Defendu: Gutter Fighting

I’ve barely skimmed through the archives at “Gutter Fighting,” a compendium of articles and history about the real-world fighting style “Defendu,” but I can already tell there’s a lot of good stuff here. Defendu is the name given to a practical style of fighting developed by Lt. Colonel William Ewart Fairbairn, formerly of the British Royal Marines, who saw much police action in Shanghai in the early parts of the last century. The idea behind Defendu is not to learn discipline or gain a general fitness like many martial arts, but instead to discover the most efficient ways to defeat an enemy in close-quarters combat.

Of course, I have no idea how effective Defendu actually is, but that doesn’t prevent me from enjoying reading about the development of the theory, easy as it is to imagine a stout man with rolled up sleeves socking pajama-clad Chinese Tong gangsters in the kisser.

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