Finding something they love
Pictou County historical fencing club gaining popularity
Brad Richardson and Casey Marjerrison want to share their passion with Pictou County.
The couple moved to the area last year from Ontario and formed the CRABS Historical Fencing Club.
“What makes the sport unique is that there’s a bit of like archaeology to it,” Richardson said. “We’re not just making up the sword fighting. We’re trying to do it as historically accurate as possible.”
BEGINNINGS
The couple’s passion for historical fencing also led to the beginning of their love story.
Richardson got his start in the sport in Ottawa while looking for a college course to take over the summer.
“As I was flipping through the book, I saw there was a course called sword handling and I said, ‘Well, I could do something practical or I could do sword fighting,’” he said.
During his first class, Richardson was given a steel helmet and had a plastic sword broken over his head.
Through his travels, Richardson ended up in the Niagara Region of Ontario. He found a local historical fencing club and decided to join. Marjerrison was part of the club.
“On our first day, I stabbed him in the chest with a dagger and he said, “Oh, she’s the one for me,’” Marjerrison laughed.
They later opened a club in Hamilton, Ont., and attended tournaments, meeting people from across Canada and the United States.
The couple wasn’t interested in the events and nightlife that came with city living, and Marjerrison would joke she wanted to retire to Nova Scotia when the time came.
Richardson couldn’t get the idea out of his head and suggested they move to the East Coast immediately.
“We were at a point in our personal lives and our jobs that we were looking and ready for change,” he added.
“As soon as we started looking at the housing prices, it was a no-brainer. It ended up being fitting that Trenton is the birthplace of steel and Hamilton is the Steel City.”
Richardson was working in construction and was ready for a change. Marjerrison was working at McMaster University and was able to secure a job teaching physics at St. Francis Xavier University.
The couple chose Pictou County for its central location within Atlantic Canada. They love to travel and love to make friends, so being an hour or two away from everything seemed perfect.
“Food access here is so much better than Hamilton and the air – the air is wonderful,” Marjerrison said.
The couple was ready for a change of pace from busy city life.
“That’s a big part of the reason we came (here),” Richardson said. “We got married and wanted to … start our lives together.”
BUILDING THE CLUB
The club has about 20 members.
While the couple has had members as old as 72, most are between their 20s and 60s, Marjerrison said.
The club offers a free try it night and those who are interested further can then enrol in a 10-week introduction to fencing program.
“It becomes a bit of a lifestyle and a recreational sport. The hope for most people, when they join, is just like us, they find something they love doing,” Marjerrison said.
This is the first year the couple has taken on a youth program. It is for teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 years old. They can attend a try it night before signing up for a 10-week program.
“It’s been really exciting for us to see how much confidence people grow from the beginning to (the) end of 10 weeks,” Marjerrison said.
The pair wants to build a community through the club.
“We’ll travel to events and swing more swords and make more friends,” Marjerrison said. “The more you do, the more you find a like-minded community of people.”
The sport of historical fencing didn’t become popular in Western culture until the 1990s and early 2000s.
Because there is a focus on being historically accurate as possible, there are manuals that have been translated that the pair follows and teaches from.
“Some of the historical manuals are quite funny,” Richardson said. “Their depictions are not the best representation of 3D space, so there’s a lot of interpretation that goes on in the sport.”
The manuals were not widely available to the general public until they started being published on the internet. Before then most people didn’t know about them unless they had a connection to a museum that happened to have them.
Richardson expressed his appreciation for the researchers who did the translations, saying without them “the sport wouldn’t exist.”