In Benghazi my book collection was getting larger.  Included  within  it  were Croisner, Nadi and Beaumont fencing books, Dempsey’s Championship Fighting,  E.J Harrison’s Manual of Karate and The Fighting Spirit of Japan, Nishiyama’s The Art of Empty Hand Fighting, Jay Gluck’s Zen Combat, R.W. Smith’s Secrets of Shaolin Temple Boxing and A Complete Guide to Judo,   Gilbey’s (actually R.W. Smith) Secret Fighting Arts of the World,  Oyama’s This is Karate, D.T. Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture, Plee’s Karate by Pictures  and Nakayama’s Dynamic Karate, Samuel Griffith’s The Art of War, Vishnu Devananda’s The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga, and numerous books on Buddhism.  I also had all the early editions of the American Black Belt magazine, which I’d discovered in, of all places, a small magazine store hidden away at the back of Waverly Barracks.

Benghazi, where I always carried a knife, was also the place where I got into some really serious fights, knives and all, with the locals (both Arab and Italian)  who hated the British. 

Bampton was my final posting and it was here that I added to my collection of books Donn F. Draegar’s  Judo Training Methods (whose training regimes I followed religiously for many years), R.W. Smith’s books on Tai Chi and Pakua,  Henry Plee’s Beginner to Black Belt, and Peter Urban’s Karate Dojo.

At this point I was also the possessor of a Super 8 projector and numerous  Super 8 films on boxing.  I even managed to find one on Muay Thai from a  Super 8  film shop on Shaftesbury Avenue.

Remember, the whole point of my resourcing all this material wasn’t for academic reasons or for some hypothetical encounter on the streets, but to make me a more effective fighter.  I was still going out and looking for fights   so as to test what I’d taught myself.

One fight that was a measure of how far I’d come was a fight against a former Army  heavyweight boxer whose claim to fame was having fought Brian London. I’ve mentioned it in my website autobiography.  At around ten stone (quite a few stone lighter than him) I quite literally kicked the shit out of him.   After he’d been hospitalized, I fully expected to be put under close arrest.  I figured I was going to the glasshouse, and I actually burnt photos which I felt might be incriminating against me because they showed me breaking slabs of concrete, bricks and piles of wood—doing all kinds of things that I’d got up to that showed I was a martial artist.  I had my kit all laid out on my bed and was dressed ready for the guard room, but for some inexplicable reason the red caps didn’t turn up.  It’s a real shame about the pictures; some of them were the best breaks I’ve ever done, and in complete naivete.

When I was at Bampton I spent a Saturday afternoon visiting the London Kyokushin Kai situated in Vauxhall and got my second viewing of karate.  During free fighting I broke some guy’s arm (I was trying to kick him in the balls at the time—well, they did say it was free fighting, which i took to mean anything goes). On a technical point: whenever I hit I’m already anticipating that my opponent  will try to block or cover, and I’m blasting through the block or cover.  I attack not only the target  but his defence of it; in the case of a karate-type block against my groin kick, I drive straight through the defending arm with my shin.      

Bampton was also where I began teaching myself yoga from various books. I’d dabbled with it in Nairobi and Benghazi using Devananda’s The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga, but in Bampton I got serious.  At first I had a few worrying moments with some of the cleansing routines, but in the end not only could I perform all the various asanas, cleansing routines, breathing exercises, concentration/meditative/contemplation practices, but I also began to get a handle on yoga’s philosophy.  I was heavily into it, along with Buddhist  philosophy  (excluding its religious aspects, I hasten to add), and this started to change the way I viewed the world about me. 

Up until then, quite honestly, I didn't have a lot going on inside my head.  I wasn’t thinking about anything other than obvious priorities of fighting, sex, and drink!  I was pretty simple-minded (some would say I still am).  I could put a chain of moves together, but not a chain of thought.  Yoga and Buddhism started to open that up.  On some of the Zen koans and concepts, I’d be breaking out into a fucking sweat just trying to get my head round it.  The development of my self at that point became more important to me than just going along with some military machine that couldn’t give a fuck who I was.

I wanted to get out of the Army, but I was in a restricted trade. My attitude towards authority had always been bad but now it got worse.  I didn’t shave, didn’t clean my kit, only did duty if I felt like it, and if officers bothered me I told them to fuck off.  Eventually my blatant and belligerent disrespect (as well as the fighting) led to my discharge in 1967.          

Though I never saw active service, for my nine years in the Army I was involved in my own private war.  I was a violently angry young man.  And although I never killed anybody (at least to my knowledge) it wasn’t for the lack of trying (on several occasions) or having hit somebody so hard or beaten them so badly that it’s only due to luck that they didn’t die.  This isn’t something I’m proud of.  But it was part of me and it still is.  In many ways, my life has been about resolving this innate violence that I have burning inside me.  I’m talking about it here because all my martial arts training has to be seen in this context. 

I started teaching myself martial arts for the fighting advantage I felt I would get; but gradually I began to get a handle on my violence and I learned to get control over it, whereas when I was young, my violence had control over me.  It’s that work that is the essence of my development, and so my violence is central to any accomplishments I’ve had along the way. 

I think this is one reason I look at everything opposite to the rest of the martial arts world.  A lot of people go into the martial arts looking to deal with guys like me from a defensive point of view.  What they fail to realise is that the very essence of the martial arts is violence.  Indeed, I would argue that the essence of meditation practices is the transmutation of primal drives such as sexual and destructive urges, into something highly focused and charged.  Sexual energy arousal within certain sects of Taoism and Buddhism is a prerequisite for the meditative/spiritual practice.  After all, you can’t direct what isn’t there in the first place.  So violence, and destructive intent, provides the energy for martial arts practice.  The defensive interpretation of martial art skills tends to be controlled by pacifists, and it’s easier to swallow the ‘defensive version’ when we live in a modern Western society that abhors violence. 

What I’m saying here might not be comfortable to hear.  I’m not saying it to big myself up.  I’m trying to get people to understand that in martial arts if you neglect the violence, you’re totally missing the point. 

Now, before I digress too far.  All of this writing is part of my explanation as to my relationship with karate.  With hindsight I wish I’d paid attention to my first impression of karate at Vernon Bell’s.  I wish  I’d paid attention to my second impression that Saturday afternoon in Vauxhall.  But I’d read so many books, and invested so much in my own practice, and I wanted the legends to all be true.  My belief system was locked into overdrive, and it wasn’t until around 1970 that I began to accept the unwelcome truth that karate could offer me nothing worth having. 

But back in 1967 I was only 23 and I badly wanted the myths and legends to be true.  Oyama was someone who had been a tremendous influence on me.  I’d never seen him in action, but I had all his books as well as Tengu of Karate by Augustin de Mello, which was a fictionalization of Oyama.   Kyokushin Kai was the logical place for me to go. 

So even though I’d been less than impressed with the training on my single brief visit to the Vauxhall dojo, I joined the LKK.  At first Bob Bolton insisted I had to attend a beginners’ course.  But I wasn’t a fucking beginner (even if i did call it ‘karat’!).  I’d been doing karate (my version of it anyway) longer than Bolton or Arneil, and probably I’d had more fights than the pair of them put together. 

It didn’t take Bolton long to realise that I wasn’t a beginner.  He went up stairs and got Arneil.  After the two of them watched me perform I was immediately   transferred to the advanced class,  where during  kumite I dropped a Swedish second dan.

‘Always hit them when they’re shifting their weight or stepping forward,’ my dad used to say. I did, and it worked.   What then followed was a year of belting guys in the dojo or in competitions, until finally one night I hit one guy too hard and got banned from Kyokushin Kai.  

Whilst at Vauxhall I was still teaching myself and regularly having street fights. During this period I worked various illegal boxing moves that my father had shown me.  I trained them on an old springless mattress wrapped around a tree, occasionally tried them in the dojo, and also tested them for real on the street.    One was the spinning back fist.  Another move I’d read about and now began to perfect was a kick to the femoral artery/testicles/perineum with the toe of my shoe or folded toes. I trained the latter by doing bunny jumps on folded toes on concrete and wooden floors.  I already knew how to walk on folded toes ever since I’d seen monkey boxers in Malaya as a child.  This was the kick I used on one of Jon Bluming’s  guys in Holland that dropped him and rendered him unconscious on the spot.  Blood was pouring out of his nose and he was in shock.  It was a vicious kick, and typical of my streetfighting mentality; I’d only been in Kyokushin Kai a few months, but already they had me on the team.  I hadn’t really grasped the concept of holding back in a fight, and they knew this, but they still entered me. 

Another favourite move was grabbing or clearing my opponent’s extended probing or threatening hand  and repeatedly striking  the guy in the head  with what ever tool was available at the time.  As a variation, I also grabbed the inside of the jacket sleeve or collar with a single or double regular or cross grip, and again, fired off a volley of shots.  Around this time I was also able to stand very close to someone and control one hand or both, or distract him in some way with my hands, and at the same time kick him in the head with a round kick or front kick.  There’s a photo in my website gallery of this move performed during light kumite with Takahashi. http://www.morrisnoholdsbarred.co.uk/07gallery.htm

Of course none of this is new.  It’s been done by others before and since.  Indeed, there isn’t anything new under the sun, only the details by which it is practiced or described.  Much of the stuff currently in vogue I was doing thirty years ago, as were martial artists across various continents long before my time.  

But the purpose of this autobiography up to this point is to illustrate that whatever mindset, athleticism, conditioning, fighting skills, and rationale that I possessed in the late 1960s and early 1970s (which I was later to build upon), it was not down to the instruction of Bolton, Arneil or Kyokushin Kai karate.  I admit, I was inspired by stories of the samurai and Oyama, even though I was later to find out these stories were just that: pure fiction.  But, stories aside, everything I knew, I had taught myself and picked up from my father and various other sources.  

So for those who believe that whatever abilities I currently have are attributable to the few years I spent in formal karate training: that’s absurd.  My fighting abilities and martial art practices were already in place long before I began training with Bolton and Arneil and the Yamaguchis.

From the very beginning, when I did karate I always did my version of the dynamics and tactics, etc.  Therefore, whatever others have said about me (such as Gavin Mulholland’s intended compliment when he described me as the best karate man he’d ever seen) is ironically, misplaced.  What I was doing was not a representation of ‘karate’, but of the fights I’d had combined with what I’d  taught myself and later augmented through my research within the Fujian, Filipino and Indonesian  systems.  I'll talk about that more later. 

Equally, whatever grades/titles I was awarded when formally practicing  karate for my fighting, physical abilities and technical abilities, these grades weren’t the measure of my karate practice from 1967 to 1973.  They were the measure of what I had already achieved through my own efforts long before I entered a karate dojo.

In fact, I’d go as far to say that the years I spent in formal karate training from 1967 to 1973 (or at a stretch 1974) were a complete waste of time.  With hindsight, I’d have been much further forward as a martial artist if I’d have continued to rely solely on teaching myself during this period. 

With my hand on my heart, I can honestly say I learnt nothing of any worth from Bolton, Arneil, the Yamaguchis, Miyazato, or any other so-called karate master from Japan, Okinawa or the West.  Quite the contrary; what they had to teach was all bollocks.

More about karate in the next installment.