Jon's Website

My martial arts story

Like a lot of other people I was inspired to take up martial arts by the films of the late Bruce Lee. However this was many years ago when I was 14, and my first brief foray into karate was not a great success, coinciding with a badly pulled muscle in my back, but probably more tellingly with the distractions of teenage life (which strangely seemed to persist long into my 30's...)

26 years later I finally took up karate again, after my son, Nic, started it of his own initiative, inspired by watching a seminar for the club taken by Daniel Tennant, who was a 3rd Dan at the time, and by Sensei Andy Wright giving me the encouragement I needed to make a fresh start.
I achieved my black belt in June 2002 but sadly Nic no longer trains. I'm hoping that maybe he'll take it up again when he's older.

I read a lot about the arts. Wing Chun was always of particular interest and that interest in the Chinese Arts led me on to an interest in the internal arts, Tai Chi Chuan, Bagua and Xing Yi. I had been hoping to take up a second art to complement the karate almost from the moment I started, and dabbled in Jeet Kune Do and Wushu before finally training in a mixture of Wing Chun and Warrior style Filipino Escrima on a private basis with Phil Dandridge in Chippenham. Whilst I was originally slightly alarmed to find that my karate training was of virtually no help in learning Wing Chun, I have undoubtedly become a better all-round martial artist from this training as it introduced many new elements. I had the chance to do some Tai Chi Chuan at the beginning of 2003, which was interesting, but it requires an immense amount of time put in and, with the other arts I was doing, I couldn't really make that time to do it justice...

For no particular reason I didn't train with Phil through most of 2003 but continued to train Escrima with Shaun Bolwell in the Latosa Escima Concepts system at The Martial Arts Centre in Trowbridge. I developed an interest in the Russian art of Systema and was training that as well alongside the Karate and Escrima, but it made for too diverse and packed a week so I am now happily back with Phil Dandridge training one-on-one. I purchased a Wooden Dummy in 2004, which lives in the garden.

In 2005, after a number of discussions with Phil in which he outlined the relationship between Wing Chun and other southern Shaolin styles, I ended up taking a sideways step and training in Hung Kuen at which I currently hold a green sash.

The other development in 2005 was that Phil moved away from teaching Warrior system Filipino arts and started teaching Zu'bu Kali (Yuli Romo) Ilustrisimo, for which I have now been put up for Instructor training with Peter Lewis at World HQ in Worcester, and now hold the first two grades, and Bakbakan Ilustrisimo, in which I have been fortunate enough to attend seminars with Master Rey Galang.