he beat up the British Resident. They said, ‘This will never do, so out you
go,’ and he had to abdicate in favour of my grandfather Tukoji Rao III”
(Allen and Dwivedi 1985, 248).
In 1910, the Bengali millionaire Sharat Kumar Mishra sent the Indian
champions Great Gama, Ahmed Bux, Imam Bux, and Gulam Mohiuddin
to Europe to prove that they could best Europeans, and after they did, the
British Foreign Office prohibited them from having any further matches in
London. And, following Japanese military successes in Burma in 1942, the
British also prohibited all Indian professional wrestling, ostensibly to re-
duce the risk of factional violence between Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims.
U.S. servicemen introduced boxing into the Philippines as early as
1899, but Filipinos did not appear in the ring until around 1914. The rea-
son for the American support was that the YMCA and the Knights of
Columbus hoped that boxers would lead clean lives (the VD admissions
rate in the Philippines for U.S. soldiers averaged around 17 percent [Stur-
devant and Stolzfus 1992, 312–313]). Meanwhile the Filipinos wanted a
gambling game with which to replace the banned cockfighting. Filipino col-
legiate athletes took up boxing after it was legalized in 1921, and this led
to several medals during Far Eastern Championship Games. During the
1930s, the Filipino Constabulary also started encouraging members to
practice freestyle wrestling. Here, however, the idea was less the improve-
ment of skill in close-quarter battle than the desire to collect more medals
during Far Eastern Championship Games.
A partial exception to this rule of nationalism being the driving force
in the spread and development of twentieth-century military combatives
appeared in China during the 1920s. In 1909, Shanghai police began re-
ceiving instruction in quanfa for the usual combination of nationalist and
practical purposes. But by the 1920s the Shanghai police had come under
the control of Europeans, and at the insistence of the British police captain
William E. Fairbairn, officers began learning a combination of Japanese
throws, British punches, Chinese kicks, Sikh wrestling, and American
quick-draw pistol drills. The result was easy to teach, reasonably practical,
and impressive in demonstration. During World War II the U.S., British,
and Canadian governments hired Fairbairn, Dermot O’Neill, and other
former Shanghai policemen to teach close-combat skills to commandos.
Once again the demonstrations were impressive—and influential, too, as
James Bond’s superhuman skills in applied mayhem apparently date to a
demonstration put on outside Ottawa in 1943.
But Fairbairn’s pragmatism was an aberration, and during the late
1930s and early 1940s the establishment of Home Guard and Hitler Youth
organizations created quite a market for jingoistic books. Examples include
Unarmed Combatby Britain’s James Hipkiss, Combat without Weapons
Combatives: Military and Police Martial Art Training 89