Good play is fair play
The Devonshire Wrestling Society marks National Inclusion Week, 14–20 September 2026
When people discover that we practise a traditional martial art here in Devon…one with its roots firmly in the soil and the wrestling fields of the English countryside…they often assume that inclusion must be a modern addition to it. A bolt-on. A concession to contemporary values applied to an old, rough, men-only sport.
We understand why they think that. And we love telling them they’ve got it wrong.
The history of Westcountry wrestling is, when examined honestly, a story of remarkable openness. The ring, throughout its golden age in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was one of the more genuinely meritocratic spaces in English public life. What mattered was what you could do when you hitched your jacket and shook your opponent’s hand. Not who you were. Not where you came from. Not what you looked like, or how much you earned, or (as we shall see) whether you could even see.
National Inclusion Week runs from 14 to 20 September 2026, and this year we want to use it to share some of the history that shapes why inclusion sits at the heart of what we do. Not as policy, but as inheritance.
A blind man’s share
One of the most extraordinary figures in the history of Devon-style wrestling is William Wreford of Morchard Bishop, who lived between 1793 and 1866. He was known in his lifetime, without condescension, as ‘Blind Bill.’
Wreford was totally sightless, and he was one of the finest wrestlers Devon ever produced.
At the age of nineteen, he appeared at a great tournament at Crediton and threw John Jordan — a man so physically feared that some Plymouth tournament committees had excluded him from prize competitions altogether, as no one would face him. After twenty minutes of contest, the young blind farmer from Morchard Bishop sent Jordan crashing to the ground with what one witness described as a sound “similar to that produced by the falling of an oak tree.” The crowd, we are told, carried Wreford on their shoulders through the streets of Crediton to the Ship Hotel to receive his prize money.
Over the three decades that followed, Wreford travelled to London to defeat named champions, competed at major events in Leeds and Southampton alongside Abraham Cann — the supreme Devon champion of the age — and threw some of the finest Cornish wrestlers in the country. When he died in 1866, the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette recorded that he had been “the hero of a hundred contests in the wrestling ring” and that his name was “familiar to all the lovers of wrestling, both in the provinces and the metropolis.”
What made this possible was a single, small, practical accommodation: Wreford was permitted to receive the grip — the wrestler’s hitch — at the start of each bout, rather than having to negotiate it across open space. One adjustment. One recognition that a blind man needed a slightly different starting point to compete on genuinely equal terms. And with that adjustment in place, he competed — and won — on equal terms for thirty years.
The wrestling community did not debate this at length. They just made it work, because the alternative (telling a good man he had no place in the ring) was evidently unthinkable to them. That is the culture we have inherited.
An unnamed man on Maker Green
There is a second figure worth knowing. He has no name in the historical record. He appears only in a Westcountry ballad (the song of Dick Simmons, preserved in the archives of the Devonshire Wrestling Society) in a single line of remarkable quiet dignity: “The blind man got his share.”
The setting is Maker Green, on the Cornish shore of the Tamar, directly opposite Plymouth. The time is sometime in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, during the Napoleonic Wars, when press gangs prowled the waterfront. A group of wrestlers who were also labourers, ostlers, ordinary men, gathered to compete for a prize of buckskin breeches. Among them is an unnamed blind man, and he competes. He gets his falls. He gets his share.
When a press gang officer turns up and calls the blind wrestler a fool, it is that insult, not the threat to the narrator himself, that provokes the confrontation that gets the narrator pressed into naval service and swept off to sea for the rest of the ballad. The community’s instinct was to defend the blind man’s honour. In that small, rowdy, dangerous scene on a green by the Tamar, inclusion was not a policy. It was a reflex.
Women in the ring
Wreford and the unnamed man at Maker Green are not the only evidence that the Westcountry wrestling tradition was broader than its popular image suggests. Caroline Andrewartha was taught wrestling by her father and in turn taught her son Joel, who went on to become one of the finest wrestlers in Cornwall, at one point defeating the great James Polkinghorne himself. Lizzie Taylor, known variously as “Happy Ned” or “Lizzie-poor-Dick”, is recorded throwing a named opponent, John Lillywhite, in a bout at Clowance in the nineteenth century. These were not novelties or curiosities. They were participants.
The ring also drew from across the full social spectrum. One of the most celebrated wrestlers of the seventeenth century was Richard Stevens, the headmaster of Truro Grammar School. The inventor Richard Trevithick wrestled. So did miners, farmers, publicans, and men who came to London from the remotest corners of Cornwall and Devon to compete in multi-day tournaments at the Eagle Tavern in the City Road. They all stood in the same ring, wore the same jacket, and shook the same hand.
That breadth was not accidental. It followed directly from the structure of the sport itself: what won a match was weight, leverage, timing, and educated hands. The ring rewarded what a body could do, not what a name could claim.
What this means to us today
At the Devonshire Wrestling Society, we do not think of inclusion as something we have added to our tradition. We think of it as something we are living up to.
Our Diversity and Inclusion Policy commits us plainly: we welcome all students and participants regardless of sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, religion, disability, or any other protected characteristic. No discriminatory behaviour is tolerated. Every person in our sessions is required to treat others with dignity and respect at all times — not because a policy document says so, but because the sport itself has always demanded it.
The handshake that begins every hitch, so every bout, every training drill, every moment of honest contact in the ring, is the symbol of this. In the Cornish tradition, the oath taken by every wrestler contains the words gwary whek yu gwary tek: good play is fair play. We use those words as a motto because they say, in five syllables, what it takes most organisations several paragraphs to approximate.
Our Access and Inclusion goal is direct about this too: we exist to empower anyone, regardless of creed, background, personal views, religious or cultural affiliation, race, or sexual orientation, to learn and practise the sport and to feel a sense of genuine ownership of it. This is not a target for the future. It is the standard the tradition has already set for us.
Be included
If you have ever wondered whether traditional martial arts are for you, whether age, background, experience, or anything else might make you unwelcome, we want you to know the following.
A blind Devon farmer stood in the ring in 1812 and threw the most feared wrestler in the county. The crowd carried him through the streets on their shoulders. An unnamed blind man at Maker Green got his share, and his community took offence on his behalf when anyone suggested otherwise. A Cornish farmer’s daughter taught her son wrestling and through him became an ancestor of champions.
The tradition we practise has always been bigger and broader and more generous than its reputation. Today, we work hard to be worthy of it.
National Inclusion Week runs 14–20 September 2026. We will be in the ring. You are welcome to join us.
Gwary whek yu gwary tek.