All in Fighting

Lieutenant Colonel William Ewart Fairburn was not a gentleman to trifle with. According to records, he had been in hundreds of brutal street-fights whilst working as the head of the special riot section of the Shanghai Police. As a master of martial arts he coined a deadly style of fighting called ‘defendu’, which was to be used by the British Commandos and Secret Services during the Second World War. Fairburn and his cadre have also been loosely connected to the James Bond franchise as the basis of the ‘Q’ division, which to some degree rings true, especially when you consider that he and his friend (Eric A Sykes) designed the infamous Fairburn-Sykes Commando knife (produced to specification by Wilkinson-Sword to this day).

I came across an original wartime issue of one of his many self-defence manuals called All-In Fighting, but was dismayed by the obscene price-tag. Instead, I opted for the relatively cheap modern reprint, but was quickly appeased by the classic dynamism of the illustrations – All penned by a shadowy chap named ‘Hary’ – with one ‘r’. Every page seems to feature a sentry being ‘done-in’ with increasing elaborateness. Each step of a ‘move’ is sketched out in figures similar to the layout of an old science textbook.

The language and tone of the book is so matter of fact that it it took me a few reads to actually digest the fact that it is, in effect, a manual of death. Tongue-in-cheek the schoolboy illustrations maybe, but the techniques are serious business and no-one gets up when they are performed properly. It’s hard to remember that this manual was given out in earnest to Commandos to learn from. I’ll never look at a village-hall chair in the same way again. Frightening stuff for under a tenner.