Wrestling and jujitsu cigarette cards (1913)

Identification

Physical description

Each card carries on its front face a colour artist-drawn illustration of two male figures in the identified hold or throw, both dressed in white shirts and coloured shorts (one red, one blue). The reverse is printed in blue ink in a decorative architectural cartouche headed Wrestling & Ju-Jitsu / A Series of 25, with the card number at the apex. The style heading, technique title, and descriptive text are set in a serif typeface within a ruled border. The lower register of each reverse carries the publisher’s imprint: Issued by John Player & Sons, Branch of the Imperial Tobacco Co. (of Great Britain & Ireland), Ltd. Nottingham.

Transcriptions

The following transcriptions are taken directly from the DWS copy, photographed 2025. Capitalisation and punctuation are reproduced exactly as printed.

Card 18 — Devon and Cornwall Style. THE HOLD.

In this style each man faces the other, legs extended, toe to toe, right hands clutching each other’s jackets, left hands holding right wrist. Two shoulders and one hip to the ground constitutes a fall.

Card 19 — Devon and Cornwall Style. DOUBLE LOCK.

Directly you feel you are going to be lifted off your feet, twist your right heel around your opponent’s left, on the inside; at the same time throw your left over his right, and make a “back-heel” of it; press opponent backwards and give him “cross heave.”

Card 20 — Devon and Cornwall Style. THE HEAVE.

The most common and best known throw in this style. It is accomplished by clutching your opponent’s collar with your right hand under his right arm, your left arm around his back; then pulling him to your body, at the same time heave, and then let go.

Commentary

The hold (card 18). The starting grip described — right hands clutching jackets, left hands holding the opponent’s right wrist — defines what was understood in 1913 as the orthodox hitch of Devon and Cornwall wrestling. The fall criterion stated, two shoulders and one hip, corresponds precisely to the three-pin rule documented across a range of primary and secondary sources. The archive’s Western Times (1881) uses identical language, stipulating that a back required “two shoulders and one hip, or two hips and one shoulder” to touch the ground simultaneously, a formulation consistent with the rules of Cornish wrestling as described by Richard Carew as early as 1602 (cited in Jaouen, 2007). Walker (1840, cited in Jaouen, 2007) likewise records this rule in his Defensive Exercises, the earliest systematic technical manual for the Devon and Cornwall style. The card therefore preserves a fall-criterion that had been stable in the tradition for at least three centuries.

The double lock (card 19). The card describes a counter-technique deployed in response to an imminent lift: wrapping the right heel around the inside of the opponent’s left leg, crossing the left leg over his right, and converting the defensive action into a backwards throw with a cross heave. Walker (1840) gives a closely parallel description in his treatment of the inside-lock counter: “the way to stop this is with the double-lock, which the adversary will execute by throwing his right heel inside your left and pressing you backwards or, with the heave” (cited in Jaouen, 2007, p. 67). The card’s language — “back-heel,” “cross heave” — is entirely consistent with Walker’s technical vocabulary nearly three-quarters of a century earlier, confirming the terminological stability of the style across the nineteenth century and into the Edwardian period.

The heave (card 20). The heave is described as the most common and best-known throw in the Devon and Cornwall style: an arm-under-armpit, arm-around-back hold from which the opponent is pulled in and lifted. This is the technique described throughout the historical literature as the defining throw of the Cornish and Devon in-play tradition — what Baring-Gould (1908) identifies as the characteristic “hugging and heaving” of Cornish play in contrast to the kicking and tripping of Devonshire out-play. Walker (1840) records “the heave from the after-play” as requiring the practitioner to “hold firmly with both hands, lift your adversary well up, pull strongly with your right arm, and turn yourself so as to fall on your left shoulder, and make him fall on both of his” — a description mechanically consistent with the card’s instruction to clutch the collar, wrap the left arm around the back, pull to the body, heave, and release. The Western Times “Diver” column of November 1904 (archive) also records the heave as central to the scientific repertoire of Devonshire wrestling.

Significance to the archive

These three cards constitute the only known mass-produced popular-print technical documentation of Devon and Cornwall wrestling technique published during the Edwardian period. Issued in a national series of 25 cards covering five wrestling and martial arts styles — Graeco-Roman, Catch as Catch Can, Cumberland and Westmorland, Devon and Cornwall, and Ju-Jitsu — the Devon and Cornwall sub-set placed the Westcountry tradition within a national and international taxonomy of combat sports at precisely the moment when Devon wrestling was, by contemporary accounts, in serious decline. The Western Times Diver column of November 1904 had already lamented the decline of Devonshire wrestling; the inclusion of the style in a nationally distributed tobacco card series in 1913 confirms that cultural memory of the tradition remained sufficiently alive to sustain popular recognition, even as active participation contracted. The cards thus occupy a transitional moment: they are at once a record of a living, if diminished, practice and an early act of its popular commemoration.

The back-text also carries independent evidential weight. The description on card 18 of the starting grip and fall criterion, and the descriptions on cards 19 and 20 of the double lock and heave, are the earliest known popular-print technical descriptions of Devon and Cornwall wrestling aimed at a general, non-specialist readership. They predate the formation of the Cornwall County Wrestling Association (1923) and the codification of unified rules that followed, and they preserve a vernacular technical vocabulary — back-heel, cross heave, the hold — that connects directly to the nineteenth-century manuscript and newspaper record.

Citation

Player, J., & Sons. (1913). Wrestling and Ju-Jitsu: A series of 25 [Cigarette cards, Nos. 18–20, Devon and Cornwall Style]. Imperial Tobacco Company of Great Britain and Ireland. Devonshire Wrestling Society Archive, DWS/PRI/CIG/1913/18-20.

References

Baring-Gould, S. (1908). Devonshire characters and strange events. John Lane, The Bodley Head.

Jaouen, G., & Nichols, M. B. (2007). Celtic wrestling — the jacket styles: History of an old sport and techniques of Cornu-Breton wrestling. Fédération Internationale des Luttes Celtiques.

Player, J., & Sons. (1925). Wrestling and Ju-Jitsu [Reissue, grey-ink ed.]. Imperial Tobacco Company of Great Britain and Ireland (Eire).

Tripp, M. (2009). Persistence of Difference: A History of Cornish wrestling [Doctoral thesis, University of Exeter].

Walker, D. (1840). Defensive exercises; comprising wrestling, as in Cumberland, Westmoreland, Cornwall and Devonshire. Thomas Hurst.

Western Times. (1904, November 11). Wrestling: The Devonshire style [Diver column].

Western Times. (1907, March 16). Ju-Jit-Su versus Devonshire wrestling at Crediton.

Further research

1. 1. Full series checklist and Flickr image set (front and reverse of all 25 cards): wrestlingtradingcards.com/1913-wrestling-ju-jitsu-a-series-of-25-john-player-sons
   2. Pre-War Cards set overview and dating notes: prewarcards.com/2017/02/07/1913-1925-player-and-sons-wrestling-ju-jitsu-set-checklist
   3. NSLists series checklist (English and Irish issues): nslists.com/13wres.htm
   4. Trading Card Database: tcdb.com/Checklist.cfm/sid/406841
   5. Look and Learn image archive (card 20, The Heave, front): lookandlearn.com/history-images/M648020
   6. John Player & Sons — Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Player_%26_Sons