The suffragettes were seriously into jujitsu.

It makes sense. They were neophile radicals with a legitimate reason to fight the law; who better to learn martial arts?

But it’s also somewhat impressive, given the time-frame: they were really among the first in England to take up the practice. Asian martial arts had received some discussion there in the 19th century, but the first dojo didn’t open until 1899*, and a decade later there were still only a half-dozen trainers.

One of them was Edith Garrud. That’s her above, demonstrating how to take down a policeman.

Because this wasn’t just about muggers and drunken husbands; the suffragettes needed self-defence against the police. So Garrud trained the ‘Bodyguard Group’ of 25 ‘Jujitsuffragettes’. Their main aim was protecting the movement’s leaders from police violence and from arrest. Meanwhile Garrud’s dojo also became a refuge for suffragettes.

Here’s how it’s described by a descendent of one of the group:

The 25 Bodyguard members were armed with Indian rubber clubs, hidden within their long skirts, & trained in jujitsu, a Japanese system of wrestling that works well against stronger opponents… Although they couldn’t out-muscle the policemen, they could outwit them. On several occasions they staged exciting rescues. Twice a decoy maneuver led the detectives to carry off the wrong Mrs. Pankhurst. But the sad truth is that, more often than not, the women suffered dislocated joints, broken bones & concussions.

And here’s how Punch saw it:

* This first teacher was E.W. Barton-Wright. Barton-Wright was an engineer who had spent 3 years in Japan (typical nerd-martial artist crossover!). On his return to London he started teaching what he called ‘Bartitsu’. This mixed jujitsu with kick-boxing and stick-fighting — the idea being that you should be able to fight off muggers with your umbrella and perhaps a well-thrown coat.

Bartitsu was quickly forgotten, but not before Conan Doyle had mentioned it as the skill which enabled Sherlock Holmes to overpower Moriarty, as they fought above the Reichenbach Falls. In the 80s, Holmes aficionados and martial arts historians figured out the connection, paving the way for a revival in the past decade. It’s surely only a matter of time until the steampunk crowd discover it, and people start feeling nervous when they meet somebody in Edwardian dress down a dark alley.

More: Martial history magazine; “The Jujitsuffragettes“; Clarkes World; Suffragettes in an airship. And thanks to Dmytri for telling me about it all.

I’m loving

Mating

, albeit in a slightly guilty way — it tweaks a few of my traits a bit too precisely, with not enough outside-world to make it seem harmless. p. 261-2:

A thing that corrupts N’s worldview is his own demonic energy, whyich is what socalled greatness may in fact reduce to. He’s unnatural. He can work six hours flagstoning or paving, scabs of cement stuck all over hi body, a bite to eat, into the bathing engine, and he’s all set to work late into the night reading and writing and using his abacus.

Spider Jerusalem, faced with impending death:

A while ago, I got excited about posting to this blog from vim. Then I upgraded things, got distracted, forgot about it, and it seems now _not to work_

easiest way I can find is to save the text into a new file, then do:

google blogger post --title "Posting from vim" --tags "technology, vim,google,howto" %

City firms are doing government work for free in the hope of getting future contracts when times are easier and the public aren’t looking:

On one recent government contract five contractors all bid to undertake the work for £1, he said. But Downey also acknowledged that there was a degree of self-interest on the part of firms, which are expecting a resurgence of consultancy in government in the near future.

It’s like medieval nobles showering the king with gifts, knowing he’ll repay them ten times over with other people’s possessions.

I

never


liked

the idea of Baroness Ashton running EU foreign policy.

Now blogger and Telegraph journalist Bruno Waterfield is gunning for over her invisibility during her first year in place:

Lady Ashton does not possess the political nous or commitment of an elected politician. Apart from one or two months last year, she has shown herself to be unwilling to travel or work over weekends. Working Monday to Friday might be fine for a jobsworth public official or serial quango/Lords appointee but it’s not good enough for an EU foreign minister. People who want to change the world have to give up prosaic ideas like the work/life balance.

And here’s Ronny Patz:

when you are in Brussels, a lot of people complain about the way EU “foreign minister” Ashton works….

I doubt that with her limited amount of involvement into the core Commission work (represented through her participation record) she really was having her voice heard

Maybe Maimed: prejudice is the media equivalent of pollution. I agree with this, and it goes far beyond porn:

Porn companies are companies, and they have a product. What makes their product different from, say, a steel mill or a coal mine is that their product is largely cultural, not material. They operate in a completely different arena; they do not have to deal with resource scarcity or distribution in the same way, for example. But this does not mean they do not pollute. They do. Kink, Inc. is a massive polluter.

In October I mentioned that French news website Rue 89 was being sued for defamation, because of an article which used my

Panama database

to link French businessman Eric de Sérigny to firms in Panama.

The case has now been dropped.

Rue89 has given Sérigny a right to reply space, presumably as part of the deal. He concedes that the original reporting was ‘serious’, but still denies the allegations, and suggests it’s a case of identity theft.

So that’s something of a relief. Props to Rue 89 for standing by their story, and to David Leloup for writing it in the first place. I wince to imagine the time and money it must have taken to defend the article.

I still have no idea what all the fuss was about; the original article seemed well-documented but not exactly damning. Now it’s all blown over, at least so far as I can tell from over here.

LJ memes, I discovered today, have a pen-and-paper forerunner from the 19th century. ‘Confessions’ were series of meme-like questions (‘your favourite book?’, ‘your greatest regret?’) — often in book form, so you could inflict the questionnaire on multiple friends and collate the answers.

Sadly, the only online traces I can find are from when Famous People got involved. Marx’s daughters liked them, so we have a set of answers from daddy, and another from an impressively bad-tempered Engels.

Vanity Fair

doggedly maintains one once answered by Proust, and Mark Twain* was typically caustic about a printed variation on the theme.

All those examples are fairly dull, to be honest. But there must be thousands more buried in obscure archives, and among them presumably some with interesting questions and/or answers. It’d be a nice small project for somebody to dig a few out, transcribe them, and reanimate them for the web. Think of it as the meme equivalent of Jurassic Park.

Also: ‘asking friends a list of questions’ is the kind of fad that must have been tried in lots of different contexts. What other forms did it take, in other times and places?

* Mark Twain:

Nothing could induce me to fill those blanks but the asseveration of my pastor that it will benefit my race by enabling young people to see what I am, and giving them an opportunity to become like somebody else. This overcomes my scruples. I hâve but little character, but what I hâve I am willing to part with for the public good.

[further teleological Victoriana: readthroughs, wargames]

Here is a potential project for the weekend:

If you subscribe to the NYT’s RSS feeds, you can actually watch the headlines evolve as the story is updated throughout the day. It’s really quite interesting, though I’ve never seen one specifically de-sexualized.