Fencing Personalities
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Title
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Fencing Personalities
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Date
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June 1939
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volume
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4
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issue
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4
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page start
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7
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page end
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7
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content
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en
FENCING PERSONALITIES
By M. A. de Capriles
The Riposte is happy to be able at this time to give to its readers the latest news about the activities of Lieutenant Colonel Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, United States Marine Corps Reserves. This internationally known sportsman from Philadelphia is an enthusiastic swordsman and has been President of the Philadelphia Fencers Club since its foundation in 1927. The Club, the oldest in Pennsylvania, is under the direction of Major William J. Herrmann and includes in its membership such well-known stars as the veteran champions Frank H. Goodfellow and Francis Tetaz and the present Women's All-Eastern Champion, Mrs. Jarmila C. Vokral.
Colonel Biddle has served many years as instructor in personal combat to the Marine Corps. In his youth, he sparred with Bob Fitzsimmons while the latter was preparing for his fights with Jim Jeffries, Tom Sharkey, and Gus Ruhlin. During the World War, he organized the Philadelphia Military Training Corps, which in 1917 had twelve thousand men in training. This organization was the nucleus from which the Marine Corps Reserves were drawn. He himself was commissioned a Captain and went to France with the Fifth and Sixth Regiments as a bayonet instructor.
Colonel Biddle's great contribution to the art of individual combat has been in the application of the principles of swordsmanship to bayonet and knife fighting. He is considered to be the greatest American authority on the use of the bayonet and the knife in personal defense.
The 64-year-old expert also has an intimate knowledge of boxing, wrestling, jiu-jitsu, and Kendo, which has helped him to develop remarkable proficiency in all-round personal combat.
Colonel Biddle's latest assignments have taken him to San Diego and to Honolulu. He is particularly proud of the achievement of one of his pupils, Lieutenant Gordon Warner of the Punahou Faculty. He is the only Caucasian to hold a degree in Kendo, the Japanese art of swordsmanship, which is said to be the oldest sword fighting art in the world. Lieutenant Warner, who stands 6 feet 3 inches in height and is a tremendously powerful all-round athlete, has acquired exceptional renown in Hawaii and Japan by his contests with Mizuhashi, a 6-foot 1-inch Japanese Kendo and Judo fighter, and with one of the remaining few Samurai in Japan, Mochida, who holds the highest rank in Kendo.
Colonel Biddle's interest in fencing has repeatedly brought him to New York, where he has been a student under Professor Julio Martinez Castello. He is the donor of the Biddle Trophy, which for the past six years has drawn an average of 200 schoolboy fencers in the Metropolitan area.
