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INTRODUCTION TO SCIENTIFIC SELF DEFENSE:
The
author of the work, the late Lieutenant-Colonel William Ewart Fairbairn
(1885-1960), is widely and quite correctly regarded as the foremost
close-combat Instructor of the modern era. His remarkable career, which
has been extensively documented, began in 1901 with the Royal Marine
Light Infantry and service as a member of the British Legation Guard at
Seoul Korea. In 1907 he signed on with the Shanghai Municipal Police,
thereafter distinguishing himself as an innovative training officer and
securing an international reputation by raising and commanding the
famed Shanghai Riot Squad. During the period of his service with the
force Fairbairn by actual record personnally engaged in over 600
violent armed and unarmed encounters, in conditions ranging from
routine police work to urban combat experience during the Sino-Japanese
War.
Fairbairn
retired from police work with the rank of Assistant Commissioner in
1940, at the age of fifty-five. Returning to Great Britain he was
recruited by the Secret Service and gazetted as a Captain on the Army
list. While so occupied he was the principal instructor's instructor to
components of British Military intelligence, the Secret Intelligence
Service (SIS); the Special Operations Executive (SOE); the Commandos,
and other specialized forces.
In
1942 Fairbairn was raised to Major and attached to British Security
Co-ordination (BSC) in New York. While in North America he served as
consulting instructor to the Canadian Army, the U.S. Army and the U.S.
Marine Corps, and was principal close-combat instructor for the Office
of Strategic Services (OSS). Fairbairn was officially seconded to OSS
in 1943, thus becoming one of the few men ever to serve with all
representatives of the Anglo-American intelligence community. In 1944
he was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel and in 1945 was awarded the
Legion of Merit (U.S.) on the personal recommendation of William J.
Donovan, founder of the OSS.
In
the mid-1950's Fairbairn again traveled to Asia, serving with the
Singapore Police during a period of great civil unrest and with the
Cyprus Police during a similar period. He died of natural causes in the
summer of 1960 at his home in England, a legend in his own time.
Elsewhere
I have written, "To put in simply, Fairbairn's methods worked. Stripped
of all the unnecessary trappings, his system of unarmed combat made it
possible for a person of average strength and skills to meet and win
against an opponent trained in the martial arts." This simplicity is
admirably demonstrated in Scientific Self-Defence, a work originally
published to serve as the complete expostition of his basic unarmed
combat method. This work is the foundation of much of his later effort,
including such commercially published extracts as Get Tough!, and the
manuals and outlines he wrote for various agencies.
What
is the essence of Fairbairn's method? Fairbairn himself wrote in 1925
that he believed his "...system to be entirely new and original, and,
further, it requires no athletic effort to perform any of the exercises
given. This system is not to be confounded with Jui-jitsu or any other
known method of defence, and although some of the holds, trips, etc.,
are a combination of several methods, the majority are entirely
original." In an article analyzing certain aspects of Fairbairn's
wartime work, I observed that his methods, "...were, from the very
beginning, designed as a peculiarly Western Martial Art, a means
whereby the English-speaking world could come to grips with and win
over oriental systems." These statements lend outline, but the serious
student of the subject requires greater detail.
To
obtain such detail those who investigate Fairbairn's work will do well
to notice the slight similarity in his style with that of Pa-kua Chang,
and the manner in which this is skillfully combined with elements of
Jui-jitsu. Apart from observing the derivative character of his method,
one must also recognize the fundamentally original contributions. His
originality stems from inspired, direct experiance with the dynamics of
personal combat over a considerable period of time. Close study of his
methods reveals that he was not a mere theorist; rather he was a
precise and careful empirical analyst with a flair for communication.
In
combat instruction, practical experience is the highest court of
appeal. When we examine many prominent instructors we are let to the
conclusion that most practical experience of the past decades has been
gained through structured competitions punctuated by infrequent
unstructured battles. Even the oriental masters to whom we attribute
such formidable qualities were considered battle-scarred if they
managed to survive twenty or thirty encounters. Fairbairn, owing to his
environments and occupations, had no such limitations. Despite a
generous share of sporting matches, Fairbairn's expertise may be said
to come mainly from the street, not the ring. The sheer number of
life-or-death fights in which he found himself, coupled with lessons
learned training literally thousands of men from widely varying
cultures, gave Fairbairn a corpus of knowledge which is without
precedent and unlikely to be duplicated.
William
Ewart Fairbairn was a master of his craft and his form pure. His were
not self-serving motions, but grand gestures of service to others. By
his example he is teaching us still and thus his works are truly
immortal.
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