Duelist

He invented mixed martial arts in 1898 and named it after himself. Bartitsu — his surname spliced with jiu-jitsu — was the first system in recorded history to deliberately combine an Asian grappling art with European fighting methods and teach them as one discipline, and he did it a century before anyone else thought it was a good idea. He put jiu-jitsu, boxing, French savate kicking, and cane fighting into a single curriculum. He opened a club in Soho with electric-light therapy and heated rooms, imported Japanese instructors to London — some of the first ever to teach in the West — and advertised the whole thing to gentlemen who might reasonably expect to be attacked in the street. He is why Sherlock Holmes survives the Reichenbach Falls. Conan Doyle wrote that Holmes defeated Moriarty using "baritsu," having misspelled the name of a real system he had read about in the papers.

He proved it in public. He staged challenge matches, put his Japanese instructors up against English wrestlers and boxers of far greater size, and let London watch small men fold large ones. He wrote instructional articles with photographs, laying out how to break a wrist, throw a man who has seized your lapel, and use a walking stick as a weapon at the correct distance — practical, unromantic, aimed squarely at a city where a well-dressed man walking home at night was a target. He recruited Yukio Tani and Sadakazu Uyenishi, teenagers who became the first professional jiu-jitsu men in Britain, and Pierre Vigny, a Swiss master of the cane. The Bartitsu Club taught women as well as men, and the suffragette movement later took the training and used it against the police.

He came to it as an engineer. He was born in India to an English family, educated in Germany and France, and worked as an antimony miner, surveyor, and railway engineer across three continents, which meant a life spent among men who settled things physically in places with no law worth appealing to. He spent three years in Japan working for a cement company and trained there in jiu-jitsu. He came home to London convinced that everything the English knew about self-defence was theatre, and that the only question worth asking about a fighting method is whether it works on a man who is bigger than you.

The club closed within about three years. It was expensive, the instructors left to make more money teaching on their own, and the fashion moved on. He spent the rest of his life running unsuccessful electrotherapy clinics and died in 1951, in his nineties, and was buried in an unmarked grave. His system was forgotten for eighty years and then rediscovered whole, from his own published articles.

Forget the club and the Holmes footnote and the unmarked grave. Remember only this: he built his entire life around the conviction that a fight is settled by whoever prepared for it correctly — and he never assumed the bigger man was the safer bet.