Today it’s shaolin monks, less recently “no-touch” knockouts, a couple decades ago it was the “unbendable arm” and other ki tricks; a hundred years ago it was the jujutsu invaders entering the west doing pole-on-neck stunts. Physical culturists performed the same feats and you could find carnies, wrestlers, other martial artists, and strong men (and women) all performing similar feats at different places and times in history. The line between the categories was often blurred with some demonstrators seeming to hit all of those descriptions.

I like the following site because it shows how some of the popular tricks are performed and that there is no mystical basis behind them. Some of these techniques may require strength, but, just like good martial arts, proper technique is a strength magnifier, and they show you the techniques that make the stunts possible.

Included are ways to break bricks, bottles, roll up frying pans, resist multiple people, fake powerful punches, tear phone books and other tricks of the trade. I also like that they include some elements from the CQC/CQB/WWII combatives field, such as putting someone in the grapevine and escaping the grapevine yourself. For those unfamiliar, the grapevine was a method shown by Fairbairn to lock a man to a small tree or pole by arranging his legs in a certain way so that he could not escape unassisted.

The site is http://www.badkungfu.net and I urge you to check it out if that’s the kinda thing you’re into. The site isn’t laid out all that well so you might need to poke around a bit. As for me, I couldn’t get enough!

Fairbairn spent time in the Royal Marines in the 1900s, the Shanghai Municipal Police in the 1920s, then taught combatives at Camp X in Canada and in America during WWII. During that time he studied judo, jujutsu, chinese boxing and various other arts which he synthesized into his own style of dirty fighting that he taught to law enforcement and soldiers.

How dirty was Fairbairn’s dirty fighting? My favorite line from Phil’s article is the quote from a Fairbairn student: “Within 15 seconds, I came to realize that my private parts were in constant jeopardy!”

The article fills in some gaps and clears up some misconceptions about what “everybody knows” about Fairbairn’s life and work. To read it in full, see William Ewart Fairbairn: The Legendary Instructor

Phil also recommends Peter Robins’ book The Legend of W.E. Fairbairn, Gentleman and Warrior: The Shanghai Years:

For more on the 1920s Shanghai Municipal Police, also check out Robert Bickers’ Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai:

For all practical purposes, Chinese immigration to the U.S. did not begin until 1850 (in 1849 there were less than 100 Chinese in California, by 1876 there were 116,000 in the state). Once the California Gold Rush began in 1849, Chinese flooded into California, eventually resulting in a backlash against the Chinese population in the U.S.

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As you can see, Black Belt announces that the U.S. Marine Corps is going to drop its judo based combatives program and replace it with a system based on Chinese boxing. In the announcement, Black Belt finishes with “We will carry the full story.” So everyone is thinking O’Neill (if you’ve seen the film “Devil’s Brigade,” the combatives instructor is based on him) and the hunt is on for what promises to be a fascinating article.

I google a bit, and, as with many things, I wind up on eBay looking for a February 1967 copy of Black Belt, reasoning that the page was a teaser for the next month’s issue. The first seller was in Thailand training and couldn’t get to his issue to check if the story was in there, but the next seller had a copy and was willing to check for me.

Unfortunately, the article was not in the February 1967 issue. The seller, an extremely kind man with the seller id Bloop68, went to the trouble of pulling all the 1967 issues and checking for the article. No luck, but please check out his store because he could not have been more helpful for something that would have amounted to maybe a $15 sale (it was obvious he was checking because that’s the kind of person he was, not just because I was a potential sale).

One of the EJMAS editors pointed out that the story would have went to print sometime in mid-1966 and hit the newsstands in fall 1966 considering Black Belt’s lead time, but a quick search of the online historical newspapers was fruitless.

So, the mystery remains: Did Black Belt ever actually publish the article? If anyone knows anything relevant, or you just want to chime in, please contact us! You can leave a comment here or contact us privately through the Contact Us page.

For more on O’Neill online see Cestari & Grasso’s biographical summary here. For an excellent print resource see Brown, Steve.”Dermot O’Neill: One of the 20th Century’s Most Overlooked Combatives Pioneers.” Journal Of Asian Martial Arts, 12:3, pp. 18-31 (2003).