Plague of Strength

In part one, we examined the first three-quarters of the life of a man who seems to be a Frankenstein’s monster comprised of equal parts of ripped-and-ready hybrid martial artist and celebrity martial arts trainer Bruce Lee, swashbuckling revolutionary adventurer Garibaldi, and master swordsman and soldier-of-fortune Fiori dei Liberi (who was essentially Italy’s answer to Musashi, though instead of being a sword-wielding, unhinged psychopath, Liberi was so fucking smooth he could make a wolverine purr, both a master swordsman and an exceptional teacher who wrote the earliest treatise on systematic fencing). Come to think of it, there is no small amount of the story of Zatoichi in Monstery, as Monstery’s early bout of bizarre explosion-induced blindness and resulting vision issues caused him to learn to fight by feel, which in turn enabled him to educate people on fighting in a manner no Westerner was known to do (but was common in Chinese martial arts).

One of the most forward-thinking men of an era obsessed with war, industrial progress, beating women, potentially reestablishing widespread slavery, and musclebound Jesus (and not the cool one give you a thumbs-up while wearing a tuxedo t-shirt) as opposed to advancing the human condition, Colonel Thomas Hoyer Monstery combined the best parts of every martial arts style he had ever encountered, from Ireland’s purring to Welsh jump kicking (an absurd fighting style in which the Welsh would get a running start and drop kick their opponent full in the fucking face with both heels) to French savate to American rough and tumble, all while lending his services to freedom fighters around the world in the defense of what is at its core the best of human spirit.

The environment in which Monstery found himself in the United States was entirely unique. As a nation with no real history to speak of (at least when compared with the much more ancient civilizations of Europe), the newly minted United States was a nation bathed in gore at birth, but without direction. The most popular fighting styles in the new nation were wrestling and rough and tumble, though modern boxing began making inroads after the first widely reported publicly contested boxing match was fought between a British sailor and an American bartender in 1816. Shortly after that fight was concluded, a school with a system resembling James Figg’s was established in Philadelphia by a man known only to historians as Mr. Gray, in which he taught courses in fencing, stick fighting, and hand-to-hand combat to “respectable gentlemen.” (Thrasher 55).

Before you get caught up thinking this was your average strip-mall self-defense bullshit, James Figg was an old school English brawler who fought in a more traditional style that emphasized taking and giving blows without blocking. Beyond that, it wasn’t merely hand-to-hand combat- Figg fought just as often with cudgels, swords, and knives as he did barehanded, and his fights were savage affairs with few rules. “[He] and other earlier fighters relied heavily upon mauling and eye-gouging opponents in a clinch, then throwing them and “purring” (kicking) them once they were down and dazed on the floor” (Seekins).

Because of its obvious brutality, boxing in particular remained a savage and low class sport in the eyes of “respectable” society, a sport relegated to the poor, and in particular the big-dick-swingin, hide-yo-kids-hide-yo-wife American black males and the drunken, irascible, and undeniably lazy Irish males (before your panties get twisted, I am just identifying the prejudices of the time- there’s no way you can be a great lazy fighter, for instance). So male-oriented and racist that it might as well have been a manospere convention, instruction in the combative arts in the United States was essentially restricted only to urban areas, while in the outlying areas wrestling and rough and tumble dominated the American fight scene. By the time Monstery reached our shores, he saw a definitive opportunity to help advance our society by spreading knowledge of means by which people of any gender could get healthier, stronger, and more confident, as well as defend themselves and resolve their disputes without stacking their bodies like bony cordwood in the streets.

In the modern era it’s hard to understand exactly how divided society was on gender and ethnicity lines in the late 19th, because their positions seem to be totally insane. 

After John L. Sullivan, who was progressive enough to at least referee a fight between black fighters, claimed that he “won’t fight a darky for there is no credit in licking a coon,” and that “on the street [he] would pass him by, just the same as [he] would pass the dirt on the street,” the reigning black heavyweight champ “Old Chocolate” George Godfrey (1853-1901) stated he would much rather fight white men, as “they are easily whipped…” in spite of the fact that he was considered white in Canada and New England (Moore).

If you’re curious, Godfrey was 5’10” 175lbs, and had a record of 23 wins, 6 losses, 14 draws, and 3 no contests, with 18 KOs. Happily, he died relatively rich and of tuberculosis rather than poor and of lynching.

It’s fascinating, when viewed in this light, that Monstery did was he did. Here was a brave-to-the-point-of-insanity, rich, respected warhorse of a Renaissance-man-slash-soldier-of-fortune who had dedicated his entire life to preserving a dying art in the form of fencing and resurrecting dead arts in the form of boxing and swimming, all while teaching segments of the population (women and non-whites) who were pointedly excluded from those sorts of pursuits. In that way, he was perhaps one of the more subversive human beings of whom you might have ever heard, because he genuinely gave no fucks what the establishment expected or demanded, and he was prepared to cut throats in the pursuit of his ideals (though he’d rather just leave you lumped up and educated). Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo journalism wasn’t shit in the face of Monstery’s “fuck your conventions dickheads- I’ll fucking stab you” bold-faced refutation of society’s more idiotic mores and Christianity-inspired racism, sexism, and classism.

New York seemed to be his spot, as he lived there until the early 1880s, teaching a combination of shooting, boxing, fencing, and swimming (and selling liquor out of his gym, in an awesome turn of fate). While there, Monstery held a number of massive exhibitions, teamed up with the Turners at the New York Turnverein to improve his own system of strength building exercises and calisthenics (though his ulterior motive was almost certainly to poach students, because he was a highly persuasive and competitive guy), and cemented his own legend as the greatest American cross-discipline fighter of the 19th century, as well as one of the greatest fighting instructors of all time.

Around 1884, Monstery moved to Chicago, where he remained until he died. While in New York and Chicago, Monstery fought exhibitions with some of the most notable fencers the planet had ever seen and taught the most prominent actors of the time, including two of John Wilkes Booth’s brothers, Edwin Forrest (whose badass acting once precipitated a riot that left a bunch of people dead and over 250 injured), Francis Wilson (who won the amateur fencing championship of 1878), McKee Rankin (who was a great-grandfather or granduncle to Drew Barrymore), and actress Mildred Holland, who was at the time considered to be the greatest female fencer in America. Though his stable of actors and actresses might seem odd at first glance, stage actors essentially had to train to be their own stunt doubles, so fencing instruction was critical for top performers.

Monstery also participated in a number of the massive UFC-meets-Arnold Sports-Weekend fight festivals Monstery and others would host that they referred to as Assaults-at-Arms (one of which I covered in the Sidebar to this series). Whereas most modern sports festivals receive only sort of cursory attention from the news, these things were trumpeted and promoted enthusiastically by the press, because let’s face it- in the late 19th century there was fuck-all to do in one’s precious free time. Watching a bunch of martial arts masters battle it out onstage would likely have been the greatest entertainment of which one could conceive at the time, especially since it was not uncommon for the fight onstage to spill out onto the streets.

As you might guess, that beef occasionally carried forward onto the streets. After a particularly contentious result with a Frenchman named Senac (who would claim victory against a rival of Monstery’s as well, with the same result), Senac caught up to Monstery at a bar about three years later and immediately began running his fucking mouth (just as in the modern day, their beef intensified over time through the attention of the media). Monstery was worldly as fuck and had trained in Paris, so he clearly understood, but feigned having not done so. He asked his drinking buddy what the Frenchman had been saying and got in the beret wearing goof’s face, essentially calling him a cheating, cheese-eating surrender monkey and telling him he’d better get the fuck out of his face.

Senac then found his balls and shoved Monstery, thinking he’d trash Monstery’s 60-year-old, 135 pound ass in spite of the fact Monstery was a decorated war veteran, god-tier swordsman, and an excellent brawler. He thought wrong, because that old man dropped that young buck with a straight left as a rapid retort to the shove. Senac got his feet, clinched, and threw Monstery, but Monstery recovered and staggered the cheating fuckwit with an uppercut. When Senac dropped, Monstery attempted to throw him but was reversed, so the men scrambled and got to their feet.

Wheezing from the brawl that had already gone on, the two took off their jackets and started for their blades just as the cops showed and broke the entire thing up. Which was lucky for Senac, but unlucky for the two swordsmen who would have identical experiences to Monstery in the coming couple of years, having unsatisfying matches with the Frenchman that would end in a call for that man to die in both instances- and that makes sense, because were they fighting with unblunted blades, he would certainly have been dead but for his cheating (which was Monstery’s criticism in the first fucking place).

And don’t forget- Monstery was also a “professor of sparring,” and taught his own hybrid system of bare-knuckle self-defense that integrated punching, grappling, and kicking techniques, designed to be effective against even the most obscure fighting styles. His hand to hand skills put him on par with the best boxers of the time, as he used boxing primarily as a means of improving his bladed fighting skills while ensuring he’d not get caught and beaten while unarmed.

Of note in this drunken brawl was the fact that Monstery was over 20 years the senior of Senac and lighter, yet he was described in account of all of his fights as extremely powerful. That might come as a shock, considering Monstery recommended people lift hard only for one year after attaining proficiency in boxing and fencing, and the exercise programs of the time called for a lot of bodyweight work and gymnastics (especially on the parallel bars, which the founder of the Turner movement invented). Though the Turners eventually invented the myth of musclebound weight lifters to keep people from abandoning gymnastics (which they invented), they were initially avid weightlifters. They referred to lifting as “heavy gymnastics” and what we think of as gymnastics as “light gymnastics.”

Monstery himself claimed to avoid the weights, though he hired Australian strongman, wrestler, boxer, and all-round athlete William Miller to coach his athletes through strength exercises and lead them in general conditioning. Given the reports of his strength, it seems likely he trained with weights alongside William Miller but publicly eschewed them to promote fencing, in the same way the Turners did. Monstery instead recommended that people spar hard in fencing for two ten minute bouts, with a five minute rest between. This, he claimed, “is the utmost exercise that is beneficial to the body, leaving the frame vigorous” and making the trainees “tall and slender” instead of “invariably thickset

Though I will cover Victorian-era training methods better in an upcoming article on the subject (there’s pretty scanty information on how each of them trained, but a sort of catch-all is possible from enough information), Monstery seemed to use all of the varied forms of fencing and their practice for cardio- it was possible to do in a confined space, kept him very active, and improved his fencing skills (which would help keep him alive on the battlefield)- in that way, his methods were sort of like a modern housewife taking a very hardcore cardio krav maga or mma class. Training that way improved his movement patterns and made them both fluid and reflexive, all which improving his cardio, muscular endurance, and his hand-eye coordination.

At 5’10” and 195-200, Prof. William Miller (1846-1939) was small by today’s standards but a bruiser by the standards of the day, and yet lived to be almost a hundred in spite of the fact that the average US life expectancy was still only 49 in 1900. In 1897 the average height of recruits in the British army was 67 inches and the average chest measurement was 34 inches at a bodyweight of about 140 pounds, and Americans were even smaller than that, being described as “a pasty-faced, narrow-chested, spindle-shanked, dwarfed race” (Chapman 125).

As such, he was the perfect proto-Sandow to work with Monstery in creating the perfect fighter.

Monstery’s assistant instructor, as it happened, was none other than Australia’s answer to Donald Dinnie and Jim Thorpe, Professor WIlliam Miller. Miller was a multi-sport monster, winning titles in weightlifting, boxing (both gloved and bare-knuckle), race walking and wrestling (55W-7L-11D), as well as Australia’s broadsword fencing championship. In New York, Miller seconded Monstery and taught boxing and wrestling at Monstery’s school, where it is more than likely he also taught strength conditioning. It was also around this time that George Barker Windship, the Boston physician who radically popularized heavy lifting in the US with his partial deadlift machines, was pushing hard for everyone to engage in heavy lifting for their health, so the two local super-strength advocates likely influenced Monstery’s own training, as he was a man who respected and valued physical strength in a fighter (provided they worked on their technique as well).

Gyms were a relatively new thing the world overThe New York Turnverein was the first athletic club founded in the United States, and it only opened in 1868. Once it opened it boomed, however, as the National Police Gazette, the first massively popular working class, pop culture magazines reported heavily on sports (which no other paper did) and drove huge interest in boxing and strongman. As such, it seems almost certain that the Victorian era’s answer to Bruce Lee lifted weights, if not assiduously, regularly enough to give him the edge over his competition. In the modern era it would be not unlike Nathan Jones teaming up with Michael Jai White to turn out supremely dominant stage and real-life fighters, which MJW handling the technical stuff and Jones handling more of the brute strength instruction and acting as a heavy when shit went down at tournaments, and it seemed to work well.

Jump to Part 3

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Sources:

Beezley, William H. Judas at the Jockey Club and Other Episodes of Porfirian Mexico (3rd Ed.). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

“The Gymnasium, Swimming Pool, and Boxing Rings.”  Origins, season 2, episode 20.  1 Dec 2015.    

Miller, Ben.  Colonel Thomas Monstery, and the Training of Jaguarina, America’s Champion Swordswoman.  Martial Arts New York.  31 Mar 2015.  Web.  20 May 2020.
https://martialartsnewyork.org/2015/03/31/colonel-thomas-monstery-and-the-training-of-jaguarina-americas-champion-swordswoman/

Miller, Ben.  A grand assault-of-arms in old New York, directed by Col. Thomas Monstery.  Out of This Century.  9 Apr 2015.  Web. 26 May 2020.  https://outofthiscentury.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/a-grand-assault-of-arms-in-old-new-york-directed-by-col-thomas-monstery/

Miller, Ben. The Monstery-Senac Fencing Contest of 1876.  19 May 2015.  Web.  31 May 2020. https://outofthiscentury.wordpress.com/2015/05/19/the-monstery-senac-fencing-contest-of-1876/

Monstery, Colonel Thomas Hoyer Monstery and Ben Miller (ed.). Self Defense for Gentlemen and Ladies: A Nineteenth-Century Treatise on Boxing, Kicking, Grappling, and Fencing with the Cane and Quarterstaff. Berkeley: Blue Snake Books, 2015.

Moore, Louis.  I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood, 1880-1915.  Urbana: Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, 2017.

Pickard, Ransom, M.D.  “Physical Development,” reprinted from The Gymnast and Athletic Review.  Mind and Body: A Monthly Journal Devoted to Physical Education, Volumes 1-5, Karl Kroh, Wm. Stecher, and Hans Ballin, eds.  Milwaukee: Freidenker Publishing Co., 1894.

Porath, Jason.  La Jaguarina.  Rejected Princesses.  Web.  1 June 2020.  https://www.rejectedprincesses.com/princesses/la-jaguarina

Seekins, Briggs.  Jack Broughton: The father of boxing.  Medium.  8 Mar 2015.  Web.  29 Mar 2020.  https://medium.com/pioneers-of-boxing/jack-broughton-the-father-of-prizefighting-7ba0e3efb38c

Thrasher, Christopher David. Fight Sports and American Masculinity: Salvation in Violence from 1607 to the Present. Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2015.

Wheeler, Jimmy.  Biography of Andre Christol.  Pro Wrestling Historical Society.  22 Sep 2014.  Web.  1 Jun 2020.  https://www.prowrestlinghistoricalsociety.com/bio-0160.html

Whittaker, Frederick. The Sword Prince. The Romantic Life of Colonel Monstery. Reprinted from Boy’s Library, octavo edition No. 28, 1884. Northern Illinois University. Web. 26 Mar 2020. https://www.ulib.niu.edu/badndp/monstery_thomas.html

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