On Self-Defence

The best defence is, and has always been, the capacity to recognise a situation before it becomes one.

I will begin here because your era, which is fond of discussing self-defence as though it were primarily a physical matter, has largely neglected the fact that the vast majority of violent encounters are preceded by a period in which they could have been avoided entirely, and that the man who walks away from a confrontation has not demonstrated weakness but intelligence, which is a distinction that costs nothing to understand and which may, on some future evening, spare you a great deal of pain and a not inconsiderable quantity of trouble with the law. In my time, as in yours, the overwhelming majority of violence between men occurred in circumstances where drink was involved, where pride had been engaged, and where one or both parties had failed to do the simple, unglamorous thing and leave. The Edwardian gentleman, whatever his other qualities, was taught that the man who could not govern his own temper was not fit to govern anything else, and that self-command in excitement was among the most valuable traits a man could possess, for it always made for the comfort of oneself and of others, and often for safety.

Walk away. I cannot say it more plainly than that. If a man insults you, walk away. If a man challenges you, walk away. If a man pushes you and you are able to leave, leave. The satisfaction of standing your ground is temporary; the consequences of what follows are not, and the man who is lying on the pavement or sitting in a police station has won nothing, regardless of who struck whom first. Your pride will recover. Your teeth may not.

That said. There are situations, rare but real, in which walking away is not possible: the confrontation has found you rather than the reverse, another person is in danger, or your departure would be an abandonment rather than a prudence. For these situations a gentleman should be prepared. And preparation means training, maintained over time; not a single class attended with enthusiasm and abandoned before the month is out.

The Edwardian gentleman was, as a matter of course, considerably better prepared for physical confrontation than the modern one. Boxing was taught in schools and practised in clubs, and a man who could not put up his hands in a credible fashion was considered to have a gap in his education as conspicuous as an inability to ride or to swim. The skills were not cultivated because violence was expected but because the capacity for it, held in reserve and governed by judgement, was understood to be part of a complete man’s equipment. One did not go about looking for trouble. One was simply ready for it, in the same way that one carried an umbrella not because one wished for rain but because one recognised that rain was possible and that being caught without preparation was an avoidable indignity.

Boxing remains, in my view, the most useful foundation. It teaches a man to stand correctly, to move correctly, to protect his head, and, perhaps most importantly, to be struck without panicking, which is a capacity that no amount of theoretical preparation will provide. The man who has never been hit does not know how he will respond to being hit, and the discovery, made for the first time in an actual confrontation, is rarely a pleasant one. Boxing provides this education in controlled circumstances, which is to say circumstances in which the lesson can be absorbed without the full penalty of ignorance.

To this I would add some form of grappling, practised standing rather than on the ground, for the simple reason that the ground is where you do not wish to be. A real confrontation is not a sporting contest; there is no referee, the surface beneath you is concrete or pavement, and there may be more than one opponent, which means that any time spent on the ground is time spent in a position of extreme vulnerability. Learn to control a man who has taken hold of you. Learn to break a grip, to maintain your balance when someone is attempting to remove it, and to create enough distance to leave, which should remain your primary objective in every encounter that permits it.

These skills must be maintained. I cannot stress this with sufficient force, for I have observed that your era treats physical training as a thing to be taken up and set down according to mood, and self-defence in particular attracts men who attend for six weeks with great intensity and then vanish, carrying with them a confidence that is no longer supported by any corresponding ability. A man who took a boxing class two years ago cannot box. A man who studied grappling for a month and then stopped cannot grapple. The body forgets what it is not asked to remember, and the half-remembered technique, deployed under the stress and adrenaline of an actual confrontation, is frequently worse than no technique at all, for it produces a confidence that the situation will immediately expose as unfounded. Train consistently or do not train, but do not carry the memory of training as though it were the thing itself.

When the matter does occur, and I say when with deliberation because a long life, if one is not fortunate, may present one or two such moments regardless of how carefully one has conducted oneself: keep your hands up and your chin down. Watch the chest, not the eyes, for the chest will tell you where a man’s weight is shifting before his limbs act upon the shift, and the eyes, contrary to popular belief, will tell you very little except that the man attached to them is angry, which you already knew. Do not punch to the head if you can avoid it, for the skull is harder than the hand and the hand will usually lose the exchange; the body is a larger and more forgiving target, and a man who has been struck hard in the solar plexus or the ribs is a man whose enthusiasm for the encounter has been substantially reduced. Stay on your feet. Create distance when you can. Leave the moment leaving becomes possible, even if you appear to be winning, for winning a street fight is a concept that does not survive contact with the reality of one.

I will close by observing that in my day, as in yours, the men who were most capable of violence were, in my experience, the least inclined to it. The man who knows what he can do in a confrontation does not need to prove it, and the man who does need to prove it is announcing, to anyone with the experience to read the announcement, that he is uncertain of his own capacity and is hoping that bluster will serve where ability will not. Competence is quiet. It has always been quiet. Cultivate it, maintain it, and hope sincerely that you never need it.