KAPAP UK and Sweden team survival weekend with Alex Mair ex Royal Marine unarmed combat instructor

This time our adventure took us up to bonny Scotland to catch up with Gary Higham of the KAPAP Lanarkshire team to do a weekend survival craft course headed up by Alex Mair ex Royal Marines. Alex is a third generation down from the infamous Fairbairn Sykes military unarmed combat instructor school of World War II. Which trained SOE (Special Operations Executive) and Commando units to take the fight to the Germans.

So after a long arduous trip to Scotland (maybe not a good move traveling on a Bank Holiday Friday) we eventually got there late and we sit down to an interesting lecture regarding survival knives and how to pick the right blade for the job. After which Alex displayed some of his huge collection of over 200 knives which he’d accumulated over the years.

Day 1 after a short trek to the harbor area, business begins with numerous lectures on camp site selection. This covered different types of fires, shelters, water procurement techniques, demonstrations on how to clear an LZ (helicopter landing zone) and international and NATO SOS signals. Once this was complete we set about building our shelter which turned out to be one big community effort in which we learned that the key skill to shelter building is team work and conserving energy and trust me it’s very tiring. After several hours of battering though Scottish pine with my trusty Ontario machete, which thanks to Alex Mair’s knowledge, turned out to be perfect for the job we had a shelter which was fit for royalty. Being a ex infantry soldier I preferred the more tactical approach and bashed up in my low profile hide, old habits die hard it seems.

Day 2 Kit packed away and yes we were off for an 8 mile force march to the next location. A bit of a shock for some of the lads who were not used to carrying weight and quite a brisk pace. Reminded me of doing the good old army ICFT Individual Combat Fitness test. Without the platoon weapons and not up against the clock either, but was still fairly tough going.

Fairbairn Sykes unarmed combat

Time for a bit of back to grass routes training and working with Alex Mair who served 28 years in the Royal Marines as an instructor. His specialty unarmed combat, perfect for us KAPAP types. Anybody who has studied a combative style of martial artists William Fairburn and Eric Sykes are the original masters of CQB who turned unarmed combat into a science and was used to such great effect proving itself on the battlefield tiem and again its now used as a benchmark for most modern day combatives.

The thought process behind the system is to work with the stress response, when heart rate is elevated. Blood goes to your muscles ready for the fight or flight response. The brain is not so well oxygenated so the human body can only perform gross motor moves, at the expense of fine motor skills which are well proven to fail under moments of stress.

Any easy way of explaining things and one of the major failings of traditional martial arts is that they do not pressure test enough and continue to teach things that even they know don’t work well but continue with them because it’s in the syllabus. Why go ABCD etc when you can simplify and just go AB. Or keep working with KISS (Keep It Super Simple). As we say with KAPAP â€techniques fail under pressure but principles don’t.

So my new project is to research the Fairbairn Skyes under the the guidance of Alex Mair one of the few seen it, done it ex Royal Marine unarmed combat instructors.