When I was five years old
Published: Mon, 03/31/25
I found myself wishing that someone had taken me to such a class when I was Iduna’s age. In 1964 (when I turned five years old) Judo and Jujitsu had been practiced in some big cities for decades but clubs were few and far between. Judo was first included in the Olympics in 1964 when the games were held in Tokyo. However, the sport didn’t become an Olympic fixture until 1972. It was known that the Chinese did some cool stuff but the Taoist arts were rarely taught to Westerners as far as I know. Some of my father’s contempories had learned unarmed combat and CQC training during the war. Few did anything with their knowledge after the war and the films of unarmed combat from the time shows some very basic techniques which might have been of very limited effectiveness.
From the 1940s onwards references to martial arts found their way into popular culture through films such as the James Bond series or TV shows such as the Avengers, and Elvis Pressley was famously a Karate enthusiast. However, opportunities to train were very limited and even an awareness that martial arts actually existed outside of the movies didn’t become widespread until nearly 10 years later with the Bruce Lee films and the Kung Fu TV series. Suddenly everyone was talking about Kung Fu (and even singing about it, although I am trying not to think about that particular song). The problem was that everyone wanted to do martial arts like Bruce Lee as seen in the carefully choreographed, high kicking, stunts in films such as Enter The Dragon. If you really wanted to do martial arts like Bruce Lee did in the movies then your best bet was actually to take up Tae Kwon Do as Lee actually learned his high kicks (for the movies) from
Chuck Norris who was a TKW teacher and a kick boxing champion. In person Lee taught a much more eclectic, and probably more useful, training method which he called Jeet Kune Do, which incorporated anything that might be useful and discarded the rest. There was also a lot of emphasis on physical conditioning and hard sparring. By the time ETD was released in the UK in January 1974 Lee was dead from a mysterious brain hemorrhage, possibly caused by fanatical over training, although there are more entertaining theories. So, if you wanted to learn Bruce Lee’s style of Kung Fu in the UK in 1974 you didn’t really have much chance as there were very few teachers in the world. (However, I did once attend a day seminar with Bob Breen who trained under Dan Inosanto who was a direct student student of Bruce Lee, so I guess I can claim three degrees of separation from Lee himself, it can be a small world.)
My first teacher was George Mayo and thanks to a peculiar combination of circumstances I was granted nearly a year of personal instruction with a teacher who had decades more experience of martial arts than Bruce Lee ever managed to clock up. Mayo was in his early 50s when I knew him and he had been teaching Judo and Ju Jitsu in London and various other places since the 1950s. (There was some Pathe News reel footage of Mayo in action available online, but I don’t seem to be able to find it now unfortunately.) My teacher also had an eclectic background in classical Japanese martial arts and he told me that he had learned his best street fighting techniques from a soldier in the French Foreign Legion. I asked him if he could teach me Kung Fu and he said I could call it anything I liked so long as I made showed some commitment and made the effort to train. And so started a highly convoluted journey which has taken over fifty years now.
For my 5 year old daughter everything is brand new and exciting. Now I have 60 years of experience to look back on I wonder what I could have offered in the heady days of the mid 1970s with what I have learned since? Such speculation is futile of course, we only have what we have in the present and there are no shortage of opportunities right now.
What I have come to realise is that there are three things that matter in martial training and practice. Firstly, a basic practice for health, well-being, and mental focus. Secondly, an understanding of structure, connection in time and space, and the principles of mechanics. Thirdly, the operational method, which is the ability to formulate meaningful objectives, and then achieve those objectives with a combination of strategic intentions and the use of tactical assets. In Stav the basic daily practice is the stances which ground me, maintain posture, movement, and breath, and cultivate mental focus and clarity. An understanding of the web, dynamic practice with weapons, as well as partner training brings an awareness of structure and connections, both internally and externally. The five principles are strategies for managing conflict situations which can be applied with the tactical skills that come with seeing the lines of the
web. The stances create the mental clarity for deciding which principle is appropriate in any given situation and then you just need to decide if you actually have the tactical resources to make that particular principle work.
These days my main enemy is the same one Thor wrestled with in the form of Ellie, the ancient nurse who embodied old age. For me age appropriate martial training is one of the best ways of holding her at bay for as long as possible.
Regards
Graham
PS Course in Salisbury this Saturday the 5th of April http://iceandfire.org.uk/salisbury05042025.html
Graham Butcher
21 Beaver Road
Beverley East Yorkshire HU17 0QN
UNITED KINGDOM
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