Bit obscure but this might interest some members. https://www.academia.edu/5365515/Wrestling_and_Cinema_1892_1911?email_work_card=view-paper

Real life experience only ( not something on the telly ) but it could have been in one of those smoky halls or perhaps meeting one of our heroes in the local shop. For me it's no contest. I had read and heard so much about Bert Assirati and when he walked to the ring and climbed through the ropes just a few feet away I had to pinch myself. The sheer presence of the man. Of course in reality what I was seeing was a fat old bloke right at the end of his career but nothing will ever take away the sense of awe that I felt all those years ago.

Wrestling has never had a very good press so I was surprised to see a sympathetic piece in, of all things, the quite posh London Review of Books. You can read it online here. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n24/tom-crewe/diary

For a long time it was a given that pro wrestling was based on a Lancashire style of submission catch as catch can that was later exported to the USA and further refined by the "carni" wrestlers with their repertoire of hooks. Here in UK the style was preserved in pit-top wrestling matches until emerging in it's theatrical form in 1930. The pure form of catch was preserved in the Wigan Snake Pit and the likes of Bert Assirati and Karl Gotch beat a path to the door to learn the secrets. It's a version of history that has really done the rounds. Billy Robinson talks about it in his Scientific Wrestling videos, it's the central theme of the excellent "Catch.The hold not taken" film and has been written about time without number. Why, I have to admit to writing about Lancashire submission catch myself and telling students about it back in the day when I was teaching martial arts. Repeat a story often enough....... But is there any truth in any of this? Did submission holds only make an appearance here with the arrival of Japanese jujitsu masters in the 19th century? Was submission catch just another sting in the wonderful smoke and mirrors world of wrestling? Come on guys. You must have given this some thought.

The tribute in this weeks newsletter to JoeD'Orazio mentioned his taking over from Charles Mascall in the Dale Martin set up and that got me thinking again about a question that I asked on here some years ago. Who was Charles Mascall? Back in the 50's young fans like myself learned just about everything we knew about wrestling history from this man's writing. But he remains a bit of a mystery. Where did he come from? How did he come to be involved with Dale Martin? Was he an ex wrestler? He just seems to have appeared as a fully formed wrestling expert in the post-war years. Someone must know something.