Defendu
British close quarters martial art
Close Quarters Combat System (commonly known as Defendu, also called gutter fighting) is a hybrid martial art utilized by British military personnel, notably during the Second World War. It was developed by William E. Fairbairn and Eric A. Sykes in the 1920s.
It is a hand-to-hand combat system based on practical experience mixed with jujutsu and Chinese martial arts that was developed to train the Shanghai Municipal Police, and was later taught in expanded form to Special Operations Executive and Office of Strategic Services members during World War II.
Development
Fairbairn's system was rooted in his training in Jujutsu and Chinese Boxing. He was a second-degree black belt from the Kodokan in Tokyo. He also studied in under Tsai Ching Tung, who had been an instructor to the retainers of the Dowager Empress at the Imperial Palace, Peking. Fairbairn maintained that while these were influences, the system was largely his own invention to differentiate it from traditional sporting styles.
Defendu was developed by William E. Fairbairn, a Royal Marine veteran of the First World War and officer of the Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP), and his fellow SMP officer Eric A. Sykes. Fairbairn had extensive experience in multiple combat sports and martial arts, including boxing, wrestling, savate, Yōshin-ryū jujutsu, judo, and Chinese martial arts. He began to develop his own system of hand to hand combat, initially referring to it as "Defendu", based on his experiences as a police officer. It was designed to be simple to learn and to provide effective results.
The public source identifies “Defendu” as british close quarters martial art. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Defendu, British and close.
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This entry incorporates text from “Defendu” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.