Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: The Rise of Martial Arts in Britain Timeshift

Towards the end of the 19th century,

something strange began happening to the gentlemen of Britain.

An elite form of self-defence started a trend

that was to fascinate us for the next hundred years.

Men and women, irrespective of class or race, would be

drawn into something that became a British obsession.

It would take a century but in the end, everybody was kung fu fighting.

Victorian London could be a dangerous place.

Beyond the fashionable and respectable streets,

trouble lurked in the shadows.

A gentleman had to learn to protect himself.

Victorian London. This was the height of the Industrial Revolution.

It was a time when people were flooding into the big cities

from rural areas.

A lot of people were very poor. There was a lot of poverty

and there was a lot of street crime. This was a violent society.

Also you had a greater social mobility. The underground.

There was a fear that criminals could perhaps travel from East to West

and come and attack you on your door.

There were what they called the garrotting panics. Garrotters were urban gangsters

who would operate in groups of three or four or five.

One of them would sneak up behind a pedestrian, garrotte them

around the neck and strangle them almost into unconsciousness.

And their confederates would come up

and steal the pedestrian's pocket watch and wallet and so forth.

So there was a perception that you had to be able to defend yourself.

And the whole concept of gentlemen in society needing to have

a smattering of self-defence skills, at least,

goes all the way back to the Middle Ages.

It was always assumed that gentleman led the way.

They needed to prove that they were well-read and intelligent

and courageous, that they could dance one minute and sword-fight the next.

The search for a perfect method of self-defence

led thousands of miles away, to the Far East.

There were rumours in the Western world of this mysterious

Japanese art of unarmed combat, of wrestling.

But there was really very, very little known about it at the technical level.

For the Victorians, Japan was a strange and mysterious land.

The famous samurai warrior caste had been abolished in the 1860s,

but some of their unique unarmed combat skills had survived.

The samurai did have this huge tradition of martial arts.

This embraced everything

from horseback archery to this bare-handed

fighting that they learned so they could cope with an enemy

when they were disarmed on the battlefield.

This was jujitsu, battlefield jujitsu.

And it was a series of techniques that were designed to be lethal.

1890s Japan had only recently opened up to the West

and was desperate to modernise.

There were opportunities to be had for the businessmen of Britain.

The engineer Edward Barton-Wright,

a self-defence fanatic, took the opportunity to work there.

The thing about Barton-Wright was, I think, that he

became very impressed with the concepts that the Japanese

had preserved from their medieval martial arts.

Barton-Wright, photographed here,

was one of the very first Westerners to learn the secrets of jujitsu.

With a lifelong interest in a diverse range of self-defence systems,

to come across this extremely sophisticated form of unarmed combat,

I think he must have been fascinated.

He certainly was enough to train as often as he could for those three years.

Barton-Wright was determined to master jujitsu.

But as an entrepreneur, he also saw its commercial potential.

After training for several years,

he combined jujitsu with the Western arts of boxing, wrestling

and cane fighting, to create an all-new martial art.

He called it "bartitsu".

He came back over to Britain in the late 1890s

and he imported this martial art that he'd created

and turned it into a brand name, a must-have for the English gentleman.

Barton-Wright was his surname, and BARTitsu,

Barton formed part of the name,

"Itsu" coming from jujitsu.

What Barton-Wright was aiming for was the complete

method of self-defence, taking the best that the East and West had to offer.

His brilliant innovation was,

"what we should do is combine all of these systems together."

We should establish Bartitsu as a method of crosstraining

between these styles.

So in essence, I would say, it was an experimental process.

Bartitsu was aimed squarely at the elite of British society.

I think bartitsu appealed to a lot of Victorian gentleman simply

because the way Barton-Wright synthesised the techniques,

it pandered to the Victorian concept of a sort of upright,

officer class kind of a martial art.

It was all about having a lot of bearing.

Balance, yes, but bearing as well.

If you look at the cane fighting, it was all about standing up straight,

about evading your opponent simply by sliding

sideways and then whacking them with a cane while you...

while they are off-balance, you stand up straight,

you maintain that gentlemanly poise.

Bartitsu caught the attention of Arthur Conan Doyle.

The writer was under pressure to bring back his most famous creation.

By 1903, the legendary Sherlock Holmes had been missing

from the pages of British literature for 10 years...

seemingly killed off by his creator in a battle to the death

with master criminal Moriarty.

Readers were led to believe both had plummeted

to their deaths in the Reichenbach Falls.

For Holmes to return, he needed a trick up his sleeve.

Conan Doyle's greatest hero, the most famous

and best-loved English detective, Sherlock Holmes,

went to battle with his arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty.

Both of them are teetering on the brink, on this tiny little path,

where the water is gushing on either side and they could slip at any moment.

Conan Doyle turned to Barton-Wright's martial art,

which he had read about in the pages of The Times, misspelled as "baritsu".

In The Adventure Of The Empty House, he revived his star detective.

"We tottered together upon the brink of the fall.

"I have some knowledge, however, of baritsu, or the Japanese

"system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me.

"I slipped through his grip and he, with a horrible scream,

"kicked madly for a few seconds, clawed the air with both his hands,

"but for all his efforts, he could not get his balance and over he went.

"With my face over the brink, I saw him fall for a long way.

"Then he struck a rock, bounced off and splashed into the water."

LOUD SCREAM

But for all that, Barton-Wright's creation never caught on.

Edwardian Britain became more interested in the martial art

that had started it all off, Japanese jujitsu.

And it was to find some unlikely participants at the beginning of the new century -

the suffragettes.

The suffragettes were fighting for votes for women

and they were very frustrated because, in the 19th century,

the male electorate had doubled under the 1867 Reform Act

and what they were frustrated by was also the way in which many

anti-suffragists were arguing that women didn't deserve the vote

because they weren't strong enough,

weren't physically capable of defending the country.

So actually, the suffragettes wanted to show that in fact,

women could be tough and strong but dainty at the same time.

# You'd be so nice to come home to

# You'd be so nice by the fire... #

These photographs show suffragette Edith Garrud,

who was trained in jujitsu by Japanese instructors.

She later set up a school of her own,

specialising in teaching women's classes,

and became eventually the jujitsu instructor for a group of,

in fact, a secret society of women who were attached to

the militant suffragette movement.

The suffragettes needed jujitsu as a way in which to defend

themselves against male aggression, whether that's from the police,

or whether that's from male hecklers.

Jujitsu was a minimal force response to male violence.

So there was certainly that going on.

But there's also, it chimed in quite nicely with ideals of femininity,

because jujitsu was elegant.

It was show, it was feminine and so, actually,

it was kind of the ideal form of self-defence.

At the height of suffragette unrest,

Emmeline Pankhurst was being constantly arrested

and so a jujitsu squad was formed to prevent this happening.

The point of this was actually to protect

Emmeline Pankhurst from rearrest.

So once she was released from jail,

she would go off and do her speeches and her unlawful activities and then,

there was a corps of bodyguards, around, probably 25 women.

And they would be swinging clubs, they would be using jujitsu,

they would be arming themselves with cardboard body armour,

under their dresses, and they would be distracting the police

and get into a bit of a fight with the police,

while Emmeline Pankhurst was whisked away in a cab to safety.

The jujitsu bodyguard helped keep Emmeline Pankhurst on the front

pages until the First World War ended all militant activity.

Martial arts had gained a toe-hold amongst

the well-to-do of Britain.

In the final years of the First World War,

a new self-defence art with its own distinctive philosophy arrived.

But this time, it was brought here by the Japanese themselves.

Judo was an evolution of jujitsu

and was introduced to Britain as the thinking man's martial art.

It was a modern style which had been developed in Japan

over 40 years by its founder, Jigoro Kano.

I think that the significance of Kano was that he was

a sort of Marquis of Queensbury figure.

The Marquis of Queensbury took a British martial art, boxing,

cleaned it up and turned it into more of a sport.

Kano did for jujitsu what the Marquis of Queensbury did for boxing.

Kano worked with a padded floor.

Queensbury worked with a padded fist.

Kano removed the more dangerous techniques of traditional jujitsu.

For the first time,

practitioners could train at full speed without injuring themselves.

What that meant was, by taking out some of the dangerous bits,

it could be used as a form of training, sparring.

It's a bit like putting two boxes out and saying, OK,

you don't have to go full out but hit them as best you can.

So judo was the same. He created this free-fighting system

and people could do it for hours and hours.

With judo, martial arts broadened its appeal into the professional classes of Britain.

It was something which was intended

for middle-class consumption.

So it was regarded as both scientifically refined

and safe, something that would be, as it were,

appreciated by middle classes the world over.

So the whole outreach in this country was to appeal to a middle-class

audience, putting forward the whole idea of a dynamic, safe,

modernised martial art, with antiquitarian roots,

but very much streamlined and brought up-to-date for modern consumption.

It attracted people from English, London society,

who were from the professions, they were barristers, doctors,

people with time and finance to be able to indulge their interest in the East.

All of the traditional elements of Japanese politesse were

retained for judo,

but along with that ritualistic sense of politeness,

what Kano wants very, very much to put forward is the idea that A, it was safe,

B, it was sporting.

It could be used for sporting competition.

Within a code of sporting ethics, which was very, very much analogous to the sporting

ethics that you would find in the British approach to sportsmanship.

So all of that was a meeting point for people from both sides to

enjoy this particular art or sport.

It was a hybrid art or sport.

Japan was very, very much on the Allied side during World War I,

unlike in World War II, of course.

And there was very, very much an outreach to Europe,

an understanding that for the future of Japan there needed to be this

kind of close cooperation and an understanding of European culture.

At the same time, there was a real drive to find

a method of exporting the values of Japanese culture to Europe.

As part of that drive, a group of Japanese businessmen had

emigrated to Britain and joined the effort. One of them was Gunji Koizumi.

Koizumi set up a Japanese cultural centre opposite

Buckingham Palace called the Budokwai, which celebrated everything from

tea ceremony to flower arranging, but especially the study of judo.

It was an instant hit.

It was exotic.

Because Japan in those days meant Fujiyama, geisha girls,

you know, little paper umbrellas, you know, tea ceremony.

That was all part of the package. So it was exotic.

But at the same time, the guys who did it had cauliflower ears

and broken noses, so there was this bizarre mix.

Martial arts have always evolved.

And one of the first British innovations was designed to

keep Western students motivated.

Koizumi invented a not-so ancient martial arts tradition -

the coloured belt system.

That's how the judo people get you addicted.

It's very wicked.

So everyone is climbing up the ladder with its coloured rungs.

And all they want is the black.

And, as soon as they get to the black, they've suddenly learned,

really, how extraordinarily complicated judo is,

that they actually know nothing.

It's like learning a language - you just learn more

and more refinement and you never know it all.

Koizumi, seen here teaching,

was to be at the centre of British martial arts for the next 45 years.

With its emphasis on safety,

judo became the art of choice for women interested in self-defence.

Your aim is to get your opponent off his balance

and then to push or pull him in the direction his body inclines.

I'll have that bag...

Because of the way judo had been developed,

strength and size were less important than technique.

I'll smash you for that!

One of the pioneers of the art was Sarah Mayer.

Sarah started judo at the Budokwai with Koizumi, late 1920s.

In 1934, she decided to travel to Japan.

Very unusual for a woman of that time.

She went via Bombay and through China, and ended up in Kobe,

and she was carrying with her introductions from Koizumi

to various jujitsu schools and judo establishments in Japan.

Mayer was able to train with the very best that Japan had to offer.

Last week, I met Professor Kano for the first time.

I'd expected to meet a very aloof person,

for everyone seems to stand in such awe of him that I felt quite nervous.

Instead, I found a charming old gentleman with European manners,

who greeted me warmly and made me feel quite at home.

He seems most anxious to help me.

The Japanese were regarded as the gold standard of judo.

It was difficult for any Westerner, let alone a woman.

But Sarah Mayer trained with the men.

I practised with him once at the Kodokan

and often sit and watch him. He is extraordinary.

Very frail and delicate. Very small and looks quite old.

He was in a playful mood when I practised with him.

He just threw me round the room as if I were an Indian rubber ball.

And when I tried any throw, he simply wasn't there any longer.

In March 1936, Mayer became

the first Western woman to be awarded a black belt in Japan.

For a woman to achieve a black belt

and for that to have been achieved in Japan, really sets out

the stall for women's judo and says, look, we have arrived.

We are to be taken seriously.

And that's how, I think, generations of female judoka,

subsequently, have a debt of gratitude to Sarah.

In the 1930s, judo was becoming popular right across Europe.

Including Nazi Germany.

Sieg heil! Sieg heil!

Before long, Britain was fighting the Nazis for real.

In World War II, martial arts would take on an entirely different,

far less sporting face.

It would leave the gymnasium and return to its battlefield roots.

Desperate times called for desperate measures.

For the martial artist in wartime,

any notion of fair play had to be left in the gym.

Unarmed combat called for a more brutal approach.

There are no Marquis of Queensbury rules in guerrilla warfare.

It is a simple matter of kill or be killed, capture or be captured.

This is All-In Fighting by WE Fairbairn.

This is the book that was issued to commandos

and other allied forces as their official unarmed combat syllabus.

William Fairbairn, who looked more like a vicar than a man

who could kill with his bare hands, had written a manual that

included everything a soldier needed to know about fighting dirty.

This was not a nice book. Not a nice manual.

It was simply...

elements of the martial arts stripped down to purely "kill the enemy".

Fairbairn, who featured in these films,

was a good man to have in a tight spot.

Knee to the pit of the stomach and that's that.

He was a judo and jujitsu black belt and for 32 years,

he served as a policeman in Shanghai,

the roughest city in the world.

'and Gerry sails through space once more.

'And just to make sure...'

He had taken part in over 800 incidents,

most of which involved firearms or knives or bottles.

That's probably more combat than a lot of soldiers have seen.

'The little finger can be seized and bent savagely backwards.

'Then, turning with seized arm, edge of the hand blows are applied

'with great gusto and paralysing results.'

When war broke out, Fairbairn was enlisted to train both British

and American covert troops in skills they would need behind enemy lines.

'In this phase of the instruction period,

'the student is taught the gentle art of murder.

'The technique of killing or crippling his opponent

'with his two hands at close quarters.'

He combined the streetfighting tactics he'd encountered in Shanghai

with his sporting martial arts skills.

'Grasp the pistol and deflect it toward him.'

He knew that there was a difference between what was done on the mat

and what was done in real life, so he decided to adapt, look at certain

techniques that you could use while you were scared out of your wits.

"If possible, bite his ear. Even although not successful,

"this will cause him to bend forward into a position from which

"you can seize his testicles with your right hand."

You've got to think like a gutter fighter.

You've got to be ruthless, you've got to be cruel.

"With all the strength of your arms,

"assisted by the forward movement of the upper part of your body,

"smash him down on your right knee and break his spine."

He called it All-In Fighting.

To use a modern phrase, it does exactly what it says on the tin.

You use everything available in the course for a fight to win.

'If your adversary hold you up from the rear, turn away from the gun,

'falling into him.

'Pin his gun arm and lock it with your left, at the same time,

'jabbing to his the chin and eyes and bringing the knee up to his testicles.

'As he falls, go with them, keeping your knee in his groin.'

For Fairbairn, survival was an easy calculation to make.

80% intent, 20% technique.

The intent is "I'm going to win.

"You're going down. I intend to hurt you. I intend to win."

But coming out of the Second World War,

it was American troops based in Okinawa that

would have the biggest impact on British martial arts.

They had found a new secret weapon in self-defence.

Karate differed from judo and jujitsu as it concentrated on ways

of striking, punching and kicking, rather than grappling and throwing.

In terms of martial arts,

the most significant event was to do with the American

occupation of Japan, Okinawa, after the Second World War because,

during that time,

you saw American servicemen learning, en masse, Japanese martial arts

and then taking them back to America

and these are the martial arts that find their way into popular consciousness.

And it wasn't long before Britain was exposed to it too.

Most Brits after the Second World War would have first

encountered Asian martial arts in general through the films, and

it was first of all through karate moves in films, the karate chop.

The first time British people as a general filmgoing audience would

have seen martial arts

would have been in the one or two post-war film noirs.

The big sequence is a scene with Spencer Tracy in Bad Day At Black Rock.

A film like Bad Day At Black Rock, which is a 1955 film,

in that fight scene, you've got the chop.

HE GASPS

There is a chop to the neck, a chop to the lower back.

It's amazingly appealing and it symbolises in a very, very

easy and small form, the other, the strange, the exotic.

I suspected that that scene in Bad Day at Black Rock would have

had enormous impact, just because it was so shocking.

I understand that before it was filmed,

Spencer Tracy read the script and said, "This is ridiculous.

"There is no way a guy with one arm could defeat a big thug,"

and the martial arts adviser put his hand in his pocket

and then beat Spencer Tracy up with one arm.

And Tracy said, "OK, I believe that," and was very keen to learn the moves.

It started out with those weird little newsreel clips

of people breaking bricks and head-butting boards.

And then the mythology sort of built up around it

and it started appearing in sort of cool movies.

I think Elvis became a karate guy.

Come on! Come on.

No, no! That's karate.

The public perception of karate at the time,

other than those people who were actually doing it,

was, again, it was this devastating fighting skill

where you could chop somebody with the with the side of your hand

and they'd fall down dead.

Of course, you know and I know that it's not like that,

but that was the perception.

It was something Oriental and mysterious,

and you don't argue with karate guys.

Or girls.

Martial arts were the must-have skill for TV action stars.

You can see the advance in fashions of martial arts styles

in the Avengers heroines.

Honor Blackman became very good at judo.

But when Diana Rigg came in, for her, it was karate.

Oyuka!

You attacked her as a woman.

But she has the skill of a man.

In fact, her fight sequences are a combination of karate and ballet,

which is really quite striking and very influential.

Action movie heroines still do that,

the sort of ballet kicks and karate chops.

That still seems to be a good way of taking down five bad guys.

Unlike the elite samurai roots of judo,

karate was originally developed

as a means of self-protection for peasants and workers in rural Japan.

In Japan itself,

you would find that karate had a very much more working-class environment

and certain forms of karate were even more working-class than other forms,

like kyokushinkai with its very much more manly or rougher edge.

The knockdown ethos of kyokushinkai

appealed to a very, very working-class environment.

It was almost inevitable that in this country,

it would also appeal to a working-class environment.

Yeah, I come from the East End of London,

lived in a sort of two-up two-down.

Ticky Donovan, seen training here, took up karate as a teenager.

Fighting then, it was sort of a common thing in the East End,

so it was... My mother didn't want me to do it,

but I wanted to learn to protect myself.

As karate entered popular culture,

clubs began to spring up across the country.

When I first started going to the club in Clapham Common,

it'd be packed and the Japanese would have free fighting,

and next week you'd go, it was half empty

cos people wanted to do the moves but didn't want to get up and fight.

But coming from the East End, we just loved the fighting side of it.

As a Glaswegian, I've always been very interested in fighting,

purely for survival reasons.

However, I think karate gave opportunities

for the young people of the time

to do something different from the sort of rather grey surroundings.

Most of my friends were taking the mickey out of me, you know,

as I went into Wimpy, they'd go, "Oh, here comes Ticky, chop-chop!"

I just couldn't get enough of it.

I mean, I pulled every muscle I think I own.

I pulled my hamstrings, pulled everything, you know,

with the stretching and kicking,

but I just loved every minute of it.

Haa!

MUSIC: "Dazed And Confused" by Led Zeppelin

Karate's tough reputation didn't put off women either.

This is the other side of Pauline Fuller.

Housewife, mother,

and Europe's top woman karate expert.

Down at the gym, Pauline sheds her feminine qualities

along with her blouse and skirt,

and becomes five foot nothing of blonde ferocity.

I was the first woman in England to do karate. I used to be scared stiff.

I used to hide and creep out when the lesson started.

But, I thought, "Well, here goes," so I took it up.

For the next ten years, karate was the martial art of choice

but its deadly image would eventually prove unpalatable to the media.

We've all heard of judo

but here, in Tokyo, there is another form of self defence

in which Japan leads the world. It's called karate.

It's a method by which a hand, a fist,

can be more deadly than any cosh

and a Japanese can kill at one blow

by striking seven vulnerable points of the body.

Now, when you've learnt how to kill people with one blow,

-what are you going to do with that?

-I don't know.

I was going to tell the other people in England about it

but I'll have to think it over, I think.

Already with an image problem,

karate was about to be struck a heavy blow.

We had a major problem occur in '67, I think it was.

A kitchen hand called Anthony Creamer

had bought a book called What Is Karate? by Masutatsu Oyama.

It's quite a violent form of the art

and he fell out with one of the waiters

in an establishment he worked at

and apparently, within three seconds,

he'd killed a man stone dead

and quite rightly, he was put away for it.

But the fallout was very bad.

The judge in the court...

..said something in the region of,

"I am so appalled at what I've heard here that I think this..."

The words he used was, "vicious and evil skill

"should be banned in this country."

Self-taught Anthony Creamer had broken the golden rule

that martial arts should only be used for self-defence.

Their moral and ethical foundation was publicly called into question.

But martial arts were also being challenged from within

by those who wanted to move them into a new arena.

By the 1960s, martial arts had begun

to leave their traditional roots behind and turn into pure sports.

Judo was the first to change.

Old school self-defence took a back seat to competition.

For the first time,

British martial artists began looking to the West for inspiration.

You look to other sports. You see what other sports are doing,

what boxing is doing, what wrestling is doing,

all Olympic sports, and of course, you want to join them.

The father of British judo, Gunji Koizumi,

had always tried to prevent this transition

into a solely sporting pursuit.

It was peculiar. Koizumi didn't believe in sport judo

and the reason he didn't like sport judo

was because he thought it produced conceited individuals

whose only focus was on winning, that was it.

My understanding is that

Koizumi really saw judo very much

as this intellectual and moral education

and much less so as a sport.

But the process of turning judo into a sport had become unstoppable.

Syd Hoare represented Britain in the first Olympics to feature judo,

Tokyo, 1964.

You go in the stadium and you're looking at these thousands of people

all waving flags and shouting and screaming.

You're in a big, open field

and then, your name is called out

and then you go up on the mat

and there's somebody on the far side walking on

and you may know him, you may not,

you know, "I wonder what this one's going to be like."

Scary. It's very scary to step on a mat

and face your opponent and look them in the eye.

Once you go on the mat, you're handcuffed to someone.

It's like you've been handcuffed to a running machine.

You've just got to keep going.

You can't... There's no ball to pass to anyone else.

It just keeps happening to you

and this is often terrifying, which is always very interesting.

You can win by throwing someone flat on their back,

by getting a submission from a lock on the elbow or from a strangle.

For British judo fighters,

the world stage was a chance to take on the best,

and the best were the Japanese.

In the early days, the Japanese were completely pre-eminent.

I mean, nobody could beat them.

And then emerged a very big Dutchman called Anton Geesink,

who was very large and very powerful

and very, very good at judo.

Geesink's golds at the '61 World Championships

and the '64 Tokyo Olympics opened the floodgates.

The Japanese were no longer unbeatable

and the chance for British competitors had arrived.

This was a kind of cataclysmic moment

in the history of international judo, you know,

and an astonishing achievement.

Japan was just devastated by this loss.

I mean, people weeping in the streets.

The fact that Geesink won

really allowed Westerners to have a renewed sense of self-belief

about their ability to compete with the Japanese.

I think, prior to Geesink, there was certainly a sense

that if you drew a Japanese, you probably were going to lose.

A couple of years later on,

there were Russians winning world championships,

French winning world championships,

there were Brits winning world championships,

all coming in at different times.

CHEERING

For women, the development of competitive judo

was a slow journey that began in the West.

But for Britain, it was worth the wait.

Woman's judo was quite late getting started,

and indeed, the first contests

were conducted behind a curtain in some leisure centre

because it was felt that the public wasn't quite ready to cope with...

..you know, the sight of woman on the mat,

but I think that's kind of changed.

106-pound final. 48 kilos.

Jane Bridge of Great Britain against Anna de Novellis of Italy.

Bridge wearing 107, Anna wearing 110 on the back of her gi.

Our early woman's teams used to beat the Japanese all the time,

and the first women's world champion was a Brit.

Jane Bridge of Great Britain the gold medal winner

in the 106-pound category.

And that win gave Jane Bridge

Britain's first ever gold medal in world championship judo.

Indeed, in any world level competition, not even Brian Jacks,

Dave Starbrook, Keith Remfry or Neil Adams have achieved that.

Judo club members and friends also turned out to welcome her back

after a competition in which

she not only became the world champion at her weight

but also the award which carried

the grand conscription "Best Stylist on Earth".

After the official welcome, the band led a procession

through the streets of the town to her parents' chip shop.

There, her tearful granny had laid on a fish and chip supper,

something Jane normally doesn't touch when she's in training.

Karate followed a similar trajectory.

It became something Britain excelled at.

At first, there were barely any competitions outside Japan.

When karate first come in,

it was just traditional, you know,

it was a self defence.

People went to learn karate to protect their self.

Judo was already a sport then.

In the early days, the Japanese dominated the competition scene

but in a few short years,

British teams were mounting a credible challenge.

When we first started fighting the Japanese,

we could only mimic them,

so we tried to fight the same way as they did,

and they were faster and more supple than us,

and they was beating us every time.

As it went on, we started developing our way of fighting.

We started using our strength and our reach,

and we moved. The Japanese fought in a very straight line

because they very traditional. We started moving from side to side,

and bouncing around more, like boxing.

By evolving their style, the British were able to break through in 1975,

finally getting the Japanese at their own game,

and the victories kept coming.

We won in '82 in Taiwan,

then we won in '84 in Holland,

then we won again in '86 in Australia,

then '88 in Egypt,

and then 1990 in Mexico.

Great Britain won the World Championships five times in succession,

which no other country has ever done

and which, I'm pleased to say, I got the OBE off the Queen for.

Even the Japanese couldn't achieve what the British teams had

but in spite of giant-killing sporting success,

martial arts were always more popular with fellow practitioners

then the general public.

For martial arts to break into the mainstream,

it would take a secret fighting art that came from China, not Japan.

During the late '50s and '60s,

Chinese immigrants began to arrive in Britain from Hong Kong.

Unlike the English-speaking middle-class Japanese migrants

that had brought judo, the Chinese were largely poor and working-class

and the vibrant and insular Chinatowns of the British cities they came to

were closed communities.

I think it took the Chinese community in this country a long time

to come to the collective decision

to integrate with local society, the host society,

so that this applied also to the martial arts.

Kung fu literally means "special skill" and is a blanket term

for hundreds of different styles of Chinese martial art.

Some of these techniques were brought to Britain by immigrants.

There was an embargo, a literal embargo against teaching Europeans

for many, many long years.

The last defence of the Chinese,

as it were, against the strange, alien outside world

with which they were having to grapple,

there was always, as it were, this secret reserve -

"At least we can outfight these guys if we have to."

Kung fu master Austin Goh came to Britain to study.

In the '70s,

there was a lot of racism because Chinese are not...

Obvious, I'm small, people would pick on you.

So I had loads of fights, I have scars from knives.

I got quite a lot of practices every day, my being Chinese.

They picked on the wrong man, then?

They pick on the wrong man sometimes, pick on the wrong man.

The secrets of Chinese kung fu were unlocked for Britain

mostly thanks to the influence of one man.

Bruce Lee is probably the coolest man on the planet, of all time.

Bruce Lee is cooler than Elvis Presley by far.

Bruce Lee is cooler than Jimi Hendrix.

Bruce Lee is as important as Che Guevara.

It wasn't until Bruce Lee burst onto the cinema screens

that people had any idea, any conceptual understanding

of, "Wow, that's kung fu!

"Oh, this is really different. We want some of that."

Bruce Lee, shown here fighting,

combined an acrobatic screen combat style with real-life fighting skill.

His American films were made during a time

when Hollywood cinema was becoming more tolerant of violence on screen.

Despite the hard-edged tone of his films

and little being known about Chinese martial arts,

kung fu became a point of common interest

between the Chinese community and the rest of the British public,

many of whom were fascinated to know more.

DRUMMING

I think this will introduce some of the Chinese culture

to the Western people,

especially during Chinese New Year like that.

Bruce Lee grew up in a middle-class family in Hong Kong.

When he wasn't training wing chun kung fu,

he was a cha-cha dance champion,

but after a move to the USA, his kung fu skills landed him a part

as a TV sidekick in the series Green Hornet.

After a number of Hong Kong films,

he got his first Hollywood hit - Enter The Dragon.

When you see Bruce Lee on the screen,

you know that you're seeing someone who can actually fight.

He's doing amazing things

that none of the people in the movies before Bruce Lee could do,

so before that, you could see people do a karate chop or a throw

but Bruce Lee's doing things that an athlete couldn't do,

he's doing amazing things that a ballet dancer couldn't do.

So the thrilling effect of seeing that,

you're looking at someone fighting and you know it's choreographed

but you know it's real,

you know that Bruce Lee is a martial artist, you can tell.

It was an amazing, amazing sensation for everybody.

I mean, no-one had seen a man, a little guy who'd jump and scream

and beat the hell out of anybody, and we men love that.

We men love it. We all wanted to be like him, big, small,

so he had a great...

He had an amazing impact to the world, and to me, to everybody,

to my master, to everyone,

because he shows the world what a human being can do,

regardless of Chinese, black or white,

that you can achieve things through hard work and training,

and it was through that philosophy that everybody went crazy for him.

By the time his signature film Enter The Dragon was released in Britain,

Bruce Lee had already died,

but with his fighting style emphasised in slow motion,

he had a lasting impact.

CRUNCH

In the '70s, people went to see Enter The Dragon.

It was the first martial arts film they had ever seen

and coming out of the cinemas,

children were doing the catcalls, the screams, the kicks,

they were trying to do Bruce Lee immediately,

so the effect of Bruce Lee was immediate and lasting

and it was everywhere. Everyone wanted to be Bruce Lee.

Following their hero, many fans are fancying themselves

as instant kung fu champions, do-it-yourself style.

It was absolutely unbelievable.

The whole town, the whole city was crazy.

We all came jumping out of the cinemas,

pulling muscles, and flying kicks.

# Everybody was kung fu fighting... #

For the first time in Britain,

martial arts had broken through to a wider public.

# In fact it was a little bit frightening... #

Kung fu fighting, the Carl Douglas novelty hit, I think we have to say,

a definition of one-hit wonder, isn't he?

It was one of those songs that was played forever

and actually, I'm sure every single documentary about martial arts

uses it on the soundtrack somewhere,

so he's probably still getting royalties.

# And I kicked him from the hip

# Everybody was kung fu fighting... #

For one brief moment,

martial arts had mass market appeal.

They became a source of parody in popular comedies such as The Goodies

and featured in TV ads.

Hi-yah! Hi! Hi-yah!

Yaah!

Hi-yah! Hi!

Be careful how you use it.

It became a fashion statement to learn kung fu,

it was a subculture that developed

and everybody wanted to be in on the latest fad, the latest craze.

People started opening clubs all over the place.

Even people that weren't back belts

were just putting on black belts and opening a club.

I mean, in the early days, anyone wearing a pair of silk pyjamas

could put a poster in local paper shop saying, "Kung Fu Classes."

The first class was in Time Out magazine,

remember the old magazine in London

and it was listed, just said, "Kung Fu" and the address. That was it.

Ten. Eleven...

Some unqualified instructors have made as much as £30,000 a year

by setting up classes, charging exorbitant fees

and then disappearing without giving more than a few lessons.

A lot of them came out of the woodwork.

A lot of them were cooks and chefs and stuff

and because we didn't know,

if he looked Chinese, he could be a martial art master, so we enrolled.

We thought it was kung fu, and we had no idea,

no books, no videos, nothing,

so we had to take it on face value,

and it was a lot of jumping around and press-ups,

and we thought that was it.

Until now, martial arts had largely been practised by white people

but kung fu changed that too.

This was something that spread, the idea of martial arts,

to a very, very wide black community.

Bruce Lee's ethnicity is really, really important to remember.

Bruce Lee is not white.

Bruce Lee is not black, but he's not white,

and the importance of Bruce Lee on the screen at that time,

when non-white faces were such a rarity

or they were in minor positions,

here you get this small, non-white guy, beating white guys

and beating everyone.

That has a really important status.

Bruce Lee was the hero.

He was the hero the way Clint Eastwood was the hero,

the way Humphrey Bogart was the hero,

the way Alan Ladd was the hero.

He was absolutely the centre of the film. He got the girl

and in the end, he won.

No compromise.

He didn't have to die so his white best friend could move on.

In Britain, Bruce Lee is still THE great martial arts hero,

all these years later,

and now he has the James Dean early death thing going for him as well.

He didn't hang around to make lots of increasingly terrible films

and tarnish his reputation.

Bruce Lee didn't just popularise kung fu

but all the traditional martial arts.

But his own style was anything but traditional.

It was a hybrid system called jeet kune do.

I think that Bruce Lee is part of the tradition,

which is the martial arts tradition

of trying to find something that works and that works best,

how do you construct the ultimate martial art?

And this has always been the question - how do you do it,

which way do we do it, does it work?

And Bruce Lee's answers are different

but maybe not essentially different from the answer given by bartitsu,

which is a hybrid martial art of East meets West.

Bruce Lee's jeet kune do is a combination of big long kicks,

of western fencing techniques

and copying off the punching style of Muhammad Ali,

which is a pretty hybrid kind of an influence.

The final fight scene with Chuck Norris in the Way of the Dragon

is the best showcase of Lee's practical style,

using whatever works best.

In the years that followed, martial artists took note

of Bruce Lee's ideas about effective fighting.

A new sport that was focused solely on practical technique,

at the limits of what was legally and socially acceptable,

was introduced from America.

Mixed Martial Arts, sometimes referred to as cage fighting,

was a combination of Hollywood spectacle

and the rougher end of fighting sports.

# Oh, this life

# Has knocked me down to my knees... #

It had shed the need for Eastern tradition,

replacing it with a Western mindset

of finding whatever was needed to win.

But martial arts have also evolved in the opposite direction

towards methods that seem as far away from combat as possible.

Tai chi can be a slow moving, Zen-like type of exercise

for those least inclined to want to know anything at all about fighting.

Martial arts in Britain,

as they are everywhere in the world, continues to evolve,

so I think the key thing is not to take any part of it as sacrosanct,

as fixed in time.

Nothing in this world is fixed in time anymore

and the martial arts will continue to be popular

because the martial arts will continue to dynamically evolve.

Martial arts are no longer the sole property of the nations that created them.

From Barton-Wright's first experiments,

they gradually became ingrained in British culture too.

Jujitsu provided a way for women to confront violence in society

and let the politicians know that they weren't to be messed with.

The middle classes took up judo

for its highly disciplined Japanese approach to sport.

Martial arts in Britain

have responded to the social needs of each generation.

Karate became the stronghold of working-class Britons,

some of whom went on to be the best in the world.

And kung fu burst through the cinema screens,

making martial arts a part of everyday life.

Martial arts may have sent out mixed messages

since they first arrived in Britain,

but they remain underpinned by an extraordinary idea.

The underlying principle that one must sort of remember,

which is the sort of truth that the great Kano discovered, was

people would get on so much better

if only they spent more time trying to strangle each other

and throw each other on the floor.

He believed this, and it's sort of true.

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