Fairbairn's technique is a genuine life-saver. His pistol-shooting method may now have been superceded, but the hand-to-hand stuff is as valid today as ever. He coined the word 'defendu' for a discipline which was an amalgam of the various martial arts techniques which were most likely to incapacitate someone, and his methods were used to good effect by his officers of the Shanghai Municipal Police.
His work ( and later collaborative training developed with Bill Sykes) still forms the backbone of most British and US military self-defence techniques.