Vintage Oriental Martial Arts Demonstration.

Another snapshot in time; an Edwardian theatre, a northern provincial town in 1975.

It must have been in the newspaper; an advert announcing a ‘Demonstration of Oriental martial arts’ at the Civic Theatre, Mansfield, October 1975. You didn’t normally see those kinds of announcements in the Chronicle Advertiser, weekly newspaper for Mansfield and District, but there it was tucked amongst adverts for the Townswomen’s Guild and the Toc-H jumble sale.

It must have jumped off the page at me, as anything ‘martial arts’ caught my attention (at the time I must have been a humble green belt in Wado Ryu karate). The cultural contradiction can’t have escaped me; what on earth was somebody thinking to organise an ‘extravaganza’ of the Oriental pugilistic arts in an east midland mining town, a cultural backwater, a smudge on the map?

Word got out among my training buddies, but details were vague and the tickets were cheap, even for those times, probably pennies more than pounds, and so a small group of us went along full of expectation and curiosity.

To paint the picture; the Civic Theatre, formerly the Palace Electric Theatre, had been squatting in its current location since 1910. Unimpressive from the front, inside it had all of those Edwardian/Victorian pretentions; gilt wrought iron balustrades and seat brackets, with plush velvet flip-up seats, but not bold enough to have even hint of the belle epoque. Even when it was new, it must have been a throw-back. It had rather a small dress circle, but the stalls were more spacious, its capacity was said to be 582, but there certainly weren’t going to be anything like that number at ‘Demonstration of Oriental martial arts’. There was no problem getting front row seats.

The Civic Theatre (Palace Electric Theatre) Mansfield, through time.

It was a good job that the tickets were so inexpensive because we certainly weren’t going to get a full evening entertainment; the whole thing seemed to be over before we’d completely settled in our seats. But I am getting ahead of myself.

There was some kind of Master of Ceremonies who introduced the ‘acts’ (if you want to call them that). My memory is of badly pronounced Oriental words all presented in that very distinct Mansfield dialect, that wasn’t quite ‘Yorkshire’ and shied away from any hint of ‘Brummie’ (this was the East Midlands not the West Midlands!). It was a kind of lazy drawl that sounds more convincing if you pull your cheeks back – think of the word ‘now’ as ‘naah’ and ‘out’ as ‘ahaat’ and you are part way there.

It was odd seeing a martial arts demo elevated on a theatre stage; proceedings looked strangely formal, especially when illuminated by up-shining theatre lights, evoking ghosts of the Music Hall and the whiff of gas lamps, but that was just my imagination.

We hunkered down in the gloom of the stalls, not sure what we were going to see, but hopeful and optimistic.

I can’t remember there being more than a handful of demonstrations; if there were, most of them left no lasting memory, good or bad – but two demos did stand out, for various reasons.

Taekwondo.

The Master of Ceremonies must have completely mangled the name ‘Taekwondo’, but we had a rough idea of what he meant.

Here was perhaps my one and only experience of Korean Taekwondo. I had heard about it, I’d seen black and white photographs of the breaking of tiles and boards, which was something that we at the karate club aspired to… but, goodness knows why. And here it was, right in front of us.

Sure enough, the TKD people were able to deliver the goods, at the end, the tiny stage was littered with broken tiles, boards and bricks, like an explosion in a lumber yard.

However, myself and my Dojo buddies had questions to ask… it was the breaking of housebricks that puzzled us.

One of the most dramatic demonstrations of their destruction of inanimate objects was when one of them held two housebricks balanced on their palm standing on end; to be broken with a head height roundhouse kick. It was quite a challenge to even balance the bricks. Appropriate dramatic wind-up, lots of deep breathing, huge Kiai and ‘crack’, both bricks broken in half; huge applause (from the tiny audience), but how was it done?

After some head scratching it dawned on me. Close observation revealed that the bricks had actually broken themselves!
By that, I mean that the TKD guys had ensured there was a half-inch gap between the bricks, and the kick actually knocked one brick on to the other, with the impact cracking both bricks.

Now, I am not going to take it away from the TKD guys, it was still impressive and I don’t think I could have done it; but why the need for the subterfuge? (It was much later on when we started to hear about how the trickery behind spectacular breaks done by other stylists had actually been achieved¹).

With much effort the rubble and splinters were cleared away and the MC took the stage and announced the next act.

Jujutsu.

It was his opening line that majorly impressed us, he told the audience that the next team to take the stage had come “all the way from Liverpool”, why was it that the ninety-mile journey from Liverpool to Mansfield had deserved our awe? Was Liverpool more exotic in our minds than Tokyo or Seoul? It must be difficult for people from outside the north of England to understand that to us in the East Midlands, at that time, people from Liverpool (aka ‘Scousers’) were as alien as people from Siberia – parochialism has always been a less than edifying factor of culture in the East Midlands, and other parts of England outside of the eco-climate of the South East.

This next group were announced as ‘Jujutsu’, or was it, ‘Jiu Jitsu’, or just ‘Ju Jitsu’? These guys can never seem to make up their minds.

From my memory four guys took the stage; they wore non-regular Gis (might have been coloured) and sewn-on badges that were the size of dinner plates. Their names were; Masters Blumstead, Minor, Chamberlain and Alcock (Names changed to protect identities)². Never a smile was cracked between them, they exuded earnestness and martial prowess. This had us sitting up in our seats.

I have to say that they impressed us with some very slick and painful-looking throws and locks, but their striking and kicking skills looked like blunt instruments and there were some karate-esque stances, but then, we, as Wado karate people, would think that, wouldn’t we? I guess we were prepared to overlook that.

The techniques, to our untrained eyes, were clever, direct and brutal. Whoever was taking the breakfalls looked unphased with hardly a wince or a whimper, he just kept on his best ‘game face’ as if this was all part of a day’s work. Cool.

Then, right at the end, they pulled something out of the bag that we would never have expected!

It was announced by Master Minor that Master Alcock would demonstrate his almost supernatural ability to survive targeted unrestrained blows to his unprotected body… now, this was going to be good.

Alcock then went through some minor ritualistic preparation; harsh forced breathing and tensing of muscles, while the others lined up their best techniques against him.

The first area to be assaulted was his abdomen; I can’t remember, they might have smashed a plank of wood against him. He then lifted his chin and tensed his neck until all the muscle strands stood out like steel wires. He took a full-on horizontal knife-hand strike to his throat, but not once, repeatedly!

It was what he did next that really grabbed our attention.

Minor said that Master Alcock was now going to take a full power kick to the groin – this had us all crossing our legs in anticipation; surely not!

Alcock braced himself, legs akimbo, a serious, if not strained look on his face. His arms assumed a kind of tensed position (sometimes seen in Goju Ryu Tensho or Sanchin kata) and he tucked his tailbone under in a very deliberate way.

Someone lined up in front of him, it might have been Master Blumstead; he slowly hefted his foot up a few times, almost delicately sizing up Alcock’s nether regions. But this was an upwards swing kick, like he was lining up a penalty. By the time Blumstead had tickled his testes a couple of times, he settled back and then swung his foot with remarkable speed and focus sending it right up the middle of Alcock’s fork! Wham! A collective gasp from the (mostly male) audience. Alcock never fluttered an eyelid; we honestly expected him to collapse like a bunch of broccoli. Apart from seeming to be launched off the ground a few inches by the power of the kick, he appeared totally unmoved. Massive applause – bow from the four Jiu Jitsu masters and end of the show.

On our way out of the theatre our little gaggle of Dojo mates were all theorising about Alcock’s miraculous feat; was he wearing a box (Cup)? Had he been able to withdraw his nuts up into his body cavity (as might have been mentioned)? Was that even possible!? One of our group said that maybe his ‘tackle’ was so small that the guy had missed on purpose? The best we could come up with was to do with the swinging arc of the kick and the way Alcock had prepared himself by tucking his tailbone under, meaning he wasn’t kicked in the groin at all, but instead kicked up the arse! We all agreed that it was possible, you didn’t need a calculator to work it out, but nobody wanted to experiment with the theory; I certainly wasn’t going to put myself forward.

An image from a 1970’s martial arts magazine showing the real ‘Master Alcock’ doing that very same stunt.

In hindsight, the peculiarity of this entire episode was like some kind of throwback to an earlier age. It was ironic that this theatre was built in 1910 and between the 1890’s and 1900’s Japanese Jujutsu masters like Uyenishi Sadakazu were in the UK doing demonstrations in these very same music halls and theatres, taking on all-comers and amazing audiences.

Main image credit: S. K. Uyenishi ‘The Text Book of Ju-Jutsu as Practised in Japan’, 1914 edition. Showing Master Uyenishi and Percy Longhurst, early 20th century pioneers of Ju-Jutsu in the UK.

1. Huge blocks of ice pre-sawn then refrozen, the cut marks being invisible. The beer bottle sliced in half when the glass had been artificially weakened at the required point by floating inflammable liquid on top of water and igniting it, thus creating a clean stress line.

2. They might have been introduced as ‘Masters’ or even ‘Professors’. In those days there was still the hangover of a tradition going way back in the UK of describing anyone who had skills to present that were considered ‘expert’ as a ‘Professor’. Again, a common thing in the music halls, and it stuck around a long time after music halls were made redundant by cinemas. For anyone old enough, think of ‘professor’ Stanley Unwin and ‘professor’ Jimmy Edwards. But in the martial arts it remained for much longer. I remember first hearing of the late Suzuki Tatsuo Sensei of Wado Ryu referred to as ‘Professor Suzuki’. Nobody questioned it.