Brief History of the Darlington Dojo

Darlington Kobudo was born out of the aspiration that Sensei Fred Bateman had to become an all round martial artist. He started in Martial Arts back in 1985 with the empty hand Karate style known as Anshin Ryu. So it was only a matter of time before he would eventually discover the weapon’s art of Kobudo. Like most martial artist he was buying magazines and reading them with interest. These were planting the “kobudo” seed, reading articles of practitioners handling weapons, such as Bo, Nunchaku and Sai. So Sensei Bateman set out to learn something about these Okinawan weapons. Initially this came from books on individual weapons and some seminars given by Karate instructors. He also purchased a few videos, which taught him “how not to do it”. So he decided to find an instructor that could teach him, but not just in a seminar format, he wanted a constant progressive training regime in a particular style.

So in 1993 he set out to find this style and his searches lead him to a system that was based around Matayoshi Kobudo.

This allowed him to open a dojo here in Darlington in North East of England. In fact the Darlington dojo was the second in England to be teaching kobudo that was based upon Matayoshi Ryu. Within the next two years, Sensei Bateman went to Okinawa and trained under Kacho Kinjo Sensei. It was during this trip in September of 1998 that he was graded to 2nd Dan.