Bodging
Bodging is a traditional woodturning craft, using green wood to make chair legs and other cylindrical parts of chairs. The work was done close to where a tree was felled. The itinerant craftsman who made the chair legs was known as a bodger or chair-bodger.
History
The term was once common around the furniture-making town of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, England. Bodgers were highly skilled wood-turners, who worked in the beech woods of the Chiltern Hills.The term and trade also spread to Ireland and Scotland.
The term was always confined to High Wycombe until the recent revival of pole lathe turning with many chairmakers around the country now calling themselves bodgers. Chairs were made and parts turned in all parts of the UK before the semi industrialised production of High Wycombe. As well recorded in Cotton the English Regional Chair
Bodgers also sold their waste product as kindling, or as exceptionally durable woven-baskets.
Chair bodgers were one of three types of craftsmen associated with the making of the traditional country "Windsor Chairs". Of the other craftsmen involved in the construction of a Windsor chair, one was the benchman who
worked in a small town or village workshop and would produce the seats, backsplats and other sawn parts. The final craftsman involved was the framer. The framer would take the components produced by the bodger and the benchman and would assemble and finish the chair.
In the early years of the 20th century, there were about 30 chair bodgers scattered within the vicinity of the High Wycombe furniture trade. Although there was great camaraderie and kinship amongst this close community nevertheless a professional eye was kept upon what each other was doing. Most important to the bodger was which company did his competitors supply and at what price.
Bodger Samuel Rockall's account book for 1908 shows he was receiving 19 shillings for a gross of plain legs including stretchers. With three stretchers to a set of four legs this amounted to 242 turnings in total.
Another account states: "a bodger worked ten hours a day, six concurrent days a week, in all weathers, only earning thirty shillings a week"
The rate of production was surprisingly high. According to Ronald Goodearl, who photographed two of the last professional bodgers, Alec and Owen Dean, in the late 1940s, recalled they had stated "each man would turn out 144 parts per day including legs and stretchers- this would include cutting up the green wood, and turning it into blanks, then turning it".
Etymology
The origins of the term are obscure. There is no known etymology of the modern term bodger that refers to skilled woodworkers. It first appears, and only applied to a few dozen turners around High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. The Oxford English Dictionary Supplement of 1972 has two definitions for bodger, one is a local dialect word from Buckinghamshire, for chair leg turner. The other is Australian slang for bad workmanship. The etymology of the bodger and botcher are well recorded from Shakespeare onwards, and now the two terms are synonymous.In Samuel Johnson's dictionary of the English language published in 1766, the Shakespearean use of the word "bodged", means to "boggle". According to Johnson "boggle" is another word for hesitate.
Other definitions of the word bodge taken from Robert Hunter's "The encyclopædic dictionary", suggest that it could also be a corruption of "botch", meaning "patch". or a measurement of capacity equivalent to half a peck - equal to.
There is a hypothesis that bodges, defined as rough sacks of corn, closely resembled packages of finished goods the bodgers carried when they left the forest or workshop. Another hypothesis is that bodger was a corruption of badger, as similarly to the behaviour of a badger, the bodger dwelt in the woods and seldom emerged until evenings.
Other hypotheses about its origin include the German word Böttcher, and similar Scandinavian words, such the Danish name Bødker. These words have similar origins to the English word butt, as in water butt.
Tools
The bodger's equipment was so easy to move and set up that it was easier to go to the timber and work it there than to transport it to a workshop. The completed chair legs were sold to furniture factories to be married with other chair parts made in the workshop.Common bodger's or bodging tools included:
- the polelathe and a variety of chisels, and likely sharpening stones or grinding wheel for honing the rapidly blunted tools
- a coarse saw: for cutting fallen or newly felled wood to length
- axes and adzes: for hewing wood into rough billets
- a shave horse to firmly hold the wooden billets for using the drawknife
Accommodation
High Wycombe lathe
High-Wycombe lathe became a commonly used generic term to describe any wooden-bed pole lathe, irrespective of user or location, and remained the bodger's preferred lathe until the 1960s when the trade died out, losing to the more cost-effective and rapid mechanised mass production factory methods.Working practices
Traditionally, a bodger would buy a stand of trees from a local estate, set up a place to live and work close to trees.After felling a suitable tree, the bodger would cut the tree into billets, approximately the length of a chair leg. The billet would then be split using a wedge. Using the side-axe, he would roughly shape the pieces into chair legs. The drawknife would farther refine the leg shape. The finishing stage was turning the leg with the pole lathe. Once the leg or stretchers were finished, being of "green" wood, they required seasoning. Chair legs would be stored in piles until the quota was complete. The bodger would then take their work to one of the large chair-making centres. The largest consumer of the day was the High Wycombe Windsor chair industry.
There were traditionally two other types of craftsmen involved in the construction of a Windsor chair. There was the benchman who worked in a workshop and would produce the seats, backsplats and other sawn parts. Then there was the framer who would take the components produced by the bodger and the benchman. The framer would assemble and finish the chair. After completion the chairs were sold on to dealers, mainly in the market town of Windsor, Berkshire, which is possibly how the name "Windsor Chair" originated.
Notable bodgers
Samuel Rockall learnt the trade from his uncle, Jimmy Rockall. At the age of 61, Samuel was almost the last of the living chair bodgers. Rockall’s bodging tradition was captured on film shortly after he died in 1962. His two sons helped in the reconstruction of his working life in the woods and his workshop. The colour film was produced by the furniture manufacturer Parker Knoll and follows the complete process using Sam’s own tools and equipment. A film copy is available at the Wycombe Museum.Cultural references
In contemporary British English slang, bodging can also refer to a job done of necessity using whatever tools and materials come to hand and which, whilst not necessarily elegant, is nevertheless serviceable. Bodged should not be confused with a "botched" job: a poor, incompetent or shoddy example of work, deriving from the mediaeval word "botch" – a bruise or carbuncle, typically in the field of DIY, though often in fashion magazines to describe poorly executed cosmetic surgery. A "bodge", like its cognates kludge and fudge, is serviceable: a "botched" job most certainly is not.Bodger was the name of a character in the comic strip 'Flook', which appeared in the U.K. Daily Mail newspaper in the 1950s and 1960s.
Bodger is the name of a dog in The Incredible Journey.
Wycombe Wanderers Football Club's official mascot is a man called 'Bodger', referring to the club's record goalscorer Tony Horseman. He had earned the moniker from supporters through being employed in the town's furniture industry, but admitted in an interview after his playing career that he had never worked as an itinerant turner in the woods.
A character named Bodger is the protagonist in the British children's television programme Bodger & Badger and is himself involved in handiwork.