Defendu
A close-combat system put together in the 1920s by William Fairbairn for the police in Shanghai. It is not a school with forms but training for a few weeks.
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About Defendu
Defendu was put together by William Ewart Fairbairn in 1920s Shanghai, where he served with the municipal police in one of the most violent cities of the day. It was not a school with forms but training for a man who has a few weeks to learn how to survive an assault. Fairbairn held a Kodokan black belt and added Chinese boxing to his jujutsu, and above all what he saw on the street. He set the system out in 1926 in the book Defendu, later reworked for the army as Get Tough. The governing idea is simplicity under stress. It uses gross movements that survive the loss of fine motor control: the edge-of-hand blow, the chin jab with the heel of the palm, knees, elbows, attacks to eyes, throat and joints. There is no trading of blows, only the fastest possible finish — Fairbairn writes repeatedly that a second decides the matter and that decency has no place in it. During the Second World War, Fairbairn and his colleague Eric Sykes trained British commandos and SOE agents at Achnacarry in Scotland, and their method became the basis of Allied close-quarters combat. The pair also designed the Fairbairn–Sykes fighting knife. Most later military systems descend from Defendu, and many present-day self-defence courses trace a direct line to it.
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