Guy Windsor
I’m here today with Ben Miller, who is the man behind Physical Culture Historians, preserving and reviving historical exercise methods for mind, body and spirit using wands, Indian Clubs, calisthenics, and more. He has a successful and fascinating YouTube channel, and has produced several modern editions of 18th and 19th century fencing and self defence sources, as well as being the author of The Gladiatory Art: the Lives, Writings, and Techniques of the 18th Century Stage Gladiators. So without further ado, Ben, welcome to the show.
Ben Miller
Thanks for having me.
Guy Windsor
So just to orient everybody, whereabouts in the world are you?
Ben Miller
Right now I’m in Hollywood, California.
Guy Windsor
The Hollywood? Okay, is that a good choice?
Ben Miller
That depends on who you talk to. But I’ve been here for about six years. I was in New York before that for almost 20 years. So yeah, we’ve been out here for entertainment industry work. I’ve never lived in a place that has so much good and so much bad going forward at the same time. So there’s a lot of great things about LA. No point talking about the bad. But it’s actually likely that I’m not going to be here for much longer. And I’ll be moving. But yeah, I’m not going to get into that.
Guy Windsor
So what entertainment industry work have you been doing?
Ben Miller
I’ve been doing a variety of things. I’ve done production work, I’ve done stand in work, background, some extra work. It’s not creatively fulfilling, but you do get to see everything up close, work with the stars and the big directors. And it can pay pretty well. So I’ve been doing that, and some writing work, as well as screenwriting work. But all sort of independent stuff.
Guy Windsor
I didn’t know you’d written screenplays. Anything I’ve seen, maybe?
Ben Miller
Unfortunately, no, I didn’t go to film school, back in the day at NYU. And so yeah, it’s been a struggle, but most of the stuff I’ve done has been independent, and then, it’s been a few years, but I used to do production. I used to produce. I got my start actually producing for Roger Corman, who literally just died a couple days ago. He was the king of B movies, you know, Little Shop of Horrors. My first big film I did was I produced a film about a feud between boxers and gangsters in Harlem, that was called Rage and Discipline. So I produced that for Roger, he basically sent myself and my director friend a cheque for 100 grand and said, do whatever you want, and then deliver me the edit, very hands off. And we did, and it was quite an experience, and then did another film, which gave me the opportunity to live in the Philippines for several months, which is called The Hunt for Eagle One, which was also a great experience. But I don’t recommend anyone see that one. Because, unfortunately, and I feel like the cut we delivered was a B plus, it wasn’t our script, and it could never be better than that. But then they re-cut it. And I would say I would give it an F or D minus. Most people can’t even believe who haven’t been in the entertainment industry that someone could muck with something so badly to take it, you know, from a B plus to like an F but um, yeah. So anyway, film industry is really exciting. And it’s also filled with a lot of heartbreak.
Guy Windsor
High stress.
Ben Miller
Yeah, I would say that’s more the norm.
Guy Windsor
Have you found that your entertainment industry experience has been helpful with, for example, your YouTube channel and making videos and whatnot?
Ben Miller
Yes, absolutely. In fact, a big part of why I started that channel. I mean, first of all, my wife was pushing me to do something. She’d been pushing me for a while to do something on YouTube. And I kind of resisted just because I don’t know, I just had kind of like a disdain, I guess for a lot of this stuff on YouTube. Be a bit snobbish, maybe about it. And she’s like, no, no, you’ve been doing all this research and stuff, you should really do something, there will be a lot of people interested in it. And so I finally got around to listening to her. And the film stuff did play a part in the sense that I was getting very sort of… ‘frustrated’ is too strong a word. But I was very dissatisfied with the fact that the stuff that I was writing that was sort of close to my heart was not getting produced, was not getting made. And the stuff that I was doing was essentially, not my own creative material. So all the work I was doing was I was making other people’s stuff, I wasn’t making my stuff. And so the idea of going back to doing that, like what I did in film school where I’m actually producing my own stuff, and it’s reaching an audience was very appealing. And if I was loaded with money, I might have done short fictional films to try to help the film career. But the good thing about the physical culture stuff was, I didn’t need to get a crew of people together, I didn’t need to hire a bunch of actors or beg a bunch of my friends to come out on a Saturday to shoot something. I could literally just me, myself, my wife, some of our stuff, set up an iPhone and do it. So that played a part in that too.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, it is so much easier to produce video content than pretty much anything else. I produce online courses. And I am not a videographer at all. But producing educational content that is good enough, in terms of its like technical production values, I guess you’d call them. Good enough that it doesn’t get in the way. As long as the information is good and it’s structured well, people are fine with it. It’s like because no one is known as coming to me for videography advice, they’re coming to me for sword advice, and the sword stuff is fine. The videography is basic, but I guess good enough. And it’s really quite quick to get it from into my head, out of my head and into somebody else’s head. That process is startlingly fast. So yeah, I can see how it’d be a lot more satisfying than just working your way on somebody else’s project.
Ben Miller
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that stuff is just kind of soul crushing. After you’ve just doing it for a long time and not your own stuff. So I started the YouTube channel, and the rest is history.
Guy Windsor
The rest is history. So how did you get into historical martial arts, historical physical culture, that kind of stuff?
Ben Miller
Well, that’s a pretty long story.
Guy Windsor
We have time.
Ben Miller
Like a lot of young guys, I was interested in the martial arts my whole life, but my parents weren’t particularly interested in paying for martial arts lessons. You know, I was doing violin lessons and all sorts of other things. I was always watching the movies and all that stuff. After September 11th hit, I was just out of college and just had my first corporate job, and I had a paycheck for the first time. So after September 11th, I thought, I really owe it to myself to learn something. So I started martial arts, from that practical mindset of I need to know something, just in the off chance that something ever happens to me. And so I started with Krav Maga with a teacher in New York City.
Guy Windsor
That’s a practical choice. If you actually expect to use a martial art, in the modern world, that is probably the most practical choice out there, I’d say.
Ben Miller
Absolutely. I mean, and there’s some controversy, and I’ve had debates with friends about this, but I think the real virtue of Krav Maga is to take a person who knows nothing and get them to knowing something and get build up their confidence in a short amount of time. And the guy who I trained with was very intense and impressive, you know, ex-Special Forces, and he actually studied with the guy who founded Krav Maga, Imi Lichtenfeld before he died just for a short time. And then he was the protege of the protege of Lichtenfeld. So he was a really good person to start with and I sort of got what I wanted out of it, I think, for the first year and a half of that, and it’s a very intense atmosphere. There’s a lot of screaming and yelling, it’s a drill sergeant type of an atmosphere.
Guy Windsor
It’s military, right? It’s fundamentally military.
Ben Miller
It’s military that’s been adapted for a civilian self-defence. So they don’t teach you what they regard as being the really dangerous stuff, but it still retains a lot of that character, especially in the spirit of it. So, I found that after doing that for a year and a half, I was feeling that this is exactly what I wanted when I started, but now I’m actually looking for something a bit more erudite, where I feel comfortable asking a complex question and getting a long answer, rather than a curt, “Just do it,” you know what I mean? It could be a good response for the long winded student, but I felt like it was a little too much of the harsh military atmosphere, and I was looking for something that I could really study and sort of take my time with. And at that moment, I also got this this film job that I mentioned before in the Philippines. So I left New York City and I was in the Philippines for about three and a half, four months. While I was in the Philippines, I was able to get some free instruction in Arnis, they call it Kali or different things there. In Luzon, which is the main island where I was staying, they call it Arnis, which is just self-defence, stick in each hand. And so the stunt guys on the film we were working on were all martial artists. Really, they were martial artists first, stunt guys second. Stunt guys to pay the bills. So some of them were really well versed in that and one guy in particular, a stunt guy named Manny Sampson sort of took me under his wing and, and showed me that for several months, and although I never got by any means advanced in that it sort of made me realize, armed martial arts, martial arts with the weapons was really a lot more rewarding and interesting to me than self-defence with the fists or grappling. Which not by any means to show disdain for that, because I have friends who are high level in grappling and boxing and very respectful of it, but just for me, personally, it was like, oh, you know, my interest is in the stuff with the weapons. And so I decided when I was when I got back to the States, I was going to look into that. In fact, I started looking to it in the Philippines on the internet, I was already started looking into places to check out. When I came back to the States, I started doing that, and I just started visiting martial arts school after martial arts school. A lot of kung fu schools and some more Filipinos schools. And then one of the last places on my list was, I heard about like a fencing school called the Martinez Academy. And I wasn’t really interested in in fencing just because everything I had been exposed to was the modern Olympic stuff, which I just wasn’t really interested in. but I had heard a couple of reviews that said Martinez Academy is doing an older style, an older method. So I that was last on the list. I went in to check it out. Took a free class, and I remember seeing specifically a sabre bout at the end of class, free fencing, free assault, between Maestro Martinez and then instructor Jared Kirby, of course, I know you know. Now Maestro Kirby.
Guy Windsor
Jared is a dear old friend and Jared has been on the show. So yes, I will put his episode in the show notes.
Ben Miller
Absolutely. So I saw a Northern Italian duelling sabre between Maestro Martinez and Jared and pretty much thought that that was the most high level thing I felt like I had ever personally seen I’d yet seen in the martial arts, that I had personally witnessed so I just said, you know what, I think I found the right place. It’s only a 15 minute subway ride away. The other thing was, up until this time, even though I hadn’t really been interested in fencing, I was incredibly interested in European history. And I took advanced European history in high school, and pursued it in college. And so it really sort of coincided with my historical interests. And then, after a few classes, I went out and on Maestro Martinez’s recommendation, I got Schools and Masters of Fence by Egerton Castle and all of Alfred Hutton’s books and so that was all pretty much new stuff to me. That was that was 2005. So it’s been a bit a long journey since then. But that is how it began.
Guy Windsor
Fair enough. So how did you get into the physical culture, Indian Clubs and sticks and whatnot? How did that interest spark?
Ben Miller
So I would say the main event that sparked that was something at the Martinez Academy, which I’ll get into, although there was all sorts of things in my past, with my family that I feel like in retrospect, had sort of steered me in that, had sort of prepared me for that. So my mum’s dad was Canadian, and his parents were British, I have actually photos of him as a child in England. And I don’t know if I would call him a physical culturist, I think maybe more of a sportsman. But his major in school was physical education. He trained with a very well known guy in Michigan. And then he basically taught physical fitness and rehabilitation to the troops during World War Two. So I grew up with him, and he would tell me things, he dropped words of advice all the time. He was very encouraging for doing fitness and athletic activities, even though I really wasn’t a sports guy growing up. I mean, wasn’t my thing. But he was very encouraging and all that. So I did do it. And he would drop me hints, tell me things like, you know, those big body builders, you see in the movies that you like, those guys are going to have health problems later, or you don’t know this, but they do have those health problems now, and it’s just not in the news. And he’s dropping all these things. And these sort of hints that the old ways were better, were healthier. And I didn’t really take it too seriously. But it’s more stuff that I remember now. And then my other grandfather, my paternal grandfather, he used to always tell me stories in my childhood about his own grandfather, who fled from Prussia during the Franco Prussian war. He was this huge guy, came to America and became a sort of a local strongman. And would do things like pull a loaded wagon with a leather strap between his teeth, and he would do all these local feats of strength. He was challenged one time by a sheriff and he basically tore the badge off the sheriff’s chest, hoisted the guy up with one hand, pinned it to his behind, sent him packing, and then had to flee town. Yeah, just legendary guy. And so I grew up with those stories and sort of this appreciation for the strong men of the 1800s, because of those family stories. And so that planted that in my brain. And then then, of course, I got into the fencing stuff. And one of the interesting things about the fencing stuff to me, specifically about the classical fencing I was learning at Martinez Academy was there’s this idea that there are things you could do with a sword, or with your body, but you shouldn’t do because of the health aspects. So in other words, there’s certain ways you’re not going to want to lunge, you could lunge, you might gain an extra few inches on the lunge. But that’s going to mess up your knees if you’re going to do that over and over again. So so there’s this idea that this is designed for self-defence. But there is this, I don’t know if I’d call it secondary, but there’s an important dimension. It may be larger than that. But there’s this important dimension of you’re doing this to cultivate your health in this very specific way and for joint health. And by the way, joint health is something I had struggled with, actually, this is important part of the story, so I should backtrack slightly. So in high school, I developed severe joint issues from running cross country and track. So basically, our coach had us running eight to 10 miles a day on hard pavement, three to five days a week. And so about two or three years into it, my knees started to fill up with synovial fluid. And my parents sent me to a physical therapist, a renowned guy, this is in St. Louis, Missouri. So this was like one of the best physical therapists in St. Louis, Missouri. And I remember walking into his office and seeing these like paintings and photographs of some of these famous sports guys, famous athletes that he’d worked with him that he’d helped that, wow, this guy, we must really know something. But anyway, the interesting thing in retrospect is that none of these physical therapists ever talked to me about what I was doing. And they never asked me well, how are you running? Well, what are you doing in your sports? You know, it’s just like, oh, you got this from cross country. Okay, let’s see what we can do. So there was this supposed attention to how to rehabilitate the knees, how to solve the problem, but not looking at the activity itself.
Guy Windsor
What causes the problem.
Ben Miller
Exactly. Now, I’ll jump flash forward a little bit here. But, but in retrospect, having done all this physical cultural research, what is fascinating to me is that in the 1800s, the vast majority of people who were important figures in Physical Culture, were both physical therapists or part of their training was in physical therapy, as well as exercise. So especially like the Swedish method, basically, you had to go through a course in which they call it medical gymnastics at the time, but it’s basically these same ideas, physical therapy, so you do medical gymnastics, and military gymnastics, which would be the martial arts, and educational gymnastics, which was actually fitness, exercise, calisthenics. But anyway, I’ll come back to that later. But flashback, went through physical therapy. And I basically was taught the structures that I’d have to do before I was going to engage in any physical activity. And that would sort of mitigate the symptoms of the knees. And I really couldn’t excel again in those running sports after that. But then that was at least towards the end of high school anyway, then I ended up going to film school in New York City. And when I’d come back for the summers, actually, my parents had moved to New England by then. And when I’d come back from the summers, I would take summer jobs, and I started being a busboy, and I’d have to lift these heavy trays and basically doing squats over and over again. And the problem came right back. So that was very frustrating. And so when I ended up going to the Martinez Academy, I remember looking at these people holding these sort of deep fencing guard positions, where the rear leg of especially is taking all this weight, you’re staying in this position for hours, I was very concerned. And the lunging as well, I was very concerned at first that these problems are going to come right back, just like they did with all these other activities. And but I thought, well, this is really interesting. Let me let me try it out and see what happens. And they were very, very, very strict and careful about your form, with the guard position, with everything, but with that initial guard position, especially. And so your knee has to be placed in a certain way. And you have to do it at this exact angle. And anyway, so I kept doing it and doing it, doing it, I kept waiting for these problems to resurface. And they never did. And that was a wake up call for me. I think about six months in when I’m like, wait a second. So this is this older tradition that’s been it’s been passed down, it’s a more antiquated tradition than what you’re seeing in the Olympics or movies or whatever. But these problems aren’t coming back. So that was like the first light bulb went off. And I was like, well, okay, so maybe the people in the past, these fencing masters, and I didn’t think of it at the time, but this thought process led to also the people who were designing exercise back then, many of them were actually also fencing masters, that they might have known more about, or at least had maybe not known just more across the board, but they had some insights that modern people don’t have.
Guy Windsor
I think their priorities are different. Because if you go to a sport fencing school, that’s quite serious, what they’re really looking for is the students who will do well in competition and maybe end up in the Olympics. And that is maybe, in terms of like physical specimens, that is maybe a 100th of 1% of the average population, to have that kind of physical robustness, physical agility, right body shape, right size, all that sort of stuff. So there isn’t the emphasis on teaching regular people to be able to do it. The emphasis is on filtering out the people who will never be really good. But if you could contrast that with the army in times of war when they are drafting people, they need to get people who are not particularly gifted. They’re just regular young men, and they need to get them fit enough to do the military stuff. They used to have a fairly high dropout rate for physical injuries and stuff, they’ve probably got better at that. But it’s just a different approach. It’s not filtering out for genetic talent. But taking the talent you’ve got and making the best of it that you can make.
Ben Miller
It’s really fascinating you mentioned that because actually, and this is getting to a topic we’ll probably get into later. But when physical culture began to become sort of displaced, or superseded by modern fitness, which is a whole transition that really occurs in the first half of the 20th century, there are these very heated debates in the journals of the period, where they’re basically discussing this exact issue. And the old guard, the old guys are criticizing the new guys and saying you’re focusing too much on specialization, you’re focusing too much on making champions. Where the point of this should be all around holistic health for everybody. And so they knew absolutely, they knew at the time, that that sort of refocusing was happening. And they railed against it. I mean, there’s many, many essays I could send you from the period that talk about this, but they lost out, it was ignored. I have a really good one. I’ve referred to it in one of my videos. I’ve read some excerpts from it, but there’s one from like, I want to say like the 30s or the 40s. And the guy you can tell he’s really angry and he realizes this is like the last dying gasp, and he’s he just going off on all the new guard. And how they were losing out, they knew it was happening, but the advice went unheeded.
Guy Windsor
Champions make money. I think there’s an element of that. And I guess some people also are in it for the competitive edge. And so they’re interested in a training program that will either give them that competitive edge, so they can come home with a load of trophies, or it will break them. And they take that risk more or less knowingly. So as long as they take it knowingly, I’ve got no beef with it. I’m personally very interested in helping students to reach their physical potential. But I have no actual interest in what that potential is. The actual level they get to isn’t the point. The point is, can they make the most of what they’ve got? And get as much out of it as possible? So yeah, I’ve always run funnel beginners’ courses rather than filters.
Ben Miller
Learning classical fencing sort of made this light bulb go off inside my head that the people in the past somehow had this insight that was missing popular fitness, modern popular sports. And the next step in the physical culture journey was actually, Maestro Martinez told me one day, I don’t know how the subject came up, but they mentioned that their fencing master Maestro Rhodes, who if for anyone listening, so the Martinezes has learned from an old German fencing master named Frederick Rhodes. He was born in 1897 in Prussia, he emigrated to the USA in the early 1900s. And he learned a bunch, basically, he was stuck to the old ways, Old Guard, learned some of the older weapons and he learned Italian classical fencing, French classical fencing, he learned some German fencing as well. And anyway, really fascinating individual. And so that’s where the fencing technique had come from. But one day, Maestro Martinez mentioned in conversation that Rhodes had also taught something called Physical Culture Exercises. And I was basically intrigued by anything in any sort of old, mysterious, unusual things that he might have been teaching. So I said, well, what is that? And I thought that was actually I think, the first time I ever heard the phrase “physical culture”. And Maestro said, well, basically, it was a series of exercises he taught before class, to warm up the class for fencing. And they were not teaching it at the time when I’d started fencing there. But anyway, I was really enthusiastic about it, and some other people were interested so they ended up bringing back those exercises per student interest. So anyway, I learned those exercises from them and tried doing those exercises. And I became really interested and these are not like exercises that people are doing today really. And so that started me really into researching what is physical culture and it was the tip of the iceberg where it’s once I started looking at that I found like all this once I started looking into the source literature, it’s like there’s all this stuff of wands, Indian Clubs, light wooden dumbbells, calisthenics.
Guy Windsor
Couple of questions. Firstly, what is a wand?
Ben Miller
Okay, yes, so a wand. So a lot of people today, the word ‘wand’ is associated with magic, but if you go back a few 100 years, the word simply means like a short staff, or a long straight stick. So that’s all it means. So if you look the word up, in the old days, it’s just referring to a stick. And then somehow, the magical version of the wand was like the only definition that sort of survived into the 21st century. But the wand was simply a short staff that people would work out with as a fitness tool. The length and the thickness and the materials varies depending on what particular method you’re working with. So they had German iron wands.
Guy Windsor
Having defined a wand, could you describe the physical culture stuff that you were learning at the Martinez Academy? What does that look like?
Ben Miller
I don’t want to get too specific, because I know that I consider that sort of proprietary material. I’ll just say that it, it involves a foil, a two-handed grip on the foil. So you’re moving the foil around in the air, and you’re also engaging in various types of footwork and positions. And what I’m saying now is completely my own belief, my own research, it is not anything that’s that the Martinezes are saying. But according to my own research that I’ve done over the years, and to all these methods, I think it’s a very good case that these were essentially German wand exercises, adapted to use a foil in the hand. And not only that, but older. So this is getting very, very nerdy into the history.
Guy Windsor
We like historical nerdery here. You’re on the right show for historical nerdery.
Ben Miller
There was a huge change that came about in the German gymnastic world. The German gymnastics school was run by a group called the Turners. The Turners were was a movement that started in the early 1800s, a gymnastic fitness movement to with the objective of freeing Germany from the rule of Napoleon. And it was successful in doing that, and then it became this mass national movement. So you hear about so the Turner Physical Culture, Turner exercises, is exactly the same as talking about German Physical Culture. The German gymnastic School of the old days. What happened was, there was a massive change that came about between 1910 and 1925, where the old the old school got supplanted by a newer school, which they no longer talked about it as being Turner exercise. They talked about Gymnastik with a K, the Gymnastik movement, and had this more sort of flowy dancy sort of expressionistic type of movements, and a lot of the old film footage that you’ll see from that time will be of the newer stuff, but excitingly, what I believe, based on the research I’ve done is that the Rhodes exercises were of the older method, which got supplanted. From my perspective, it’s a really historically interesting and exciting thing. So, anyway, that that is, that’s the upshot of it. And it caused me to go down this rabbit hole of a physical culture.
Guy Windsor
What are your primary sources for this stuff?
Ben Miller
If I may add one thing is that I also have to credit my wife because when I met her, she already had this massive pair of Indian Clubs. So I also started asking once I got into the physical culture stuff through the Martinezes, I also started looking at the Indian Clubs really because of her so I wanted to give her credit. So I’m sorry. So the next question was?
Guy Windsor
So what are your sources for the historical research?
Ben Miller
I mean, at this point, I must have collected at least 50, 60, 70 antique books on the subject.
Guy Windsor
I know that there are written sources for this, and I actually have some of them in my library myself. But for the for the listener who has never encountered historical physical culture stuff before, what would be like the top one or two sources that really influence your approach, which maybe people who are interested in doing their own digging down this rabbit hole might look up?
Ben Miller
Okay, that is actually a very tough question. Because, in terms of the German stuff, I don’t think there’s any one thing I could possibly recommend. I mean, it’s literally just looking at everything. I’ll just go over a bit of an overview. So the main categories that I could talk about, even though there’s quite a diversity of approaches, really there was as much diversity to prove how to approach physical culture as is there is now in modern fitness, more so. But there were a few areas that I’ve sort of zeroed in on. Because simply because after years of looking at it all, I felt like these were the best areas because not everything is created equal, even in the past are good methods and bad methods. And after really working with the stuff for a long time, I really have zeroed in on one thing is the Swedish method. Which was, I think, if actually, if there was one figure in the last 1500 years who I think is the most important figure, this is purely personal opinion. Take with a grain of salt. But I would say a Per Henrik Ling, who essentially founded the Swedish method. I think he was the most ingenious person and he accomplished the most in his lifetime in terms of advancing physical fitness, probably the most since the ancient Greeks and Romans, which I know that’s a pretty lofty statement. But everything really, that came after was influenced in some way by Ling. If you look at the German Turner stuff that that came about the same time, they started taking stuff from him. And you know, there’s so many modern exercises that are essentially sort of like derivations or sort of bastardized versions of something Ling invented. And so his stuff is available, if you want to go on the internet. Ling did write a number of texts. There’s sort of a popular myth among people who are getting into this stuff that Ling didn’t invent the bulk of the system, that it came about later. And that’s because the texts that Ling wrote, he wrote one massive text that is essentially almost all theory and philosophy. And then the actual books he wrote that were illustrated with actual exercises are sort of limited. They’re sort of small texts. But pretty much his son, Hjalmar, who was his successor, and actually all his other successors, you know, disciples, they all credit Ling with inventing this exercise method, inventing all the exercises, and then it was basically their task to write about them. And in some cases, like Ling’s son reorganized, and he sort of changed the terminology and he reorganized the system. But so there’s no doubt that Ling invented all this stuff. It may have changed slightly throughout the century, but that’s a whole other conversation.
Guy Windsor
When was he writing?
Ben Miller
Well, Ling was born in the late 18th century, and actually, he was a fencing master as well, which is also that’s a really interesting topic, because what it means is that fencing itself influenced the creation of modern physical culture, and it’s had a significant impact on it. And that’s why if you look at a lot of the 19th century exercises, you’ll see lunges, that looks very similar to fencing lunge. So Ling was I believe, he started his whole sort of gymnastic career in the very late 18th century, 1790s. And then his method was, I believe, unveiled to the public or we use first start hearing about Ling’s Swedish method around 1811 or 1813. And then he starts teaching that and at some point, he gets like a royal support to do that. And is teaching at universities and things like that. And then it explodes in popularity.
Guy Windsor
So listeners who want to kind of dive into physical culture stuff, Ling would be a good place to start. Excellent. Okay. So what is your favourite bit of historical training gear? I know, it’s a hard question because people keep asking me, what’s my favourite sword? And I’m like, whichever one I happen to be holding at the time.
Ben Miller
I think I can answer that question. I would say to me, it’s a toss-up between the Indian Clubs. And to be clear, the historical Indian Clubs tend to be significantly different than the modern reproductions. And there’s also a wide variety of types of Indian Clubs, which is a big conversation. So I would say Indian Clubs, and I would work with clubs between, say the lightest, maybe a half a pound, because you need the lighter clubs for some of the exercises and methods that are more geared towards agility, and nimbleness and sort of mental development. And then on the heavier side, maybe I tend to stick with five or six pounds, for that end of the spectrum. And then I’d say it’s a toss-up between Indian Clubs as a group and the wand. There’s so many versatile and interesting things you can do with the wand. And I also have a liking for the light wooden dumbbells. So most dumbbells of the past they were light, and maybe between a half a pound and a few pounds. But there’s no doubt about it, that the dumbbells are less versatile in terms of what you can do with them than the Indian Clubs on the one.
Guy Windsor
You said the historical Indian Clubs are different than modern ones. What’s the difference?
Ben Miller
Wow, that’s a really big conversation. But if I’m to generalize, I would say, if you’re not getting it from a boutique maker, because there are a handful of people that are doing excellent work. And unfortunately, well, it’s just the nature of the beast there. Because they’re really good. And the attention to detail, those clubs are probably going to run you a couple $100 a pair of clubs. So those guys doing good work, but a lot of the mass-produced stuff to me, it’s got a clunky feel to it. A perfect example is a wall hanger longsword versus a museum piece. Huge difference, right? And it might look to the cut to the layman, it looks similar, it looks very close. But you pick it up, you’re like, oh, my God, it’s just the balance, it’s just you never want to use this thing in your life, you know. And I think some of that some of the Indian Clubs, modern ones have gotten better. But I still have the issue where, okay, here’s the problem: the problem is that the modern people are designing them with a different type of club swinging in mind. So they’re doing this modern version of club swinging. And they’re designing the clubs to fit that modern version. But the historical version is different. So when you try to do the historical version with the modern clubs, it just feels totally off. This is someone else’s insight. I don’t know if I can remember who they were to give credit. But someone was telling me their insight was that there’s a particular popular modern brand of Indian Clubs. I remember who it was Dr. Colin Hughes of the UK. So he was telling me that the grips, basically they were designed for a crushing grip, but with Indian Clubs, you actually want nimbleness, you want to finger play, you want the same similar agility that you’d use with a sword or a foil. Or sabre. Basically, most of the light Indian Clubs, if you’re a sabre fencer, you should pick that up and start doing it, you should be able to do wrist Milanese. And if this club is under three pounds, it shouldn’t feel terrible. But if it feels terrible you’ll probably believe this is not something you should be using. And you don’t really do as much with the fingers once you get to higher weights. But even so, it should feel like a heavy sabre or it should have that that pendulum like a swing to it or balance to it.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so you do realize I have to ask another question that’s going to have a very long answer. Because you mentioned the difference between modern club swinging and historical club swinging. What is the difference? I’m listening with the listeners in mind. And I’m thinking, an average listener may very well have gone but what is the difference? I don’t know. I hope Guy is going to ask them what the difference is. So I have to kind of follow that that internal listener and they want to know, so go ahead.
Ben Miller
There’s a lot of issues. Just as if you were to discuss the differences between Modern Olympic fencing and historical fencing, you’re going to come up with a lot of things. So and I would say, now, to give the devil it’s due, there are people who are doing some very visually impressive things. If you get on the internet, there are a lot of people who will be doing really impressive combinations and flipping the club around in this very impressive way. I would say the thing that is the most off for me, from my perspective, is the fundamentals. So you have to understand, the people in the 19th century, were not swinging clubs for Instagram likes. It started out as a health thing, right? So it’s a very specific posture. Very few people in the modern world are focusing on the posture. I would say that a big giveaway is that you don’t see people using their fingers with the nimbleness like you would see someone as a good historical fencer. You’re using the sabre, it’s going to use a lot of fingers. And they’re not going to be just cutting from the shoulder. That’s an easy one for any historical fencers listening. You’ve all seen the bad fencers, where everything is from maybe the shoulder and elbow. And there’s like nothing from the wrist. So there’s a very similar thing you’ll see in the club swinging world. And the best way, if you are independent minded, and you don’t want to listen to what I’m saying, I would say you want to figure out for yourself, find the footage of a club swinger online and older club swinger, who comes from a living tradition, because there are a handful of them, unfortunately, one of them just passed away. And many of these people are in their 80s. But the video footage is still up there. And you will be able to see a difference if you’re clever, if you’re observant. Compare that to the modern stuff, and you’ll be able to see how they’re doing it differently. And someone I particularly recommend is Harry Allick of the UK. He’s amazing. He’s in his 80s and he’s put some video stuff up.
Guy Windsor
Could you find one of those videos, send me the link and we’ll put it in the show notes so that people can be sure to find the right thing?
Ben Miller
I owe Harry a lot. And unfortunately, because this has all happened during covid I’ve not yet been able to travel to the UK since then. But he sort of gave me a lot of advice and corrected me and stuff via long distance.
Guy Windsor
So you have actually had some actual instruction from living people from a living tradition on this? So much more efficient than getting out of a book.
Ben Miller
I don’t know, because it was long distance, how much I could claim Harry as I got formal instruction from him. But I regard him as my main mentor for club swinging whether he would be okay with that. I don’t know.
Guy Windsor
I think every instructor is okay with being given credit.
Ben Miller
I just felt like when I saw his stuff, it was like a light bulb went on, it was like, this is all the stuff I’ve been reading about and the silent film footage from the 1890s and stuff like that, he had it. And I will say also, Paul Terrace Walter Winsky, who is of the slightly later generation, in between our generation and Harry’s generation, but he’s trained with a lot of good people too. During the very beginning, like the first day or two of the pandemic, Paul was here, and he was able to show us some stuff in person. So I’m grateful to him as well. And he’s got a ton of videos like if you want to go on and go down that rabbit hole Paul still puts up a lot of stuff. Anyway, so steer me back.
Guy Windsor
This is great. So I asked you about your favourite implements and I think it’s probably if you had to choose, it’s probably clubs, given that you spend most of the time talking about clubs, and only a little bit talking about sticks.
Ben Miller
How it was different you asked?
Guy Windsor
So what does your own physical training look like? What is a typical week, if there is such a thing?
Ben Miller
Yes. So I pretty much tend to focus on those main areas I told you about. So right now I’ve been doing a lot of Swedish calisthenics, which has become the new rabbit hole that I came a little late to compared to the other stuff. I came to that way later, more after the Indian Clubs and the wand, but the more I learned about Ling, the more I looked into it, I’m like, wow, this is really interesting. And so I do something called, I forget the Swedish term for it, but in English, the heaving exercises, which are a lot of hanging, sort of isometric type of exercises. And so I’ll do those. And I’ll do some Swedish push ups, the Ling version, which is basically what I think that is likely that all modern push ups are descended from, but the original one.
Guy Windsor
What is the Ling version of a push up?
Ben Miller
Well, first of all, it’s a different mindset. So at least I don’t know how they things are in Europe. But in America, the way we tend to do push ups is you got a high school coach, or a military guy screaming at you and you’re on your toes and your hands, and you’re trying to go up and down as fast as possible and get as many in as possible. So the Swedish version is going to feel a little more like yoga or something more holistic, where you’re doing it slowly, slowly rather than fast and not using any momentum of your body to sort of affect the push up. And you’re doing a deep inhalation. I have to think about actually doing it to describe it. But you’re doing a deep inhalation as you slowly go down and an exhalation as you go up.
Guy Windsor
I’m going to do one. You watch and you tell me if I’m doing it right. Alright. Okay, so I’m in a push up position. Okay, slowly down, inhalation.
Ben Miller
Yep, that’s pretty good. And I couldn’t really tell from the video. Make sure the hands are underneath the shoulders. And so you don’t look forward like you see a lot of times with modern people. You want to look straight down the ground because that’s better for the neck. Basically touch the nose to the floor. And then the other thing that’s different about it is you actually will alternate raising each leg on going down. So you’re going to point your toe and raise each leg as much as possible.
Guy Windsor
As much as possible. Alright, so as I go down…
Ben Miller
Yes, just try to raise the leg slowly in sync with the lowering of the butt. And point the toes. And the interesting thing about that one is that you’ll notice that when you’re actually doing the push up, you only have three points of contact instead of four. So requires like a little more balance, and it works your torso, and a little bit of legs in a little bit of a different way, which is interesting.
Guy Windsor
That’s super fun, I shall incorporate that incorporate those into my regular training. That was great. Excellent.
Ben Miller
So yeah, so I’ll do a variety of Swedish calisthenics. Some of the stuff I’m actually still experimenting with, and then some a mixture of light club swinging and heavy club swinging, because they really do work different things. And then some of the German wand stuff and then the latest thing I’ve been doing, which has been part of the regimen simply because I’ll be doing a video about it at some point in the coming months. And so I have to have to practice that. And depending on how much I like it, I’ll retain it or not, is German breathing calisthenics. It’s got a very kind of like, yoga Tai Chi feel to it, where you’re slowly going into various positions with a deep inhalation and then coming out of them with an exhalation. Kind of like what you were just doing. But yeah, a little bit more of like a Tai Chi, Kung Fu sort of vibe.
Guy Windsor
The focus is more on the breathing than the motion if I get it right. If I understand it correctly.
Ben Miller
I would say the all important things would be the breathing and the positioning. So the positioning has to be good for the joint health and all that and so that will be that. But yes, as opposed to the motion.
Guy Windsor
Okay. I have a question that feel free to be entirely honest. I am unoffendable in this regard. Have you have you come across my variation on the Indian club called the Blade Bell?
Ben Miller
No.
Guy Windsor
This is on me describe it. This is not an Indian club. This is something I designed so that if you don’t have space in your house to swing a sword, you can use this. So basically, it’s got flats. So you have edge alignment. It has a vestigial little cross guard there so you can practice various grips, so like a rapier grip or like a sabre grip. It has a pommel like a regular Indian club would but also like a sword would. And I designed it so that the point of balance, given its total mass, and its point of balance is further away from the hand that it would be with a sword it applies about the same strain to the hand as a rapier would. So if my rapier is sitting in my hand, the forces are approximately the same given the mass and the point of balance. So they come in pairs. And you can do your usual sort of sabery type stuff and your Indian clubby type stuff. But the idea is that it is a kind of a sword specific Indian club. It even has a place here on the flat so if you’re doing German longsword stuff with the thumb up the flat, you can do your Zwerchaus and your Shielhaus and whatnot. So gut reaction, horror or delight? Or something in between?
Ben Miller
Well, I mean, clubs swinging itself was recommended by fencing masters. There’s a huge overlap. I don’t know if you’ve come across a lecture I did a few years ago for the AHF, Association for Historical fencing, called the connection between fencing and physical culture. And it goes into that a bit in there, the connections between Indian Clubs and fencing. So yeah, what you’re doing is a very similar idea to what they had back in the 19th century. I’d have to hold that to if I was going to like it or whatever. But, if you designed it to for what you are doing and training, then I mean, that sounds good.
Guy Windsor
Actually, I have friends in LA who have a pair so I can maybe ask them to drop them round so you can have a play with them. Because I’d be very curious as to how they handle to you because they are different to regular Indian Clubs in the way that they handle. And that’s to be more sword-like, which takes away from the kind of clubbiness of them a little bit. But not abject horror. Okay, that’s good.
Ben Miller
If you’re trying to train edge alignment, because that’s something that you don’t have with the regular Indian club, so I’m trying to think about it like that.
Guy Windsor
That’s basically the main thing I adapted was so that there’s a clear edge alignment thing. So the handles aren’t round, they are round with flats, and the flats are in line with the flats on the blades, so you can feel exactly where the edge is for exactly that reason. Okay, my next question, who was Colonel Monstery? And why should we care?
Ben Miller
Colonel Monstery was a 19th century individual. He was a fencing master. He was a duellist, if we were to believe the various figures printed during the era, he was involved in somewhere between 50 and 60 duels either as principle or second. So didn’t necessarily fight 50 or 60 duels but was involved in them in some fashion. And he served and fought under the flags of 12 different countries, as a soldier of fortune, as a soldier for hire, as an adventurer, you might want to say as a mercenary in some cases. And so a very fascinating life, a very fascinating martial life. And what makes him extra cool is that he actually wrote about the martial arts. Which is always a treat, when you can find somebody like I think of Donald McBane who fought like around 100 duels. He wrote a memoir about it, you know. If only we had a memoir, or a treatise written by James Figg, you know, how lucky would we be? There’s all these many interesting characters, but Monstery wrote about it. So that was actually the first book I ever published was Self Defence for Gentlemen and Ladies, which was is a compilation of Monstery’s sequential articles about the martial arts, which is about I want to say 60% bare knuckle, unarmed self-defence, and about a couple chapters on the cane, and a couple chapters on the quarterstaff. So that is what Monstery wrote about. And then he also wrote a bunch of dime novels, so these will be works of fiction, but that have really interesting sort of like descriptions of the martial arts and martial passages. So that is Monstery in a nutshell. And another thing that makes him interesting to me is that he was a disciple of the Swedish method. So I don’t believe he would have been able to train with Ling himself, but he would have trained with Ling’s successors. Descriptions of his Fencing Academy also mentioned that he had Indian Clubs hanging on the wall and he taught Swedish calisthenics and things like that. So that’s Monstery in a nutshell.
Guy Windsor
And do you have written more than one book with Monstery in it?
Ben Miller
Yes. The first book was Self Defence for Gentlemen and Ladies, which contains a short introduction about Monstery and his life. And that is the basically the articles that Monstery wrote on self defence. And then the next one is called King of the Swordsmen, which really came about because I always like to post stuff on social media about Monstery. I have a lot of people who would say things like, basically doubt it. This guy is full of hot air. You know, he’s a braggart, he’s a boaster, he couldn’t have really fought or been involved in that many duels that he said he did. Or that number of combats, there’s accounts of him defending himself against multiple opponents with a bayonet, or with a sword. And he couldn’t have really done all that. So I decided at one point, to do something a little bit more in depth, in terms of his biography, and to really see if I can verify any of this stuff. So the result of that is King of the Swordsmen, which is about a 100 plus biography introduction, talking about Monstery’s real life adventures in South and Central America. And then the second half of the book basically reprints a novel that he wrote, called El Rubio, Bravo King of the Swordsmen, which is a dime novel he wrote, which was loosely based on his own life. So he basically created a fake fictional character called Olaf Svensson. And he drew a bunch of stuff from his own experience, and he mixed it with some fiction. And the reason why so some other people kind of like stick their nose up at the fact that why is this high level fencing master martial artists writing fictional dime novels. And the reason is, what I found out is that basically, the beginning of his career as a novelist, coincided, it was the same year that his Fencing Academy and shooting gallery were destroyed in a massive fire in New York City. Ruined his business. It’s clear that he did this to basically pay the bills. This was a career issue. And actually, after he wrote the series of dime novels, maybe eight or 10 or 12 of them, I can’t remember the exact number. Then he created another Fencing Academy, I believe, in Chicago. And as soon as you start hearing things about that, in the newspapers, his dime novels cease being published. So it really just fills this gap in between him having a fencing school. So it really seems like it was financially motivated. But as I say, in the book, what was Monstery’s loss is our gain, because we have all these fun dime novels written by fencing master.
Guy Windsor
I should say that King of the Swordsmen is how I got to know who you were. Amazon, I think, recommended that book to me, because people who have bought other books that I’ve bought have bought that book. I think it was one of those sort of recommendations. I thought, that looks interesting. So I bought it and I read it. And I was like, hmm, this Ben Miller chap sounds interesting. So I looked you up or whatever, then a year or so later, I started the podcast. And it took us a while to organize this interview. But yeah, that was the book that put you onto my radar.
Ben Miller
Excellent, I will add about that book is that what we started talking about, relating to it is that I was able to verify not everything, but a lot of the stuff. I found that these obscure individuals that he mentions in his interviews, the fights and the duels and things that he had down in Central America. These people really existed like this Señor Galetti he mentions in Cuba was a real individual in Havana fencing circles and his nemesis this General Bragamonte that he fought was a real individual who was down there serving at the exact time that Monstery claims he was or mentioned. Of course, it is possible that he embellished some of this stuff, exaggerated. And then oftentimes simply retelling things, like listening to stories of mine from my grandparents and stuff, the details kind of can change a little bit and people kind of remember stuff differently. But it gives me reason to think that there was a lot of truth to his tale, the general truth of it. So that’s always interesting.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. So okay so you do research into Colonel Monstery. I can totally see why, fascinating character. I am curious about the Scottish sources you’ve dug up so Ferguson, Ferdinand Sorley, and McAlpine, who I had never heard of until I came across your edition of their work. And I lived in Scotland for an awfully long time. And I spent an awful lot of that time digging around in the National Library of Scotland looking for books like that. So how did you find them?
Ben Miller
Well, McAlpine was the first one I came across because within a year or two of starting fencing, I wrote an article for the AHF about the fencing masters of colonial America. So basically, before the American Revolution, who were the fencing masters, what was the fencing scene like in in the American colonies. And one of them was, was this guy Donald MacAlpine. He was a Scot, and he taught in various places in New England. And so I found a lot of his fencing advertisements and that’s how I first found out about him and then I also would see references to him by one of the students who later became royalty, Count Rumford, had left this like sketch of the guard position or engagement in McAlpine’s fencing school. I thought, well, that’s so interesting, because that would be the first like only known illustration, I think, of fencing from the American colonies, which is considered kind of a backwater for as far as fencing technique is concerned. Because although there was an earlier fencing treatise written by Edward Blackwell, that didn’t have any illustrations in it. So it actually took me a good like 15, 16, 17 years to track down that original illustration. And I don’t remember all the places I looked and how I did it, but eventually found it at some like small Historical Society, in I think New Hampshire had the sketchbook of Benjamin Thompson, aka Count Rumford, who trained with McAlpine. So McAlpine kind of got me into it. And then, let’s see. So Harry Ferguson’s dictionary of the smallsword, I believe. He’s actually mentioned by one of the British Victorian fencing historians. I think it might be in Carl Thimm’s bibliography or may possibly if I’m misremembering, it might be in Hutton or Castle, but one of those guys mentioned that text. And so I had sort of on my radar, but it took me years to track it down. And I think we eventually found it at one of the major libraries in Scotland holds that and I think it’s the same institution that holds Ferdinand, which I think I found Ferdinand literally by just looking in library catalogues and going, what is that?
Guy Windsor
So what prompted all this searching? Why particularly these texts?
Ben Miller
It wasn’t really those texts. Well, I think Harry Ferguson, I’ve always sort of kept a list of books that okay, I’ve seen this referred to in an old bibliography, but I don’t have the book and no one else seems to have the book. So let me see if I can track it down. And sometimes it takes years to track down. And I think that was the case with Ferguson, I found some reference to it before, as I was saying. The other ones. So it’s just literally you go in library catalogues and type in ‘fencing’, type and ‘swords’ and see if anything comes up. And sometimes you might. Most of the stuff you’ve already heard of and then every once in a while, you might get lucky and something comes up that you’ve never seen before. And then of course, you have to put in a request to order a photocopy. And there’s a lot of really interesting stories I can tell about tracking down texts. Actually the most interesting one was one you haven’t mentioned, because it was an anonymous author, but it’s in that Scottish fencing book is the first one, Examination of the Highlanders Method of Fighting. And that one was just completely off the radar. And I was on some website I think it was the card catalogue or I can’t remember if it was online or what, but the catalogue for the library at Windsor Castle, they have some stuff and I don’t remember what search terms I put in to find it but up comes this manuscript and I mean, you know description, okay? An anonymous person describing the Highlanders’ method of fighting, I have to get a copy of this. And then I did. And then it’s like, okay, this is pretty interesting.
Guy Windsor
So you got permission from the institution to publish the stuff? Wow. Because my general experience of archives like that is they don’t want to show you their books, they don’t want to copy their books, and they certainly sure as hell don’t want you to share anything from inside any of their books ever. Because they’re secret.
Ben Miller
I was surprised, honestly, I was surprised. It was very painless. A lot of times, also you have to pay sometimes fees for $150. It’s not bad in the long run, unless you’re going through rough times. It’s not nothing, but you know, often $150 for include a single image from a book in your book. Yeah, they were very easy to deal with. And very, very nice.
Guy Windsor
Okay. Now, you do realize that part of the point of writers coming on podcasts is to plug their books. So you are allowed to plug your books. And your latest book is called The Gladiatory Art. And this is I’m honestly inviting you to plug it. So what about the lives, writings and techniques of the 18th century stage gladiators should the average listener know and what’s in the book that would make anybody want to go out and buy it?
Ben Miller
Sure. So from my perspective, it’s a very sensational kind of a topic. And as I recount in the preface of the book, when I first started fencing, and Egerton Castle’s book was one of the first fencing books I read. And I was fascinated by there’s this little section or small chapter on these gladiators that fought for fame and prize money in the 1700s. And it just seems like something like how is that not something everybody knows about? Everybody knows about the gladiators of ancient Rome. It’s common knowledge. But I’d never heard about this, and you almost wonder, is this really real, you know, these guys are really killing each other sometimes and maiming each other and disfiguring each other for money on a stage before these huge audiences. Sometimes members of the nobility being in the audience, and yeah, it was all real. And except for being mentioned by Hutton, Castle, Aylward, you know, here and there, you find these little scraps of mentions, but I’m like, why has there not been a book written about this? And over the years, some of the other projects I worked on touched upon this on these guys like.
Guy Windsor
Could you just describe for listeners who may not know what stage gladiator really were and what they did, because again, as you said, they were relatively unknown. So what if I went to a one of these gladiatorial combats what would I expect to see?
Ben Miller
So what would generally happen is you go in into this sort of arena, or held at an amphitheatre or the bear garden is what one of them was called. So the sort of tall building, you know, with seats stacked upon each other, so there’s several levels and floors, and in the centre of it all would be the stage. And they would open up with contests of single stick, and sometimes boxing, wrestling, which were a bit more tame. I mean, still would be drawing blood and bruising people but you know, not death and mutilation.
Guy Windsor
Boxing and wrestling is a bit more tame. All right, okay.
Ben Miller
This is another topic. But as the 18th century went on, the boxing matches actually become quite fatal, which is interesting, but more on that later. So that would be like the warm up act, and then they would bring on to so called masters of the noble science of defence. It’s unclear if these titles were merely self assumed, or if they were actually being used being passed down, master to student, but they call themselves masters, they would get up there and they would essentially fight a series of bouts with various weapons, antiquated weapons. So a staple would have been the sharp backsword and also the quarter staff, and oftentimes, sword and dagger, oftentimes sword and buckler, sword and shield. Occasionally you hear about the two handed sword and the flail, and a few other unusual sort of old school weapons. And yeah, and so they would fight and they would keep fighting until someone was either wounded or completely disabled. So the fight couldn’t go on. Sometimes there were various ways that they judged who was the winner. So sometimes it was for the largest number of wounds that you dealt the other person, sometimes it was like just who kept the stage that means who was not disabled by the end of the contest. And then sometimes they would be inconclusive, they each would got a same number of cuts, so they’d have to have a rematch. But from my perspective, there’s some debate on exactly, were these really real? Were they fake? There were people at the time who claimed that they were. Based on evidence, which I think you’ll see in the book, while it was possible that there may have been secret agreements between gladiators in terms of who was going to give or receive a cut. There might have been some corruption and things like that. However, the fact of the matter is these people got up there knowing that they were going to have to probably get cut.
Guy Windsor
Fighting with sharp swords.
Ben Miller
I mean, even if it was staged, it was dangerous as hell.
Guy Windsor
McBane famously says that he broke this chat O’Brien’s arm with a falchion and a falchion is a weapon that it’s hard to get any credit for. Like, who cares about falchions, but he broke this chap O’Brian’s arm with it.
Ben Miller
Yes, yes. And people did actually die. I mean, which I talked about in the book, two of the top 10 gladiators were killed. So one of them was Thomas Barrett, an Irishman. Actually, they’re both Irishmen. The other one was Michael Butler of Kilkenny, who his death as described in John Godfrey’s famous treatise, and then there are accounts of people being really gruesomely disfigured and there’s accounts of anonymous gladiators being killed, disembowelled.
Guy Windsor
This is all before modern surgery and before antiseptic technique and that kind of stuff. So gaping wounds are seriously dangerous.
Ben Miller
For the person who’s interested in that sort of thing, there are some funny details occasionally. Like one guy, one firsthand account, this guy witnesses some guy get half of his calf lopped off in a contest, and then he ends his account by saying “I am told there are powders which affect a speedy cure.” That was true. Whether or not that was true, he didn’t even seem to know if it was true. But he’s told there’s ways to deal with it. Also, the other reason that you know that this had to be have to have been dangerous is that there’s a lot of first hand accounts of gladiators and I’ve included them in the book that describe them as being severely scarred and frightening to behold, like, one account says he looked like his face was chopped into a Good Friday bun or ploughed with as many cuts as a field is full of furrows. So there’s all sorts of very, very verbose descriptions of how incredibly scarred and mutilated these veterans of these fights looked and in fact one of the gladiators was said, I don’t know if this is true, but it was claimed he was engaged in more than 600 of these combats and Thomas Barrett, an Irishman, his nickname was Old Chopping Block because of his scars. And he was actually killed. It’s very fascinating to me and it’s also kind of fun because there were very colourful characters. A lot of these guys, whether it’s Fig or McBain, you read all these back and forth, this trash talking that occurred, this boasting and they got very verbose and they would they would write satirical poems mocking one another. Even the people who witnessed the fight, there was one hilarious one I’ll tell you, it might give you a laugh, at least it gave me a laugh. But there was an account in a newspaper and it said so and so champion was challenged by some new character called the Bold Braiser, but within only a few minutes, his boldness was defeated. So they were very quick to build people up with these lofty titles and stuff, and they were just as quick to take you right back down. So it’s actually pretty entertaining to read some of these accounts.
Guy Windsor
So, so anyone who is really interested, it does sound fascinating. It’s not duelling because it’s not gentlemen trying to murder each other over a point of honour, it is like professional boxers but with swords.
Ben Miller
With sharp swords where you could die.
Guy Windsor
I think it’s a critically important aspect of historical fencing history because it’s a whole context in which these sword arts that we practice were actually done, which is different to the one we normally think of when we think of historical martial arts. So, yes, I think people should go and buy your book.
Ben Miller
Thanks. Yeah, I think no one’s been disappointed yet.
Guy Windsor
So Ben, were there any women gladiators?
Ben Miller
There absolutely were. That’s a fascinating topic, too, because it’s kind of unexpected. But yes, there were a number of female gladiators. They referred to them as the “Mistresses of the science of defence”. And they’re just basically doing the same thing that the men were going through these various sort of antiquated weapons, sword and shield, you know, sharp backswords, quarterstaffs. And they, they had some pretty interesting and entertaining challenges, too. There were a couple that really stood out there. There was the English woman, Elizabeth Wilkinson, later married a male gladiator, James Stokes. So she became Elizabeth Stokes. There’s another one, Mary Welsh, she married another gladiator named Barker, I think Robert Barker, she became Mary Barker. And so there were a lot of gladiatorial couples.
Guy Windsor
What would a marital spat look like in those households?
Ben Miller
It’s kind of funny, because there is a firsthand account of a combat between female gladiators. And one of the guys describing is giving these sort of funny speeches before they fight. And one of them says, she beats her husband every morning to keep her hand skilful. And another one, there’s a challenge between gladiatorial couples. No, I think it’s between the women but it mentions afterwards the men are going to also fight, and there’s some little quip like it said something about quarrelling with his wife. And it’s like a cause in this age, precarious, but meritorious or something like that. So clearly, they had fun with the whole idea of it at the time. But I will say there was one, actually, this was like, a couple days ago, I went through, the book obviously had already been published, I thought it would have been neat to go through and actually count who fought the most combat to compile a sort of a Hall of Fame. And so I did like a top nine and the eight was a woman, Sarah Barrett from Cumberland. So she actually beat out McBane for the number of the 43 or 44 combats. And she was married to Thomas Barrett, who I mentioned before, who was the guy who fought like 600. And he eventually was disembowelled in a stage fight. So yeah, this gets crazy. It’s so sensational.
Guy Windsor
Did women ever fight men on the stage?
Ben Miller
That is a good question. I don’t think I have ever come across a single account of a woman fighting a man on the stage. I think it was all women versus women and men versus men.
Guy Windsor
Interesting. I wonder why?
Ben Miller
I don’t know. That’s a good question. One thing about the book is I put it out as a source book. So you don’t really listen to me very much. 1% of the book is my writing. Most of it is just the first hand primary accounts. And there’s a lot of really interesting questions that get raised. And I’m sure a lot of other people out there could probably write an essay, or write an academic paper on just, you know, look at the evidence, and then you come up with you figure it out, come up with your own conclusions, because there’s a lot of fascinating aspects to this, which I think have not been explored too much. But hopefully, the book will at least provide the primary source information if people want to want to go down those rabbit holes.
Guy Windsor
it’s actually a really important thing to do. Because when the primary sources are distributed as modern published books, they just get multiplied and spread out all over the globe. So that if the one archive with this stuff in burns down, well, at least these secondary copies are preserved elsewhere. Think of where Italian medieval combat would be if we didn’t have Novati’s edition of the Pisani Dossi manuscript, which was the first version of Fiore that was generally available to the public. Which kind of kicked off the whole research thing where we found the Getty manuscript and we found the Morgan manuscripts, we found the Paris manuscript. I don’t know whether or when we would have come across those manuscripts if we hadn’t had Novati’s edition of the Pissani Dossi. So, in this sense, you’re kind of like a modern Novati for the gladiators.
Ben Miller
Well, I hope it’s useful to some people out there.
Guy Windsor
Excellent. Okay. Now, there are a couple of questions that I asked most of my guests. And the first is, what is the best idea you haven’t acted on yet?
Ben Miller
Well, the way that my writing process works for all these books, all these projects, which might be a bit different than I don’t know how anyone else does it. But I basically come across some interesting stuff, and I start compiling a file on it. And then anywhere between like, four and 15 years, I’ve amassed enough stuff that I decide, Okay, it’s time to put out the book. And then I have to spend some more time making that happen and writing it, but they tend to be long projects in the work. So in a way, I’m sort of always acting on it, long term, and I always have multiple things that are in the works, but they take so long to complete that it’s kind of funny how it works like that. That doesn’t really answer the question, I guess I’m kind of acting on everything slowly. But some things that that I am working on now that will be coming out are I’ve got something that’s a long lost fitness manual by one of the most legendary figures in American sports. So his physical culture manual. I’ll be putting that out soon.
Guy Windsor
Who’s that?
Ben Miller
I don’t want to say yet, I want it to be a surprise. It’s a household name. Everybody knows him. That’ll be, I think, a couple of weeks. And then the other one is on rough and tumble fighting, which should be out in a couple of months.
Guy Windsor
Ben. If it’s going to come out in a couple of weeks, this podcast episode will be coming out in a couple of months after we’re talking. I usually record a couple of months ahead. So at least four to six weeks from now, this will go out. Tell you what, give us the name so people can find the new book and go and buy it. Because this is what podcasts are for for some people some of the time. And then if the book isn’t out before this goes live, I can just edit this bit out.
Ben Miller
Fair enough. So it’s Babe Ruth.
Guy Windsor
Wow. Okay. I don’t know anything about American sports and I know who Babe Ruth is.
Ben Miller
He’s a big name. Yeah, he wrote a book. Well, it’s kind of like the Monstery book. It’s a series of sequential articles that he wrote, exercises, calisthenic exercises, a lot of them using a bat as an exercise tool. And a lot of those exercises are similar to the German wand exercises, probably based on that.
Guy Windsor
So one of the most legendary baseball hitters of all time, used his bat in the same way that you find Rhodes’ students using a foil for warm up exercises, all German wand techniques from the 19th century. That’s fascinating.
Ben Miller
It’s not exactly the same, but I will say you do see some similarities here. There’s a huge repertoire of technique, so that you’d see a little bit of overlap.
Guy Windsor
I’ve a thought, have you ever considered writing an introductory training manual for people who want to start their own physical culture exercises based on historical sources?
Ben Miller
Already in the works. It’s just taking a while because it has to be good. And yeah, there’s a lot still a lot to do for that. But yeah, it’s absolutely in the works.
Guy Windsor
Writing a very long book about it will be easy, but writing something short and accessible is much, much harder.
Ben Miller
Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, that’s something that’s a little bit farther down the pipeline. I have something else coming out in a couple of months about rough and tumble fighting, American rough and tumble fighting, which have you heard of that?
Guy Windsor
Yes, but the average listener probably hasn’t. So tell us what it is.
Ben Miller
I would say is, it’s a candidate for at least in America, one of the most devastating unarmed martial arts because of its no holds barred nature. So this is basically Anything Goes with no weapons. So that includes kicking, punching, bare-knuckle punching, head butting, eye gouging, biting, pinching, weirdly enough. There’s like all sorts of weird things. And the one way to connect this to pop culture as anyone has ever seen or heard of the Gangs of New York, the character played by Daniel Day Lewis in that movie, was based on real life figuring and Bill “the Butcher” Pool. And he was a champion of rough and tumble fighting. But honestly, I resisted actually publishing anything on it for a long time, because it’s frankly, kind of distasteful, it’s so gruesome. I mean, what these guys would do, but I ultimately decided, well, no one’s ever written the book. I’m the only one who’s going to ever write the book on it. And it is kind of historically significant. So I decided to do that. And it is a big part of American culture. I mean, President Teddy Roosevelt wrote about it. There’s historical figures that were involved in it. And it’s also interesting to me, because it’s kind of funny, because in the late 18th century, early 19th century, you’ll read a lot of accounts by British people, contrasting that to what they were doing and basically saying that Americans are absolute savages, basically the English saying, we have Marquis of Queensbury rules, we do this in a civilized way. And then Americans who are doing this are just utter barbarians. Now to be fair, Monstery also writes about them as being utter barbarians. But the ironic thing is that according to the research I did, the American rough and tumble fighting, which sort of start first start hearing about in the colonial era, it’s actually descended from British practices earlier in the 17th century. There’s actually a famous British treatise, which people may not may or may not have heard of, that mentions gouging. So yeah, so I think that’ll be interesting for anyone who’s interested in unarmed fighting and or the history of the period, you know, 18th century?
Guy Windsor
So these are all ideas you have acted on or are acting on. Is there an idea you think you should act on buy you haven’t yet? Or are you one of those people who just does everything?
Ben Miller
I mostly do everything, but I have a long list of ideas for physical culture videos that I haven’t gotten around to yet. I will say something that’s coming out, that I haven’t written anything about it, I haven’t actually done the exercises yet, so it might fall into this category. It’s how the Greeks and Romans exercised with dumbbells.
Guy Windsor
Wow! Oh, I want to see that.
Ben Miller
I was hoping to do it soon.
Guy Windsor
How do you find out how they did it?
Ben Miller
First of all, it’s a little bit more speculative than the 19th century stuff because the 19th century have these treatises which are very specific about what you do, and you’ve got charts and diagrams and elaborate language. But for the ancient times we basically have a handful of descriptions. Sometimes these descriptions are very general. The writers aren’t instructing you how to do it. They’re saying this is a practice that was going at the time which was doing X, Y and Z with a dumbbell. It’s a sentence or two at most. So the accounts are not as descriptive. But two other things that have been able to inform it a little bit more, which is we have images. Now, images are problematic also as some of them are highly stylised. We also have the surviving object themselves, or good representations of those objects. I cross-referenced all of these and I think I can make a good case for generalisations on how they were used. With the caveat of course that we can’t say it was exactly like it. I think it’s interesting, because my conclusion, which I’ll give in advance, is that there is a similarity between the way they were doing them in the 19th century and the way they were doing them in the ancient times. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence. The people in the 19th century were literally looking at the ancient sources to revive this idea of physical culture.
Guy Windsor
Really?
Ben Miller
If you look at Ling’s writings, if you look at the early German Turner texts, they will refer to the ancient Greek and Roman authors.
Guy Windsor
Interesting, so you’re going further back and finding that. I would love to see that, because it’s fascinating how far back these things can be traced. Now, my last question, someone gives you a million dollars or similar large amount of money to spend improving historical martial arts, or shall we say, physical culture worldwide. How would you spend the money?
Ben Miller
It’s actually something I’ve thought a lot about in the past. What would I do if I win the lottery? Unfortunately, it’s never happened. For me, if someone was to give me $15million tomorrow, and I could start putting that money towards what you’ve just mentioned, I would create a scholarship fund. Maybe an organization that would deal out scholarship funds, because I feel like, speaking personally, I would love to be able to devote 100% of my time to this stuff. I would always love to. But it’s often not possible because we have to find a way to survive, we have to pay rent, we have to pay bills, we often have to take jobs that have nothing to do with this. So that can be an obstacle for the serious student. I have friends who have great careers, they were doctors, lawyers. They were great students but you would see them leave because they couldn’t devote the time that was necessary to become great in historical fencing or historical fitness because they had these other important careers. So I think what a historical scholarship fund could do is, for a serious student who wanted to devote a lot of time to this, it would allow them to do it. Also you would then be putting money in the pocket of the expert instructors. I don’t think there are too many expert instructors out there who are wealthy from doing historical fencing or historical martial arts.
Guy Windsor
I’ve been doing this for a living since 2001 and I can assure that there is nobody on the planet who has gotten rich doing historical martial arts.
Ben Miller
Exactly. So I feel that would be good because it would be killing two birds with one stone. It would be allowing serious students to devote the time and it would be helping the good instructors survive and keep teaching these things. You need the good instructors.
Guy Windsor
It may sound a bit self-interested, but if I had the money I would probably give it to you. I would imagine that some of those students would pay the money and come and train with me and that would be great.
Ben Miller
So that’s my idea.
Guy Windsor
Brilliant, well thank you so much for joining me today, Ben, it’s lovely to get to meet you.
Ben Miller
Absolutely, likewise, thanks for having me.
