• Return to Cloudesley Road and turn right…

 

• Turn left into Copenhagen Street...

 

• Cross over Barnsbury Road alongside Barnard Park...

 

• Turn right into Hemingford Road...

 

• Turn left into Richmond Avenue down to Matilda Street...

 

• Turn right onto Matilda Street and ...

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• ...follow Thornhill Square around to your left until you reach number 60...   ///tight.item.pack

 

Edith Garrud, a diminutive self-defence instructor who taught jiu-jitsu, was one of the first female professional martial arts instructors in the western world. She and her husband, William Garrud, ran a school of jiu-jitsu on Seven Sisters Road. She was also a suffragette and trained 'The Bodyguard', the suffragettes' own protection unit, which guarded its members from police arrest. She was portrayed in 'Punch' magazine in July 1910, single-handedly tackling a group of policemen!

 

In 1899 the Garruds had attended a show of ‘wrestling’ by Edward Barton-Wright at the Alhambra Theatre, Leicester Square. This ‘wrestling’ turned out to be a martial art Barton-Wright had learnt in Japan called ‘jiu-jitsu’. So impressed was Garrud with the art, that she joined his school. 

 

Soon she was offering self-defence courses for fellow suffragettes and wrote articles explaining basic jiu-jitsu positions in the suffragette newspaper ‘Votes for Women’. 

 

Garrud rarely fought at the front line as the suffragettes were careful not to lose their self-defence guru to imprisonment. She continued as a jiu-jitsu teacher until 1925 and died in 1971 aged 99.