A JUJITSU fighting suffragette who learnt the martial art in the heart of the West End is to be immortalised with a plaque.
Edith Garrud was a real-life female action hero. While in her 20s in the early 1900s, she and her husband Evan Jones met Japanese jujitsu instructor Sadakazu Uyenishi in Golden Square, Soho.
Ms Garrud became one of the world’s first female martial arts instructors.
Her first dojo, or training centre, was a rented room in the new Palladium Academy, a school for dancers in nearby Argyll Street.
She also trained in Golden Square. She would pass on her fighting skills to other suffragettes, who would fend off the cops during protests for women’s rights, according to her great-nephew, Martin Williams.
He said: “The whole strategy of the suffragettes was that they would create a group around the main leaders like Emmeline Pankhurst, and when the police tried to get close they’d fend them off using the Jujitsu Edith taught them.”
A 1910 issue of Punch magazine portrays a cartoon image of Edith single-handedly tackling six policemen.
Mr Williams said it had worked well for his great aunt to have her training ground in Soho.
“She was very pleased to have it in the posh end of town,” he said, “because people were less likely to suspect. The suffragettes would create a disturbance in Oxford Street, but then they’d run back to the dojo and hide their clubs and bats under the floor. By the time the police arrived they’d be pretending they were in the middle of their exercise class.”
Edith Garrud died in 1971, aged 99. A plaque is set to be unveiled on the street where she lived in Islington later this year.
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