John Waller

John Waller (12 August 1940 – 20 April 2018) was an English pioneer of the historical European martial arts (HEMA) revival, a fight director for stage, screen and spectacle, and a teacher of martial arts.

Biography He was born in Welling, at that time in the London Borough of Bexley. His father, John William Waller, was a veterinary surgeon in the 1st Battalion, the Middlesex Regiment, and was captured by the Japanese at the Fall of Hong Kong in December 1941. Father and son did not meet until after the father's liberation by the Soviet Red Army at the end of World War II. Waller's childhood was disrupted by his parents' divorce and many house moves; he attended nine schools. He left full-time education at 16, and had various jobs.

He had always been interested in history, and was inspired as a teenager by three Hollywood historical films: Ivanhoe (1952), Knights of the Round Table (1953) and Quentin Durward (1955), all directed by Richard Thorpe and starring Robert Taylor, which form an unofficial trilogy. He became interested in the Middle Ages; not as book history, but as to how people lived and thought, especially the concept of knightly honour. He began to make replicas of historical weapons and armour, and set out on a lifelong quest to understand how they were used and how effective they were. At the age of 16, he took up archery (preferring field archery over target shooting). In 1960, he met Rosemary Atkinson at Bromley Archery Club, in London. They shared the same interests, and married two years later. Their only son, Jonathan, was born in 1970.

In 1963, he was recruited to run the archery department of the specialist sporting goods store Lillywhites in Regent Street, London. The same year, he was a founding member of the Medieval Society, the first of the now-many period-specific historical reenactment societies; specifically, for medieval reenactment. They had several obstacles to overcome: from the disdain of professional historians for the idea of amateur reenactment, through the difficulty of acquiring authentic clothing, armour and weapons when the only suppliers were theatrical costumiers,