Close Quarter Battle -the case for the defence.l

[Stuart]

I confess I have taken little notice of this section in the forum in recent days. I was therefore surprised to see an innocent posting of mine censored. Now, you may recall that a week ago I posted an interesting little video of unarmed combat techniques, yes, real ones..
The subject of that video was Jim Shortt. Who ? Well, Jim is one of the few people I have met who has claim to have re-invented a western martial art. How so ? The science and art of unarmed combat had been allowed to die out in the British army and by the end of the 1970`s, all your average trooper got taught was low-grade Aikido, and certainly no knife fighting.
Enter Jim. Armed with the works and advice of Fairbairn, A.D.J Biddle, Charles Nelson and others, he distilled the easy and lethal parts of the earlier western martials arts ( remember Biddle was a fencer ) and started to give demos to different regiments. The new art got a new name, Close Quarter Battle - CQB. It was quickly adopted by the armed forces forces and Jim Shortt has been instructing ever since. The rest is history, and the subject for debate. Did Jim Shortt re-invent CQB, or was he one of several who did the same thing at roughly the same time ?
My point here is a simple one. Jim Shortt progressed a combat art that was, and is, a western one. Not eastern and accordingly I think it qualifies as something to be considered, not censored.

[pmel018]

Hi Stuart
I don't think it was removed because of your content, but the sh*t that flew around our old friend Hadrian.

For what it is worth I believe the entire Fairbairn/Sykes/Applegate corpus of work AS TAUGHT DURING WW2 is is historical and western. It is much more than just a few random quotes from a book or two. But if to qualify for discussion here it must be categorised as an "ART" then it is not.It was a pragmatic method of killing your enemy, taught in a very short time to a disperate and desperate group of men and women with very little (if any) military experience. This slowly changed as the tide of WW2 tuned, with a greater number of military personnel going through the various programs.

As to direct lineages, well... in the end all of the 'famous' instructors were teaching something different, learning from the feedback provided by survivours of the missions and adding and subtracting techniques as they saw fit. The most major change being the elimination, by Rex Applegate , of most of the 'police based' restraint techniques originally taught by Fairbairn(who was after all a policeman by training). In fact Fairbairn and Syke had a long running dispute about what should and should not be taught leading to a major rift between the two men.
Phil

[Colin]

Nothing personal Stuart. I would have left your post stand except it had become a story board for personal grievances. I apologise for taking a sledgehammer to a walnut approach, but I'm afraid I will keep doing it until things quieten down.

As for whether CQB is a Western martial art I've done a fair amount of research on it. I'll state up front I'd have liked for it to be a WMA, and for a while I did actually state I believed it was. However the more I studied it the more convinced it was a combination of Asian martial arts put through the mill of Western thought. I've posted elsewhere various origins of CQB. I can also quote more, but the result will be the same however.

In a similar vein Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do was invented in the USA. It had influences from boxing (especially Jack Dempsey), wrestling, savate and through his brother classical epee. The opening page (i.e., page 1) of his book on said MA states quite openly Bruce Lee's admiration for (Western) boxing and wrestling. Does this make Jeet Kune Do a Western martial art?

[Stuart]

A good discussion. I think we have a consensus.

[Hadrian]

The contents of this post were removed at authors request - Admin