From the New York Tribune, April 4, 1920: Johannes Josefsson, Who Fights With His Feet in Ringling’s Circus, Craves Meeting With Bandits
[From the New York Tribune, April 4, 1920]

A certain degree of timidity is excusable in almost any person, owing to the increase of thuggery and crime in this city. But there is one man in town who not only refuses to quake when in dark and dangerous byways, but who actually craves the excitement that might go with a brush with a hold-up man.

Johannes Josefsson, the Icelandic wrestling wizard, is the intrepid one, and he has thrilled or will thrill you as one of the star attractions with the combined Ringling Brothers-Barnum & Bailey Circus at Madison Square Garden.

Josefsson thinks with his feet, and can reduce a robust athlete to a frayed-out wreck in the twinkling of an eye by mauling him with his heel and toe. He is so confident of his skill with his feet that he would meet Georges Carpentier and Jack Dempsey in the same ring and would guarantee to toss them both off without drawing a long breath.

However, neither Jack nor Georges being a “feet fighter,” this ambition of Johannes’s life will have to go unsatisfied.

To get back to the Icelander’s indifference to the lurking highwayman or his gang. One has only to see the blond giant of the North in action to realize how much out of luck a fool outlaw would be to tackle him. The glima, the native word for this form of wrestling expert would simply “pile up” his adversary with one or two dexterous kicks and then dance an old fashioned breakdown on the hapless thug’s neck.

Josefsson explained his art yesterday in his dressing room just before his exhibition.

“There is not a man in the world who can subdue a clever glima exponent,” he said, “unless he does it with glima. It is simply the art of using one’s feet and legs instead of one hands. I finish five men at every performance, and, let me tell you, their attack on me is not staged the same way every day. They are continually trying new “stunts” to get me, but it never takes more than two minutes to stop them all.”

“Have you ever met a boxer?” the Icelander was asked.

“Yes,” he replied. “I have fought many. Roche, of France, a heavyweight, was unable to stay more than eighty five seconds with me, and a Belgian heavyweight, whose name I have forgotten, was still easier.”

Josefsson is a catch-as-catch-can wrestler of no mean ability himself,
and he claims a victory over one of the Zbyszko brothers at Lodz, Poland. This bout lasted forty-seven minutes and was ended by Josefsson getting a toe-hold on his opponent. But perhaps the most notable victory In his record was scored by Josefsson in a “grudge bout” with Ota Gawa, a jiu-jitsu expert, in this city in April, 1913.

Josefsson is thirty-eight years old and is the undefeated glima champion of Iceland.

& modern

Meet Bartitsu, created by William Barton-Wright, whose railroad work took him to Japan for 3 years, where he studied at the school of Jigoro Kano. Once make in the land of limies, he quit being a railroad engineer and took up his new calling.

In 1899, Barton wrote an article in the London based publication, Pearson’s Magazine, entitled “A New Art of Self Defense.” In it he set out his system of self defense that he called “bartitsu,” an obvious melding of his name and jujitsu. While bartitsu was based mainly on jujitsu, Barton explained in his article that the system included boxing, kickboxing, and stick fighting.

Barton opened a school called the Bartitsu Club. He brought in some of the best martial arts teachers from around the world to teach at his new school. Via correspondence with Professor Jigoro Kano, the founder of Kodokan Judo, and other contacts in Japan, Barton-Wright arranged for Japanese jujutsu practitioners K. Tani, S. Yamamoto and the nineteen year old Yukio Tani to travel to London and serve as instructors at the Bartitsu Club. K. Tani and Yamamoto soon returned to Japan, but Yukio Tani stayed and was shortly joined by another young jujutsuka, Sadakazu Uyenishi. Swiss master-at-arms Pierre Vigny and wrestler Armand Cherpillod were also employed as teachers at the Club. As well as teaching well-to-do Londoners, their duties included performing demonstrations and competing in challenge matches against fighters representing other combat styles. In addition, the Club became the headquarters for a group of fencing antiquarians led by Captain Alfred Hutton and it served as their base for experimenting with historical fencing techniques, which they taught to members of London’s acting elite for use in stage combat.

One journalist described the Bartitsu Club as “… a huge subterranean hall, all glittering, white-tiled walls, and electric light, with ‘champions’ prowling around it like tigers.” Unfortunately by March of 1902 the club was no longer active.

Bartitsu might have been completely forgotten if not for a cryptic reference by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in one of his Sherlock Holmes mystery stories. In 1901 Conan Doyle had revived Holmes for a further story, The Adventure of the Empty House, in which Holmes explained his victory over Professor Moriarty in their struggle at Reichenbach Falls by the use of “baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me”.
MORE of this “Art of Maniliness” & Here


I teased the old Englishness of Sir Barton but his mixing of all sorts of physical arts and physical treatments in a freeform manner is fantastic (though anyone who cares about actually practicing or recreating this in historical verisimilitude is being Anglophilistically arrogant). Its interesting what would have happened to it if he named it not after himself but after a method or principle, like Form Will Fist, 8 Changes, etc.

VEGETARIAN?

The researchers expected gladiators would need a protein-rich diet to build muscle – however their analysis of the bones in fact suggested a vegetarian diet.
Plants contain higher levels of the element strontium than animal tissues. So, people who consume more plants and less meat will build up measurably higher levels of strontium in their bones. Levels of strontium in the gladiators’ bones were two times higher than the bones of contemporary Ephesians, according to research presented by Kanz and Grossschmidt at a meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Philadelphia, U.S., in April this year.
This agrees with some historical reports of gladiators eating a diet of mainly barley, beans and dried fruit, says Grossschmidt.
It would have given them a lot of strength, but may also have contributed to the tooth decay found in teeth in the cemetery and potentially made the men fat. However, a little extra weight could actually have had benefits in protecting vital organs from cutting blows during fights, argue the researchers.
Grossschmidt says that the gladiators also drank foul-sounding plant or bone ash solutions, acting as a kind of ancient isotonic sports drink. The mineral-rich drink may even have been a kind primitive painkiller, he says.

! really ?

Written records tell us that if the defeated gladiator had not shown enough skill or even cowardice, the cry of “iugula” (lance him through) would be heard throughout the arena, demanding he be killed.
The condemned gladiator would be expected to die “like a man” remaining motionless to receive the mortal blow.
The pathologists discovered various unhealed wounds on bones that showed how these executions could have taken place. And these are consistent with depictions on reliefs from the time showing a kneeling man having a sword rammed through down his throat into the heart. A very quick way to die.

woah

Or if you just get critically hurt and need to be put down somebody garbed as the death god “Dis Pater” will swing by to deliver a hammer to the skull.

5 years in the ring and then freedom.

What a hard knock life.