Terry wingrove biography

Vernon Bell was the founder of the karate movement in Britain. During the Fifties he began to train in the martial art in a dojo in Paris, and founded the British Karate Federation from his parents' house in London. It was the first organisation of its kind, and paved the way for the introduction of different forms of Japanese karate to this country.

It was during this time that he began to learn judo from a fellow-serviceman. Involved with the Health and Strength League, he opened a barbell club, and became a founder member of the Amateur Judo Association. He left the bank and began a course to become a PE teacher, but quit early because of financial pressures and took work as an encyclopaedia salesman.

(Terry's Biography is attached).

In he became a professional judo instructor. He then began to train with Kenshiro Abbe, one of Japan's greatest judo masters. At this time he also held Dan grades in ju-jitsu. In the mid-Fifties, fascinated by a photograph in a magazine of a Japanese karateka breaking wood with a kick, Bell began periodically to travel to Paris to train with Henri Plee, who is widely recognised as the pioneer of karate in Europe, and Hiroo Mochizuki, from the Yoseikan, an extremely highly regarded dojo in Japan.

On April 1, , having become the first Briton to hold a black belt in karate, Bell formed the British Karate Federation, which was initially affiliated to the Federation Francaise de Karate. The first newspaper reports and demonstrations of British karate appeared that year, as did the first television broadcast, when ITN showed a two-minute film on the evening of July 22, , of Bell and his students training in the garden of his parents' house in Hornchurch.

The federation gave a large number of demonstrations to promote the new art, but Bell always looked for quality, not quantity, in future students and would operate stringent selection criteria. Numbers remained remarkably small, with only 56 students known to have been members by the end of It initially attracted ten students.

In August that year, Bell attended the first European Karate Union meeting in Paris and trained with Tetsuji Murakami, whom he later invited to teach a basic form of the Shotokan discipline for the British federation. In the British group also became a member of the International Karate Federation.