Guy Windsor
I’m here today with Samantha West who is an instructor at the Dueling Weapons Academy of Renaissance Fencing aka DWARF, a historical martial arts club in Barrie, Ontario, where she teaches Italian longsword, 1.33 sword and buckler, and rapier. Amongst other things, she’s also involved with running The Gathering of the Blades. You can find the school at Barrieswords.ca. So without further ado, Samantha, welcome to the show.
Samantha West
Thank you for having me today. It’s nice to be here.
Guy Windsor
It’s nice to have you. Just one quick question. Do you prefer Sam or Samantha?
Samantha West
Sam. My mom calls me Samantha when I’m in trouble, so I try and avoid that.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so if you hear me Samantha it means you have overstepped the bounds somewhere and we’ll have to edit this out later. Whereabouts in the world are you?
Samantha West
So I’m in Canada. I’m in the province of Ontario. And I’m in a small town named Barrie. And today it’s actually a snowstorm outside, you can’t even see two feet in front of you.
Guy Windsor
Classic Canada. I taught a seminar in Barrie, Ontario about 10 years ago.
Samantha West
I actually know people who went to the seminar. One of our board members, Kieron Rowe was there. And he talks very highly of you. He’s very jealous that I’m on the podcast and he’s not.
Guy Windsor
Well, I can tell you how you got on the podcast if you like. Somebody who’s a regular listener, and who I sort of know, vaguely, just recommended you, said you should definitely talk to Samantha West. Well, I shall then.
Samantha West
Thank you. That’s a very good compliment. Yeah.
Guy Windsor
So why don’t we sort of start ourselves off by you telling us how you got into the whole historical martial arts thing?
Samantha West
Okay, so it’s kind of a really funny story. A lot of people will ask me or assume like oh, do you watch Game of Thrones? Are you a history buff, and I am into history. But I don’t really watch TV very often. But what it was, is a friend of mine, Meredith had been asking me over and over again, to take this woman’s longsword intro. And I kept on saying, no, it’s not really my thing.
Guy Windsor
How wrong you were.
Samantha West
Yeah, well, that’s exactly it, seven years later, I’m running one of my own clubs. But you know, when you say no to someone so often, when they ask you to just spend time with you, and I just thought, I’m going to do it anyways, she’s kind enough to be asking me and, and so I went to my first longsword class, and I loved it, I absolutely loved it. I thought it was going to be terrible. I’m not very coordinated. I’m very clumsy. So I didn’t think I would be very good at it, or enjoy it as much as I did. But I loved it. Once I started doing it, I was just absolutely hooked. In the past, one of the sports I had been doing was bouldering, specifically, like rock climbing. And it’s very anaerobic. And so fencing is very aerobic. And I’ve never been very good. Like, if you’ve ever seen that one person in class, who looks like just a manic person trying to keep up with class, that’s me. I’m just not coordinated enough. And I thought, oh, Jesus, this is not going to work out very well for me. And you know what? I loved it. I loved everything about it.
Guy Windsor
Can I just say, you clearly are coordinated enough. You just weren’t yet.
Samantha West
Yeah, that’s it. But maybe Kaitlyn is good enough at editing out all the times I’ve stabbed myself with someone else’s sword.
Guy Windsor
No, I mean, that’s part of the process. And I think it’s really useful for people listening who are maybe thinking about taking up historical martial arts, we tend to look at experienced fencers and watch them and go, oh, my God, I couldn’t do that. Like, you go to the circus, and you watch people do extraordinary, acrobatic stuff, and you go, there’s no way I could do that. Which is true, right then and there, today, you can’t. And there is some stuff that maybe you will never be able to do. But you can certainly get an awful lot closer to it over the next couple of years if you practice than you are right now.
Samantha West
Absolutely. I do agree with that. When I think about how I was in the beginning, and to where I am now. I think it’s definitely two vastly different areas. And even though I feel like I could always be better, personally for myself, that’s my own journey, but I know that there’s a very vast, giant gap there from beginning to where I am now.
Guy Windsor
It’s actually useful for many students to record them when they’ve had two or three months training and just hold on to the video and then record them again a year later, and then put the videos side by side and let them watch them.
Samantha West
Oh, yeah. We do that quite often. One of our instructors, Colin Sharkey, he is a big fan of recording all of our fights. We have fight nights on Wednesdays, and we started picking up fight nights on Wednesdays, but also study group and then Friday nights, we do another fight club and we tape all of it, we record almost every fight to look back on that. We have a YouTube channel where we post a lot of that, he posts a lot of that and just to be able to look back and see how well we’re doing.
Guy Windsor
Who ran that first class you went to? Do you remember?
Samantha West
It was done at MSC. Which was Medieval Swordplay Canada. And it was Colin, who ran it. And it was done in a church, it was a very small club. And it was great. What I liked even more, it was the people. I really, really enjoyed the atmosphere of like, HEMA itself, and the people that are involved in HEMA. I just think it’s wonderful, the people are lovely. You know, I have been very fortunate in the fact that I haven’t run into anyone I don’t really enjoy.
Guy Windsor
I was going to say some of the people are lovely. That’s true. I would go so far as to say most of the people are lovely, but you know, when any subculture gets big enough, there’s always going to be some people in there who you wish weren’t.
Samantha West
Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve been fortunate, I have been on the outskirts of that, I’ve seen it in the periphery. And I’ve heard stories of that as well, in the periphery, from other people experiencing it from other groups. I think though, the community tends to be really good about showcasing if someone’s too aggressive. If somebody’s too misogynistic, or there’s like racial, you know, that they tend to shout that out quite early to just kind of be like, hey, we barred this person from our club, or we have concerns about this one person.
Guy Windsor
It’s changed a lot in the last five years. I promise you 15 years ago, it was not like that.
Samantha West
I can see that. Even with the rock climbing community, they’re vastly wonderful, but you have like one or two unfortunate apples that can ruin a whole entire bunch.
Guy Windsor
That’s the thing of the whole rotten apple analogy is the whole point of it. Is one rotten apple spoils the whole bunch. It’s not just one rotten apple.
Samantha West
No, no, it doesn’t.
Guy Windsor
You hear that flipped quite a lot. So I imagine your club is pretty good. I mean, I’ve looked at your website and everything, it seems to have, what’s best way to put this, it states its position on certain social issues clearly enough that it will automatically filter out most of the assholes.
Samantha West
We’re very adamant about having a space that is conducive to an open kind of space. We are LGBTQ friendly, we are disabled friendly, or differently abled friendly. Our position is that there are no limitations. HEMA is for everyone. But at the same time, you can’t be so tolerant that you accept intolerance. So our position on that is that the moment that somebody starts becoming intolerant in that aspect, then we bar them from the club.
Guy Windsor
Have you had to bar many people?
Samantha West
We haven’t. A lot of people will comment on our social media page before they will enquire about coming to class. And so we have we have filtered people that way.
Guy Windsor
Also just having your position made very clear. Like I have my Sword People online community thing, and it’s got a sort of rainbow flag with all the extra bits as part of its banner. And that just filters out an awful lot of people who I’d otherwise have to filter out for violations of the Code of Conduct.
Samantha West
It’s sure does, like we have merch and we post proudly. We want to do the Pride Parade. We are very adamant on our page. We just don’t allow it. Unfortunately, we have another aspect to our club as well, which is a historical aspect. And so some of our members have, you know, Instagram or social media pages where they post themselves in like historical gear and the like. Unfortunately, sometimes, certain kinds of people will comment, especially when it comes to like Viking pages. So we’ve had to be very careful about things like that, unfortunately.
Guy Windsor
I feel really sorry for the Viking community because most of them are just exactly the same as the rest of us. They just particularly like a particular culture or a particular period, or particular kind of weapon or whatever. And that specific historical time period also attracts vastly more than its fair share of complete assholes.
Samantha West
Unfortunately, I think so too. We have one member who is historically like a Viking, he dresses in Viking garb, he fights Viking style, and he will sometimes get comments that are that are unwanted. And so for us, it’s a thing, and we don’t stop doing it, because we love it. He loves it. But we’re adamant about the kinds of behaviour that we’ll accept and the kinds that we won’t. It’s absolutely a thing for us. The last thing that we want is any of our members, or ourselves even, to feel like we don’t belong. HEMA is for everyone. It’s such a wonderful thing. It has something for everyone and to make someone feel excluded from that, I think it’s just unacceptable.
Guy Windsor
I agree. Okay, so tell me something about the role of instructors in your club.
Samantha West
So it kind of comes down from the top. We have Kieron Rowe, who is our chair and he’s amazing. He makes most of the curriculum for us. Now, whether or not I follow his curriculum is another story. Because he’s been doing it the longest, he did college and fencing when he was a kid. And then transferred over into HEMA. I find some of the best fencers are fencers that started off in Olympic fencing.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. I did Olympic fencing from 87 to about 94.
Samantha West
They just have an understanding of measure that is just incredible to me.
Guy Windsor
And footwork training. Like David Ito.
Samantha West
Oh my gosh, I love him so much and at the same time it’s like, “How?”
Guy Windsor
The thing to remember about David Ito is he is a professional circus performer, which means he is physically extraordinary.
Samantha West
I have known Ito for years and I can tell you some stories that would just, but he is infuriatingly amazing at what he does. So Kieron was my instructor, one of my instructors, originally before we started the club, and then became my coach. And then the rest of us kind of take a cue from him and the way that we like to instruct at our club as it’s mostly fun or play based. A lot of it is like book work. A lot of it is boring, not boring. Like I love footwork, and a lot of people don’t but I love it. I think it’s a fundamental part of the whole fencing.
Guy Windsor
People who don’t like footwork, don’t like practicing footwork, when they feel that it’s disconnected from what they’re actually trying to do. So my rule of thumb is that when the student has a footwork problem, that they can become aware of, then when I teach them a footwork drill that will help them solve that problem there’s no issue with being bored with everything because they understand what it’s for. They’re not just having to adopt this are genuine faith that yes, footwork is good for you. It’s okay, I am failing in this thing for this reason, this footwork exercise will help. And actually, yes, it helps. That way, they’re actually interested and engaged with the footwork, they don’t find it to be this sort of tedious thing that they just have to do before they can move on to the fun stuff.
Samantha West
Yeah, yeah, I find the same thing too. In one of my old clubs, that’s kind of how it was, it was very disconnected. You couldn’t really see the connection there. One of the things that we’ve tried to do is, as instructors, personally, myself as an instructor, I introduce a lot of play into mine. We play games, I love tennis balls. So there’s a lot of tennis ball play in my class.
Guy Windsor
What sort of tangible exercises we’re talking about?
Samantha West
Of the things that I do is, everyone stands around in a circle. Because I have between 10 and 11 in the class. So what I do is we stand in the gym, we have all these tennis balls, and I’ll have Kaitlyn standing off to the side with a bag of tennis balls. And so what I do is I have one tennis ball and I start out everyone introduces themselves. And then I will throw the ball at someone call their name and they have to catch it. And they have to catch it either with both hands to start with, or then I’ll flag out like left hand only, right hand only. And then as we go forward through the thing, if you miss a ball, you either have to do jumping jacks, push ups, or sit ups, and then jump back up to catch the ball, while people are throwing it around. And then we can add as many as five or six balls at a go. So we’re constantly like throwing these balls and catching them right or left hand, we’re trying to do it in a fashion where we’re not falling, but that happens slowly over time. So in the beginning, we’re very uncoordinated, we’re running after a ball, and so on and so forth. But then after a while, it starts becoming more coordinated, they’re able to catch it faster, they’re not falling over their legs or their feet. So that’s one of the play things that we do. Another one is, when I’m doing my rapier class, I like to have my students throw the ball at the wall. And then lunge into a nice catch, into that thrust. I also make them throw it in the air and do a small little lunge to catch the ball. To practice that steady movement. One of the things we do too, is I call it the slappy game. So we take soft gloves. And we find a partner, one glove per partner. And then it’s about measure, so the game is no hitting to the face, but we want to be able to hit our partner with the glove without being struck ourselves with their glove.
Guy Windsor
We call that glove fencing.
Samantha West
We also did flag tag, where we have a belt that has all these little tiny tabs on it. And the premise of that is to pull a tab without having someone pull our tab.
Guy Windsor
So everyone has their own tab on their own belt, and you have to collect as many tabs as possible.
Samantha West
That’s right. Yeah, last man standing, and it breaks up the day. So we have a two-hour lesson. And I’ll do it for like 10 to 20 minutes, 10 minutes, generally in the middle to break up the first section and into the second section.
Guy Windsor
So wake them up a bit.
Samantha West
I also think one of my jobs is, not a job, but like, one of my goals as an instructor is that I love it when one of my students can beat me. I think as an instructor, I’m not supposed to be better than my students. Ultimately, I want my students to be better than me. I want them to excel. I want them to progress beyond me. My job is just to create a space where that they’re able to do that, to facilitate them in that journey.
Guy Windsor
So yeah, I mean, Vanessa Williams could always beat her coach in a tennis match. But she wouldn’t be winning those grand slams if she didn’t have a coach.
Samantha West
No, absolutely. Absolutely. I started coaching last year was one of my goals as well.
Guy Windsor
I’m sorry, are you are you distinguishing between instructing and coaching? Or using them interchangeably?
Samantha West
Instructing and coaching are different for me. Instructing is like school-based whereas coaching is it’s a tournament-based thing. So that’s when I go to tournaments, specifically.
Guy Windsor
So when you say instructing, you’re talking about teaching classes in your club. And when you say coaching, you’re talking about coaching fencers in tournaments? Okay, fine. Yes, that’s quite a common distinction. It’s not the same distinction that I use. And so quite a lot of my students who may be listening would also have a different distinction between the terms. So it’s always best to flag these things up.
Samantha West
It’s vastly different in the sense that when I’m in class, even if I’m instructing or we’re doing sparring I’m talking about technique we’re working on, a style or a problem that needs to be solved. But when I find when I go to tournaments with some of my fencers, that’s not what they need, that’s already done. What they need is emotional counsel.
Guy Windsor
They need warming up, they need getting into the right headspace. Then they need coaching to stay in the right headspace and take the right approach under the pressure of the actual fencing bout. And then they need to make sure that how they react to however the bout went is managed properly so that they will do better next time or keep improving or basically be happy about how things have gone.
Samantha West
Yes, absolutely.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so you mentioned in the pre-interview chat, I should bring up something about how the club relates to the community.
Samantha West
We’re not a for profit, we’re actually nonprofit. And so one of the things we do is we try to do as many parades actively, we’ve been working with other charities to help raise awareness for certain issues that are happening in our community. We have certain charities, personally, that we’ve been working with, on a personal level. So there’s the season centre that me and my husband specifically have been working with for several years. It’s a space for kids that are grieving. And we are trying to reach out to them as a club to see if we can work with them. We also do a lot of events where we are armed fighters, we will get dressed up for kids’ things, we’ve done camps and things like that for kids that are having issues. We try to be out in the community as much as possible in that context. To try and help out. Yeah, I think it’s important to be visible within the community, and also to have that reflect back into the club.
Guy Windsor
In what way does it reflect back into the club?
Samantha West
I think that when you are present in your community, and the community is aware of you that you’re fostering a really good relationship in that way. But more than that too, it’s a way to show the community that there are alternatives to things, that the community is growing. We do a lot of swords in the park. And so just over here, right in the inner city. And so, you know, people will come up to us, kids will come up to us, and we talk about it all the time. We talk about the history, you know what I mean? So they’re able to come up to us and talk without being afraid. We do things at the library for free. This March Break, we’re putting on an event for the library for kids for programming during the March Break season. We’ll have our knights go up. It won’t be modern HEMA based, it’ll be historical HEMA based, and we’ll talk about the history and we’ll talk about the knights and we’ll talk about our armour and things like that. Me and another fellow board member have been going into the schools, Hillcrest specifically, and they do a medieval week and we talk we go in and we do a little bit of fencing. And we talk about what it was like and what we wear and what a knight would do, essentially.
Guy Windsor
Is this in any way related to The Gathering?
Samantha West
It is and it’s not. The Gathering is actually for the HEMA community, per se.
Guy Windsor
What is it?
Samantha West
So, one time we were at a pub, and someone was trying to convince us to do a tournament. And as much as at the time, we would have loved it, we just weren’t prepared for that. We just did one actually this week, like this two weeks ago. And it is a lot of work, don’t get me wrong. And Gathering is a lot of work as well. But we wanted something that wasn’t a tournament. There are lots of tournaments. But we wanted something different. We wanted something that was more educational based, something for something that gives back and gives to HEMAists and I know that tournaments do give back to those who go and participate and it’s a wonderful thing and I like to do them too. But what it is, is it’s basically a seminar for HEMAists, we have eight spaces where we invite instructors and their schools to do what they want to talk about. We had Vadi, we had smallsword things, weapons that people usually wouldn’t use, because many schools only do longsword, so they don’t really get a taste of it. We had Callum doing Irish stick fighting, we had Dennis doing Bokken. And so they come and they do a 45 minute to an hour instruction. And it’s just a weekend full of that. And it’s amazing, right?
Guy Windsor
Like a historical martial arts buffet.
Samantha West
That’s exactly what it is. And people can pick and choose what they want. I think it’s different than a tournament. But it’s also amazing. And the reception has been amazing.
Guy Windsor
Honestly, I did tournaments as a sport fencer back in the 80s, and 90s. And I’ve organised a few historical martial arts tournaments, every now and then, nothing terribly big. For me, they’re just not a good use of my time, as an organiser, or as a martial artist, because all the things I was ever going to learn from tournament fencing, I’ve already learned in sport fencing, which is much more developed. Because they’ve been developing it for 100 years. I’m very glad that the tournament scene exists. But events where the tournament is the main event, and the classes are kind of on the side don’t interest me terribly much.
Samantha West
Yeah, I find too, when I’m going to a tournament, and I’ve signed up, I don’t have time to take those classes. I want to, because I find that they’re very interesting. But I just don’t have time or the energy at that point. So here was one of the other reasons why we did that. Not everybody is interested in tournaments, we only have a few people in our club that are interested in actively doing tournaments. And, and that is one part of HEMA, but it’s not the entire part of HEMA. And I think that you’re only really catering to a few people instead of the group. And there are a lot of people that would come out to classes, very interesting ones on a varying amount of topics, as opposed to going to a tournament.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, when I teach seminars in various places, there’s very often a tournament going on somewhere that people could have gone to instead, but instead, they’re coming to a class, because that’s what they want. Just in case, the average listener is confused on this point, I would say that there are some students who are better off going to the tournament than coming to my class because of where they happen to be in their development and the topic of the class. So it’s not like they should be picking the class. It’s just, we need to have all of these things.
Samantha West
Yeah, you’re right. And one of the things that I’ve said earlier on is that HEMA is for everyone. I do love tournament fencing, and I’m one of the ones who does tournament fencing. But not everyone does like it, not everyone feels the need to do it. And I’m 45 right now, I’ll be 46 in March. And we have people that are in our classes that are 60, 70, sometimes, and they’re not into that, but they want to learn, they want to engage, they want to advance their skill. And tournament fencing is not for them, or even younger people. I have someone who’s much younger than me who’s just not into it. He’s not into the stress and it’s just not his thing. And I get that too. It’s not for everyone. And also, I don’t think it indicates whether or not you’re a good fencer, I think it just indicates whether or not you’re a good tournament fencer.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Because good, can be read many different ways. You can have someone who is technically a beautiful fencer, lovely to watch, lovely to fence, but they just don’t hold it together in tournaments, because it’s just not their environment. And you can have people who do very, very well in tournaments, as we have seen, who are mindless thugs, frankly. I said it so you don’t have to. I said that.
Samantha West
No, no, you’re absolutely right. I’ve walked away from tournaments. I came home from a tournament one time and I said to my husband, I think I broke my arm. Can you take me to the hospital? He was like, You’re kidding me? Thankfully, I didn’t, it was just a hematoma. But sometimes you get the, I don’t want to say ‘peasant’, but we all know what that means, who’s just using brutality. And some people are just like, I got to work. I have to work or I work in an office or my hands are, you know, I need them.
Guy Windsor
So what job do you do?
Samantha West
I work as a server. I started doing that because I have a ton of kids. I have four kids.
Guy Windsor
Really? Oh my god, I have to and that’s a lot.
Samantha West
Yeah, I have four kids.
Guy Windsor
Respect from this end. If you can handle four children.
Samantha West
We have four kids. So I needed something that would be flexible with the club and with my family life. And I’m fortunate enough that I can just work part time for that. Which enables me then to dedicate a lot of time to the club and to my family.
Guy Windsor
By server, do you mean in a restaurant?
Samantha West
I work at a high end restaurant in town here, which is more like a family, I’ve been working there since my last son started school. So seven years ago, I’ve been around for a while.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. And actually, in a good restaurant, the waiting staff are a really critical component of the success of the restaurant.
Samantha West
They are, they definitely are because they’re that bridge between the back of the house and the front of the house. So it is pretty essential. Yeah, I like it. I find it’s high pace. It’s fast enough for me to keep me involved. And I love the staff. And it’s a small business. I’ve known the owner since he’s owned it, and it’s perfect for me. And it’s a block away from my house. I live in Barrie, but I live in the Inner City of Barrie. So I live downtown, and I’m really prominent in my community. So I walk everywhere I go. If it’s not walked to, I don’t go.
Guy Windsor
What do you mean by prominent in your community?
Samantha West
So I guess, over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time in the community. I volunteered at an art based studio, I’ve done tons of charity events is one of the things I love to do. We’re involved in a lot of like, again, like the season centre and a lot of local charities. I have a community garden outside, I actually have not a large property, but I’m blessed with a really nice side yard to the road. And so I have a lot of garden beds, I put purposely outside of my yard in order for the community to have access to that.
Guy Windsor
You’re the sort of person who when you walk down the street, in your hometown, people often say hello, because they know you.
Samantha West
Yes. It’s a good thing and also not a great thing.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, that has pros and cons.
Samantha West
It does. Yeah, absolutely.
Guy Windsor
Now you have a fairly eclectic mix of styles you’re interested in. I mentioned Italian longsword, 1.33 sword and buckler, Italian rapier, which are three of my specialties, incidentally, so we can geek out as much as you’d like about those. What prompted that breadth? Why so many?
Samantha West
So it’s t’s neuro divergence, maybe, like a little neuro spiciness. What really prompted it was I went to Fran’s event in England, By The Sword.
Guy Windsor
Fran was one of the first people I interviewed on the show. I think she’s episode three or four.
Samantha West
She’s lovely. She’s really, really lovely. And it really changed the course, I think, for me. Again, I was at MSC and we only did longsword. And then we found out that the way that Fran was running By The Sword was mixed weapons. And it was a roll of the dice essentially. And whatever the die rolled on is the weapon you would use in this tournament.
Guy Windsor
That’s an interesting idea.
Samantha West
It really was. And so I went with my fellow board member, Kaitlyn Rose, and we’d only done longsword. I think we’d only been doing fencing for two years or something like that. And we thought, oh, let’s go to England. Let’s do this thing. Let’s do it. And I think Kieran Rowe and Greg Sagaris were some of our instructors at the time, and they quickly tried to give us a rundown in a week on how to do everything and they did their best, but oh my gosh, it was just horror, we were ill prepared for what was about to happen.
Guy Windsor
You can’t prepare somebody for that in a week, unless all of their fencing up to that point has been aimed towards fundamentals and principles rather than aim towards technique.
Samantha West
Oh, no, no, so the first bit not the good part. So we were not prepared. We went and I did quite well in longsword and I remember getting in the ring with this wonderful like lovely woman. She ended up winning the Rapier at that tournament, but she was a rapierist and she just annihilated me. Oh, she was amazing. She was amazing. And it was beautiful. And I remember the whole entire time fencing her thinking, this is amazing. This is the most amazing thing. And she just trounced me, I didn’t hold a candle and I loved every minute of it. And I remember I walked off from being just beaten up. And I looked at Kaitlyn and I said, you need to find me a rapier, we need to order one while we’re here. And we need to have it delivered to the house. And sure enough, that night, that afternoon, she had us both rapiers bought and they were being shipped to Canada. I was like, I want it there by the time I get home. Because she’s such a whiz on that sort of thing.
Guy Windsor
When people tell stories like that, it just reminds me of what it was like back in the day, where, if you wanted a rapier, it might take you three months to find someone who could actually make one. Probably a year to get one from them, then it wouldn’t be quite right. Nowadays, you can just go online and you could just order a decent rapier and, or even an excellent rapier. And it’ll be at your house a week, two weeks, a month later, depending. You can just do that. It’s amazing.
Samantha West
It’s so convenient. In saying that about equipment, from when I first started to now, the access to equipment is so much better than it was even six years ago. But that kind of started me on the journey to all the swords. And so I deep dived into rapier. I love Italian rapier. My new obsession with rapier is Spanish rapier.
Guy Windsor
What sources are you using for Italian and Spanish.
Samantha West
So for Italian right now I’m using Capoferro and Fabris, which I do love. One of my fellow instructors when he bought his book, he was like this is amazing. And then Kieron says to me. Oh, Sharkey only read the second book and hasn’t read the first one.
Guy Windsor
I’m just having a little flex here. This is my 1610 Capoferro.
Samantha West
Oh, that’s beautiful.
Guy Windsor
This one is my Fabris. So you’re working with Capoferro directly or using translations?
Samantha West
I’m trying to do both. I got Capoferro directly. And then when I first started reading it, I was like, I am not prepared. It is so hard. Oh my gosh. And I’m not prepared for that. I got a translation. I got somebody to do it. I’m working with a translation. Now that I’ve done that, and I’ve done it enough, I’m starting to work with it directly. I find that that’s kind of the best way. Same with a lot of books that like Liechtenauer’s, like no pictures, just a poem about fighting, and you have no idea what you’re reading until you do it. And then you’re like, oh, this makes sense, right?
Guy Windsor
I don’t think anybody interprets Liechtenauer’s as longsword stuff just from the Zettel. I think everybody uses the 15th century glosses with the illustrations and the explanations.
Samantha West
You have to, absolutely. But I mean, in the beginning, though, you’re looking at it like this is just a poem to swords, this doesn’t make any sense at all. And then for Fabris too I’m starting to work with the direct but again, I like the translations as well.
Guy Windsor
So how good is your Italian?
Samantha West
It’s not that great.
Guy Windsor
Fabris is a much clearer writer than Capoferro. I mean, my Italian is not too bad. But Capoferro is a beast.
Samantha West
Oh, it’s not great. It’s slow. And I’m doing it not in the classroom. I’m doing it personally, for myself. It’s very difficult. But French was my first language, it’s not that every Canadian speaks French fluently. My dad was French speaking. And so I went to a French school when I was a child. And so I find some of the Latin based languages tend to be a little bit more easier for me. But it’s still work. It’s just that it’s the time period. So middle Italian, and anything from that period is just like, there is no Google Translate that’s going to help you on this.
Guy Windsor
Honestly, the language hasn’t changed that much in 600 years. I mean, if you read Fiore aloud, to a modern Italian, they’ll understand what you’re talking about. There’ll be a couple of words they won’t get. But yeah, Fiore uses ‘stanco’, which now means ‘tired’ to mean ‘left’. So as in left hand. But other than that, it’s pretty straightforward. So if you could put it into modern spelling, and put it into Google Translate, I mean, you’d get a bit of a mess. But I mean, you get a bit of a mess with Google translate whatever language you’re using.
Samantha West
It actually helps that we have someone in our class who his thing is Italian. So he’s like into translating a lot of that stuff. And I remember the first time I got Liechtenauer, and I just needed some translation, and it just happens to my best friend’s from Berlin. And like I know, fencing is not your thing, but can you please translate this for me in a way that I can understand? So I have a couple of friends that I’m able to pull from when I’m having a hard time.
Guy Windsor
That does make life a bit easier.
Samantha West
But it also helps like we’re very passionate about all swords. I find that my thirst for swords is like I just picked up the smallsword and I can’t even tell you how much I love it. It’s so pretty.
Guy Windsor
I love smallsword. Oh my god. It was my first historical fencing style that I was ever any actually good at.
Samantha West
Really? When I think about it, I think it’s just such a tasty little sword. It’s so lovely and wonderful. And every time I fence with it, I just get giggly ,I just love it. It’s nice. It’s really lovely.
Guy Windsor
Have you ever handled an original smallsword?
Samantha West
No, I don’t.
Guy Windsor
I do all my solo training stuff for smallsword with a late 18th century original. And it is a murder spike. It is gorgeous. It is so nasty. It is so vicious. It is so like I’m going to stick 16 holes in your face.
Samantha West
That’s what I want to do when I fence with it. Oh it is like a little tiny murder stick isn’t it? I really do love it. I find it also for rapier, I know it’s not quite the same but I find rapier you have a lot more measure, you have a lot more room, and I find with a smallsword you don’t and so it kind of micro exaggerates what’s happening.
Guy Windsor
It’s more of a knife fight. If you do it the way it’s shown in the most of the texts anyway, Angelo for example, it’s fenced pretty damn close. So there isn’t time for all of that fancy stuff. It is sort of parry, riposte, parry, murder. It is very, very quick. It reminds me a lot of knife fighting.
Samantha West
Yes, it does. In fact, it’s funny that you would say that because Wednesday nights when we do study group I was standing there I was holding both my rapier and my smallsword and I thought I wish that I had a parrying dagger almost the size as my smallsword because it is very much like a murder dagger. Like it’s lovely. I find that practicing with it oftentimes, especially with those little tiny micro movements, it does help a lot more. I find if you’re going to mess up you’re going to mess up much faster with that little tiny dagger than you will with the Rapier.
Guy Windsor
So what sources do you prefer for smallsword?
Samantha West
I’m kind of all over the place. Kieron is one of my instructors. He’s been walking me through them. Where am I here? I have all my books around here somewhere. Like you, I do also have a nice little bit here. But it’s the Army and Navy Gentleman’s Companion. The one I’m going through right now.
Guy Windsor
That’s an unusual choice.
Samantha West
By John MacArthur of the Royal Navy.
Guy Windsor
That’s an unusual choice for a smallsword specialist. Interesting. It’s a good book.
Samantha West
Which one are you going for right now for that?
Guy Windsor
Most of my small sword stuff is from Angelo. Because his school of fencing was originally published in French in 1763, if I recall rightly. But his son produced who was also a professional fencing master in London, produced a translation in 1787 of his father’s book while his father was still alive. And so you know that it is accurate, within reason. And it is very, very specific. It tells you exactly what to do. The difference between when we go from tierce to quarte, it moves four inches. He says four inches.
Samantha West
That’s it.
Guy Windsor
So I have sometimes taken a yard stick out with my students and made them do this thing and I hold up the yard stick to make sure it’s four inches. Which is kind of a silly thing to do, because of course it is never exactly four inches. And for that to actually work, all sorts of other things have to be correct, like your hip position and your shoulder position. Otherwise four inches isn’t enough.
Samantha West
I think when you’re practicing like that it’s ideal because it beats it into your mind in a way. So even if you’re slightly off when you’re under pressure, you’re still trying to keep to that four inches.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Keep it small. Keep it tight. And he has, he has a nice breadth too. He also deals with fencing against the sabre, fencing against the rapier. Just very short plays. And it has some very fancy cool stuff in there as well including quite sophisticated sequences. Totally recommend. But you should get it in French. And it just occurs to me that as a fluent French speaker, Girard might be a good choice, also. I would pick Angelo over Girard for content, but Girard is glorious. And at the end of Girard, this is his second edition from 1740. I had it rebound. But at the end of it, he is doing how to light a grenade. He’s got a bunch of Musketeer and grenade stuff.
Samantha West
That’s fabulous.
Guy Windsor
It’s a fantastic book. MacArthur is great. But my heart belongs to Angelo first and Girard second when it comes to smallsword.
Samantha West
I went with MacArthur because at the time I do study a lot. Even in Italian, I do Fiore but I love Vadi. You know, we do everything. And so at the time, I got the smallsword and I was like, I love this but I couldn’t dedicate myself to it. Kieron Rowe was like, this is the one for you. It’s simple. It’s basic, six guards and I was like I can do that. I can do that. So I felt at the time it was easy, I could learn that plus I was still knee deep in 1.33. And we were doing some more Italian but it was just there was so many things going on I couldn’t jump into a deep manual.
Guy Windsor
The reason I can do so many of these different systems is because this is my actual job. So I can dedicate pretty much as much time as I need to it. Most of my students don’t do all of it. Most of my students do maybe 1.33 sword and buckler or they do Fiore and other medieval stuff or they do rapier or maybe sometimes they will Fiore and Capoferro but they don’t do all of it.
Samantha West
In our instruction for Italian longshore we do Fiore, we do Marozzo, we do Vadi.
Guy Windsor
but Marozzo doesn’t do longsword. He has a two handed sword but it’s not a longsword.
Samantha West
We do kind of use it as a longsword though in longsword class. So we kind of work through that. But it makes sense, because I find that like your body only moves so many ways. I don’t teach it because I do Fiore. That’s it. I help with Vadi. But Marozzo is just not my thing. It’s too complex.
Guy Windsor
The mechanics that Marozzo is using are quite different to what Fiore is doing.
Samantha West
Oh, it is incredibly different. And it’s like, I think he has three moves after a decapitation. That’s court fighting. Like it’s all flourish. One of our instructors, he has a flair for that kind of thing. It’s his baby. Yeah. I find our club is able to do all those things because we have so many people who have studied and have a passion for one specific or you know, a handful of things and so we’re able to give our students that kind of access. I don’t have enough students to do a rapier class on a Sunday. But I have a study group going on Wednesday where everyone who wants to do rapier comes and then we work through that. So same with like, on the Sunday we did a spear class after our main class. But it’s not all the students yet. Every two weeks what we’ve been doing is we tack on another hour or two hours and we do an alternative weapon. I think the weapon before that was sabre. I find that most people who are interested in tournaments, you have the big three, you have your longsword, you have your sabre and you have rapier. Or they mix it up and do sword alone. So, it’s a push for them to learn a lot of these other styles. Whether or not sword and buckler is I’ve never seen it yet in a tournament. I would love to because I think it’s fun. I haven’t here in Canada, or the US, and I’ve been to the US fighting as well. I just haven’t seen it. But we fight a lot with it when we do historical fencing. It’s one of my favourites.
Guy Windsor
Presumably you’re not working directly from the Latin?
Samantha West
I am not. I’m working from a translation for sure on that one. I can’t emphasise enough. I love the play in sword fighting. And I there’s not a weapon I haven’t looked at and thought that looks incredibly fun. And then I get interested in it. And then I buy it. I have a collection. I only have one longsword, but I have probably a dozen swords. And they’re all different.
Guy Windsor
I tend to be known for a couple of things, because those are the things I’ve written books on. But smallsword, I even do the Bolognese stuff, up to a point. 1.33, I’ve done a lot of.
Samantha West
Yeah, I find the same thing too. I’m always intrigued. Even wrestling at this point, and I wouldn’t call myself a wrestler, but I love it.
Guy Windsor
I’m not a wrestler, either. But if you’re going to do Fiore longsword, you have to do wrestling.
Samantha West
No, I think one of the things that I do recommend, and which we don’t do, because I find that like, when we’re doing intro, everyone thinks of the longsword. And so that’s what they want. They imagine the movies, they think about historical fencing, and that’s the thing that they think about. And so that’s what they want to take. When we get them in with a longsword, then we try to hook them in with but you know what’s even better than that is dagger. I think if you’re going to start in an ideal world, you’ll start with dagger, then do longsword,
Guy Windsor
I mix them up. What I do, for a beginners’ class, I will get them started using doing just physical stuff with their hands, wrestling-based stuff because they can already control their hands. And then we do some dagger stuff. It’s all in one class. It’s like a 90 minute class, then we do some related stuff with the dagger, which gets them used to using a weapon. And it gives them the chance to do some sort of interactive weapons stuff. And then we do basic longsword handling, and that tends to be the end of the first class. So they’ve experienced all of it. And they’ve gotten probably the most technical development in the unarmed stuff. But they all come for the swords. I don’t want to deny them the swords, but also having done dagger stuff, they’re going to pick up a sword, they realise that they’re going to have to spend some time just learning to control this enormous bit of metal. So it kind of puts into context, why we’re giving them these other things as well because otherwise the whole first class would basically just be learning how to handle the sword. And that is interesting for the first half an hour but then it gets a bit dull. Then by the next class, they’ve had a chance to do some wrestling do a bit more dagger stuff, and then start maybe doing some basic longsword defences because they can now for a reasonably safe longsword attack. So I integrate the whole thing.
Samantha West
I think that’s a really interesting way of doing it and yeah, that actually sounds really amazing because our last class when we were doing close plays, those close binds, we stopped actually, we’re like, let’s pull out the dagger and we’ll show you how this works. But the way you are suggesting just makes sense. It makes so much more sense than doing it in the way we have been doing it.
Guy Windsor
I’ve put all of that in a book called The Armizare Workbook. So what I’ll do is I’ll send you the e-book when we’re done. And that way, you can sort of see how it all sort of come to grips with itself. Because Fiore’s system is one system of armed combat. It’s not, there’s wrestling stuff, and there’s sword stuff and they’re all separate. It is this is the art of arms applied to wrestling, applied his dagger, applied to longsword. And he routinely refers to other sections of the book. So for example, when some of the longsword plays explicitly in the text refer to some of the dagger plays.
Samantha West
That’s right. And I find too the dagger plays, and even the wrestling, all of the moves, really, essentially, all the guards and a lot of the actions are the same in the wrestling, and the dagger and then also in the longsword are like you’re preparing that kind of body movement all the way through. So he’s kind of setting you up right from the beginning in order to do that longsword action.
Guy Windsor
Although the treatise is not, I don’t think it should be considered a training manual. It is not designed to teach people from the ground up. It’s a picture of the art, it is exposition of the art.
Samantha West
I’ve often been told that it’s a manual for individuals who already know how to fence or are already engaged in warfare. This is not from the ground up. This is somebody who already kind of knows or has done it. And then that’s the next step.
Guy Windsor
And by the time a person of the knightly classes is old enough to read or is being taught to read they’re also being taught all that stuff already. So the book is really clearly not intended for training knights, it is not a curriculum. It’s an exposition.
Samantha West
Yeah.
Guy Windsor
Cool. All right, slight left turn, because we can geek out about the specifics for ages. But I do have a list of things I need to get through. So tell me about Sword Women of Canada.
Samantha West
So Sword Women of Canada, again, it started with going to By The Sword. It really changed me and Kaitlyn when we went there. We’ve never seen so many women fencers. First off, it was all women fencers, it’s a women’s tournament, but it was amazing. We came home and we just didn’t know how to let that concept go. Because we don’t have a lot of women. At the time, when we were starting fencing, we didn’t see a lot, we didn’t really engage with a lot of women in sword fighting. And we wanted to create a space for the women that were here, the women we could get in touch with, in order to trade gear, talk shop, things that would apply to us that may not apply to ….
Guy Windsor
Dude bros is the term you are looking for.
Samantha West
Exactly. Absolutely, absolutely. And a lot of the gear at the time when we were getting it was always tailored to men’s bodies. And so we were just kind of shut out. And so, hearing women even in Europe, that were having the same difficulties, we were really fortunate in the sense that we had talked to a lot of women, and even they had had some not great experiences in their own clubs or in the community at the time. And we came home. At the time, we hadn’t really experienced that, we were in a kind of sheltered little club. And it was wonderful. And we had a really great experience. And the people that we worked with, the dude bros that were at our gym, were amazing. They were fantastic and wonderful. But we wanted something for us, to encourage that safe space. And so we started it, and it was fabulous. And it was wonderful. And we had really good feedback. And then through Covid something happened, it’s hard. And we kind of dropped off. And I was at home teaching my kids because they didn’t have school anymore. And so I had all those kids at home and we were kind of trying to navigate this whole thing. And unfortunately, we only got so far with Sword Women of Canada because we couldn’t get out. We couldn’t get the word out. And even as small as the HEMA community is, it’s still vast. In Canada we’re not connected that well. There are clubs and places close by we had no idea that even existed. So when we had sat down and really talked about it, we wanted people to have access and the way to do that was the concept developed of having a Ontario HEMA tracker, a consolidation where we would know where all the clubs were. And so that we started a group. And it’s full of things. It’s basically like an Ontario HEMA club online. For everyone, anyone, who’s interested in HEMA, anyone who goes to a club. If you’re an individual who’s on your own in North Bay, and you don’t have a club, you can still join the group. And you have access to everything. We have a club guide. It’s online, we have it on Discord where we can talk, we also have gear for sale, we even have a meme page for people, it’s an online community for anyone in Ontario who is interested. We have a lot of people who are not in Ontario actually in it as well who come to Ontario every once in a while to play. But one of the things we get when we do a lot of these events for historical events is people will ask us, well, where are you as a club? Can I join? And oftentimes, because we travel around Ontario doing this, we’re not close to them.
Guy Windsor
Ontario is bigger than most countries. It’s not strictly true, but you can both be in Ontario, but it’s actually probably quicker to get to New York than it is to get to the other end of Ontario.
Samantha West
You can be like seven hours away, or eight hours away. So what we wanted to do was our goal as a club, one of our goals when we first started fencing as a club, we weren’t a club, technically, we were a Fight Club, we were just going to get together on Wednesdays, a bunch of people and we were just going to practice. And then we realised we’re going to run out of people to practice with because a club that was in our in our town closed, and they moved to like Nova Scotia or something. And so we thought, we’re only going to ever play with us unless we travel to another club. What do we do? So we thought, okay, well, we’re solid, we kind of know our stuff. And so we started a club, because we thought, well, we’ll train people to fight us, as what will make us better fencers is if we have other people to train with.
Guy Windsor
Honestly, that’s how I started. When we started the Dawn Duellists’ Society it was so me and Paul could find other people to fence with. But then we realised we had to teach them how to do it. Yeah, that’s how we started, 30 years ago.
Samantha West
Yeah, that’s exactly how we started. And so one of our main goals, I think, at our heart at our core, one of them is spreading the word of HEMA, but also, the more people who do it, the more people that are training, the more ideas that come around, the more variety you get, the better. It only makes you a better fencer, ultimately, it only does, so when we go to these events, one of the things we get is, where are you? And we’re never close enough. And so poor Kaitlyn started tracking down all of these clubs to tell them.
Guy Windsor
This Kaitlyn sounds like an absolute fucking legend.
Samantha West
She’s amazing.
Guy Windsor
Maybe I should interview her next.
Samantha West
Maybe you should, you should, because she literally does all the behind the scenes things. She’s not an instructor. She doesn’t instruct. Everyone you’ll find at our club has a specific job. And Kaitlyn’s job is she wears multitudes of hats. But her thing is like she coordinates all the stuff. She’s our coordinator.
Guy Windsor
She’s the grown up in the room.
Samantha West
Oh, yes, she is. Yes. We have a linked calendar, and she puts all of our engagements in it. And then I’ve linked my husband’s into it, because she’ll ask me, what are you doing? Are you busy on this day? What are you doing on that day? And I tell him all the time, you have to look at the calendar. Kaitlyn plans my life, and I just do it as is says in my calendar. She’s amazing. But because we’re fencing and we’re fighting, she’s able to discuss and talk with everyone that’s there. So one of the questions being asked is where’s the club? And so, that’s what kind of came out of it. We were getting so many emails about where clubs were that we thought we’re going to do this thing, and so because she’s actually a computer tech, this is what she does for a living. She set it up. She’s so savvy that way and then it just blossomed from there.
Guy Windsor
I’m a little bit sad to hear that she’s got a proper job because she sounds like exactly the sort of person who should be work as a assistant, or organiser or manager, maybe puppy herder is the word, for people like me. My assistant, Katie is absolutely brilliant at all the stuff that she does. She doesn’t check my calendar though. And I would probably benefit from having someone who knew where I was supposed to be at any given time, because I often don’t.
Samantha West
Oh, I don’t either. Because I have so many things going on. I do a lot of things but she doesn’t just check my calendar. She’s the one who organises my calendar for me. And all of us, quite frankly, she is a godsend, honestly. So like when it comes to instruction, and the hands on aspect, those things me and Kieron do, and we brought on two other instructors to help us and Kyle as well. Kyle is on maternity leave right now from the club. But we all work together, we all work well. And we all do our thing well, and that’s what makes us work so well as a club. We have five board members. And each of us has a specific job to do. And as long as we’re doing those jobs, and the fact that I can do Kaitlyn’s job for a very short amount of time. And we have somebody like Brent can do my job for a short amount of time. We have coverage, so we’re not running ourselves ragged. But yeah, it really works out that way.
Guy Windsor
Okay, yeah. When I was doing the research for this interview, because basically, if you’re just some bloke looking at women online, you’re a creepy weirdo. But if you run a podcast, and you’re interviewing women for your show, you actually have to kind of look into their social media and look into their work stuff. And if they’ve got a LinkedIn and if they’ve got an Instagram or whatever. So, that’s just part of the job. Alright, so not creepy weirdo. Podcaster. It’s different. Why is your Instagram account called West End Village?
Samantha West
That’s an interesting question. My last name is West.
Guy Windsor
I’ve noticed that. I even said it in the introduction, but I hadn’t made the connection yet.
Samantha West
I also live in the West End village, The area I live in is a historic community. Maybe not historic to across the seas, but my house was built before Canada was like, you know, Canada, so when it was just a colony. And so a part of that heritage, designation, this has been deemed the West End village. But also, again, I have half a hockey team as children, but we used to run a games club out of my basement for the kids. You know, on any given day, when you have four kids, 10 more is not a blink of the eye, any given day, we have like a multitude of children here. They’re older now. So it’s not quite as intense. But, we’re always open. My husband’s dad fenced in college, and my husband has done a little bit of Olympic fencing. And so we have a lot of that kind of equipment here. And the kids have often spent time outside fencing. Once I got into the historical HEMA my older sons practice HEMA outside and their friends come over and we do it with wasters and things.
Guy Windsor
Does your husband do historical martial arts?
Samantha West
He doesn’t, funny enough, and it’s not because he doesn’t want to.
Guy Windsor
Because children and time and life.
Samantha West
I think everyone needs something for themselves. And I mean, my husband and I do rock climbing together and he has also sports and activities that he does on his own with his buddies, and so this became kind of my thing.
Guy Windsor
That’s sensible. So West End Village is sort of is where you live, but it’s also play on your name.
Samantha West
It is a play on it. It’s where I live, it’s also a play on my name.
Guy Windsor
Have you always lived there? You seem to identify with where you live. I moved around a lot when I was a kid and I don’t identify with any sense of place at all really.
Samantha West
So I did move around when I was a kid. I lived in other provinces. My husband moved around a lot. He lived all over Europe and the United States when he was a child and so I think when we found the house that we were going to settle in, the majority of our kids have had were born in this house. And so they’ve lived here their entire lives. And so one of the things that we wanted to establish was roots for them because it’s hard to you’re a kid that moves around so often, especially when you’re younger and so we kind of wanted to settle down and put roots in and so this is the primary house. Our house, even though we’re I’m not from Barrie. I’m from another town in Ontario called Spanish Ontario.
Guy Windsor
Okay. Interesting name. Why did you choose Barrie?
Samantha West
Barrie is kind of that way point between being in the city, Toronto and kind of having the Muskoka or the wilderness because we’re kind of smack in the middle and I love being by the water and I just can’t even imagine myself living in a space that doesn’t have water. And so we’re not that far away from the Lake Simcoe.
Guy Windsor
Okay. Yeah, I was in Barrie, briefly and I stayed at a chap called Colin’s house. And then we went to the seminar the next day, and then we went out for dinner, I think. And then we went back to his house, and then I went back to Toronto the next day, so I didn’t really see much of Barrie.
Samantha West
Yeah. It’s quite lovely. It’s still kind of like that way point. So my kids can take the train. We used to take the train all the time, and go into the city, go to the museums and go to the art and all that stuff, it’s 45 minutes away, which is in Canada it’s not that far. Yeah, that’s next door. But then I can go 45 minutes the other way and I could be literally, in the woods, deep of Muskoka. Because Spanish Ontario has 500 people in it. It’s a very tiny town, and it never gets any bigger. We don’t have a mayor. We have a Reeve. It’s very small. And so I like that. It’s Northern Ontario. I liked that aspect. But I also being from a small town, I really appreciate the city.
Guy Windsor
That can go either way, some people from small towns cannot abide cities. And some say, no, this is this is great. This has all sorts of things going for it.
Samantha West
Yeah. So we tried to do it kind of in the middle, a middle spot that I could access the theatre and all the good things that I love about the city but still have access to the wilderness.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Lovely. Okay, now, a couple of questions that I asked everyone. Or most people, because as you know, you have the opportunity to decide not answer certain questions. I just wouldn’t ask them. Because you haven’t said don’t ask these questions, so I will now. So what is the best idea you haven’t acted on?
Samantha West
The best idea I haven’t acted on is, this is going to sound really awful. But I need to buy a mask, a new HEMA mask. And my best idea is that I want to buy two of them and I want to get a really good one. And one that’s kind of cheap, it’s still good. Because when we do reenactment stuff, I often had head butt people when we get into close plays, which I love it. But I find that I ruin my mask doing that because it’s not excellent for then fencing. So my best idea that I haven’t acted on yet is to buy two masks at one time, a cheap one and a better one. One for strictly head butting and one for strictly tournament fencing. Yes, I love that mask.
Guy Windsor
I would say you shouldn’t be using fencing masks for longsword at all. I would say you should be using one of these, which is the Terry Tyndall style mask with the suspension and the chin strap and all that sort of stuff. And I mean, I must have been hit in the head many 1000s of times with this. I’ve had it for 12 years 10, 15, a long time anyway. Honestly, I wouldn’t put my head in anything else to do longsword. And it’s got a big steel plate to bash people in the head with it.
Samantha West
Honestly, it’s my favourite thing to do. But I didn’t think he was still making them.
Guy Windsor
He handed over the production. Edwin Gilbert makes Terry Tyndall designed masks. He’s at horsebows.com. He is kind of retiring though, as well. But Terry is an old friend of mine. Terry is retired and he has no commercial interest in the masks. So with his permission, I have found someone in Europe who has the capability to actually have them produced properly by a factory. So if all goes well, sometime maybe in 2024 they should become really properly commercially available.
Samantha West
I think that would be amazing. One of my gripes about fencing masks is that they’re not made for HEMA flat out, they’re not made for that kind of concussive blows that you get. It would be like wearing a bike helmet while you’re driving a NASCAR. It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I was trying to look for one of those, something with like a harness in the inset. That would be wonderful. Actually, congratulations. If you do that. That will be amazing.
Guy Windsor
And in the short term. I tested a helmet designed for historical martial arts by Windlass. I’m just typing it in… Yeah, Windlass Steel Craft, certainly, at some point, made a helmet designed for historical martial arts, which was basically a fairly simple helmet, like a regular armoured combat helmet. I forget what type of helmet but you’d recognise it. But instead of having the usual eye slits and whatnot, it had a perforated steel plate went over the face, and it had an aventail that worked really well. Again, you know, people use to helmets like that historically, not with perforated faceplates so much, but for a reason. And the fencing mask was designed for use with a foil. And it works beautifully with a foil.
Samantha West
It does. But that’s what it was meant for. It’s one of the other things I talked to my students about when they asked me about gear. And I always remind them, I always tell them flat out, I don’t know what anyone else does. But like, the padding and the safety gear that you’re buying to practice or to fight with, it’s only designed to minimize the damage, there’s nothing that is safe. There’s nothing that’s going to protect you 100% This is just to minimise the damage that could incur from the impact.
Guy Windsor
I would rephrase it because it does not minimise damage. It changes the damage. I would rephrase it as you wear the equipment to allow your opponent to actually hit you. But they should make it clear that you have been hit, but they shouldn’t actually be using any force because that gear is not equipped for it.
Samantha West
No, you’re right. And that is true. One of the things that we do talk about, too, as a club is being a good partner. And a part of being a good partner is vocalising what you’re comfortable with, and asking your partner that you’re fencing, what they’re comfortable with, and being honest about it too. Because if they’re hitting too hard, you need to be able to vocalise that. And as a good partner, you need to be able to hear that. Absolutely. 100%. We want to play with our friends. We don’t want to break them so they don’t want to play with us anymore.
Guy Windsor
So the best thing that you haven’t acted on yet is actually get yourself a Terry Tindall mask.
Samantha West
That’s exactly it. That’s 100%.
Guy Windsor
So my last question, somebody gives you a million dollars to spend improving historical martial arts worldwide? How would you spend it?
Samantha West
I had to ask a couple of my club members what they would do. And it’s funny, because there’s two main schools of thought. Getting the word out more. They were like, more demonstrations. And I was like, ah, and then one of the other ones was, oh, shoot, what was it? It was something along those lines, but I think what I really thought about it was if I only had a million dollars, which is not commercially a lot of money.
Guy Windsor
Have as much money as you want, this is imaginary so have 100 million, make it 5 billion.
Samantha West
I think that doing either making an info seminar or something for people in order to help them start up clubs. Like how to get insurance.
Guy Windsor
A club starting resource thing?
Samantha West
Yeah, I think, you know, people don’t know how to start a club. People don’t know do I want to be a for profit? Do I want to be nonprofit? What are the pros and cons. Insurance is a big one, how do I access insurance? How do I do that? You know, we talk to people a lot. And we’ve had a couple of meetings with other potential HEMAists about starting clubs, we’ve had a few of them over the last couple of years, it’s not as hard as you think, let’s walk through it, we’ll have a Teams meeting, we’ll tell you everything that you need. And I think that having something like that available to everyone across the world, like China, Japan, India, Russia.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. The difficulty is that what you need to start a club is different in every political place. What you need to start a club in the UK is different to what you need in Barrie, is different to what you need in Mexico. There would need to be localisation.
Samantha West
Yeah, absolutely. But I think that would bring in a lot more people. I think, ultimately having access or readily available access to clubs would make it much more prominent in the community, it would make it more prominent in the world. I think having it would go very far in putting HEMA on the map a lot more. I also think the more people who do HEMA, the more people who spend money on HEMA-like things and so those products become more available, like when I think about years ago when we can barely get a jacket for a woman.
Guy Windsor
I’m doing the old man thing of “youth of today, you have no idea.” Because back in the 90s, we were making stuff out of carpet. Yeah, it’s difficult for women to get jackets that fit properly. 100%. And that is a problem that should definitely be addressed. But the whole equipment scene now is 100 times better than it was 10 years ago, which is 100 times better than it was 10 years before that. There wasn’t an equipment scene. No one was making stuff for historical martial arts in the 90s because it didn’t exist.
Samantha West
Someone was saying something. And I was like, oh, these gloves. Gloves are never good. I was like, at least they’re not like when we first started. We were using hockey gloves. Horrendous. Awful.
Guy Windsor
I’ve used lacrosse gloves back in the day. Not good.
Samantha West
Not good. One of the gripes I have about modern HEMA fencing for women today is the chest protector. It only goes to like mid rib. And so all of my vital organs are always exposed. And if I buy a men’s hardened chest protector, they’re too high in the armpit area. So it always cuts. There’s never an in between. And I’m always like, it’s great that you want to protect my chest, but also my vital organs are vastly important as well. We started making our own out of out of buckets, actually.
Guy Windsor
That’s a common solution. How have you come across Veronica Young, who’s an industrial designer. She’s in Episode 139, The Yeti of Chest Protection. She was running an Indiegogo campaign, which was set for 6th January 2023. So obviously, it’s long past. But from the conversation I had with her she has a solution that was basically one size fits all, and it does actually work. Because it’s not moulded. It’s more like it’s more like a bucket. So have a look at that episode and maybe look up her stuff, because she might be producing them. I don’t know.
Samantha West
Because once the Kickstarter is done, they usually go into production. Yeah, I’ll look at that.
Guy Windsor
So we’ve sort of got slightly off topic from the million dollar question. But actually, not really, because, because one of the big problems that many clubs have is access to the equipment. And one of the biggest expenses, if you choose to set up a club this way, is buying equipment for the beginners.
Samantha West
We’ve done that. Yeah, it’s expensive. We’re a nonprofit. So all the proceeds that we make go into the club. And so we’re able to budget for those kinds of things. In the beginning, it was primarily insurance, paying off insurance. We tried to keep our fees as minimal as we can, at the same time being able to grow as a club. And because we’re nonprofit, we also get spaces quite inexpensively as well, which is also helps us.
Guy Windsor
That’s one major reason why people do it as a nonprofit.
Samantha West
The schools and stuff we generally get for free except for the administration costs and then if we rent space from this City which we have a wonderful relationship with our city because we do a lot of stuff. The spaces tend to be affordable. And they work with us quite well, if there’s a space that we want, and it’s not available, they work with us to get either a bigger space or something that we need. Yeah.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, that is a major consideration as to whether you go nonprofit or for profit.
Samantha West
Absolutely. So there’s another private club in town here, Nemesis. And they are for profit. And one of the stipulations about joining is you have to have all your kit.
Guy Windsor
It’s funny, because I ran a for profit school. And the way we did it is in Finland, was my teaching was paid for. And basically the students organised themselves as a not for profit organisation. And I had my company because it was my job. And the association hired me to teach seminars and teach classes and provide the space and that sort of thing. So there was this kind of symbiosis between a company and a not for profit, which made life a lot easier. It’s the sign of a much more developed community, that it’s even practical to say, you have to have all your kit before you can join our club, because it means that they’ve been training somewhere else first.
Samantha West
That’s right. Their focus is on tournament fencing, specifically. Whereas ours is, we have all the things that you need, you just come in, bring your water bottle, nice pair of comfy shoes, and comfortable pants, and then we provide everything that you need. And if you decide to keep on going, we can still provide those things, if you want to buy kit, great. But if you are going to tournaments, and doing other things off premises, you need your own kit.
Guy Windsor
That’s not a bad way to do it. So the club loaner gear is just inside the club. Do you have a permanent space?
Samantha West
We do and we don’t. We have a permanent space in the sense that it’s a gym. And we have two schools, three now, because we picked up a Friday, that we are always in the same location for those, but they’re not our own personal space.
Guy Windsor
All right, so you can’t leave all the equipment there.
Samantha West
No, but we actually have a storage locker conveniently 10 minutes away from everyone’s house.
Guy Windsor
That works out quite well. It is a lovely situation to get yourself into when you actually have your own permanent training space.
Samantha West
Oh, yeah. Yeah. It is and able to leave those kinds of things there. I’m really happy for like Ito’s just finally got into his own permanent space. It’s so expensive. And the rent here is just incredibly expensive. And we would have to charge so much in order to facilitate that. And it’s not something we want to do to some people. We want to make it affordable. So no matter where you come from economically, we want to make it work.
Guy Windsor
Okay. The way the way I handled that issue is I had the full rate, and I had the discount rate. And people just chose the rate that they could afford. The discount rate was intended for students and unemployed people, people who would normally be have access to that kind of discount, but I never asked to see any kind of proof that they were entitled to it. My people will deal fairly. And I’m sure some people pay the lower rate because they just didn’t want to pay anymore. But also, I’m pretty sure that plenty of people paid the higher rate even though technically they were entitled to the lower one.
Samantha West
I think if you’re fair with people and you give them that option, not many, there’s always one or two, but yeah, the majority of people treat you fairly as well in that situation. So that’s actually a really good option if we because we would love to have a permanent space.
Guy Windsor
The trick is to make it a regular monthly payment that they don’t have to think about so it’s automatic, and to give them a free choice. I know there’s one on one club that has a super cheap level and they’re like $15 a month or something and then a sort of regular discount level of like $40 a month or something and then if you can afford it, $80 a month will be lovely. And people also can then adjust. If their circumstances change, like they get a better job, they might raise it or if they lose their job, they might drop it or whatever. And there doesn’t have to be any of that justification or there doesn’t have to be a conversation about it, it’s just something they choose.
Samantha West
I think that’s a good way of doing it. If we can find the space that we’re always keeping an eye out for, then we’d love to do that. I think that is the best way to do it. Right now, the way we do it is people don’t pay by class, they pay monthly or in blocks of three months.
Guy Windsor
Giving them that variable rate you’ll probably see an increase in income. If the club has more money it can do more things, especially for people who can’t afford it.
Samantha West
Absolutely. I do agree with that. It’s something I’m going to take to the next board meeting. One of the things about being a non-profit is we do have a board. We have a board of five and we have to vote for everything. We’re pretty much on the same page oftentimes, so there’s not very much disagreement when it comes to all of us together.
Guy Windsor
Excellent. Well thank you so much for joining me today, Sam, it’s been lovely to meet you.
Samantha West
Thank you for having me, it was really great.
