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History. The term was once common around the furniture-making town of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, England. Traditionally, bodgers were highly skilled wood-turners, who worked in the beech woods of the Chiltern Hills. [3][4] The term and trade also spread to Ireland and Scotland.
The earliest known use of the noun bodger is in the 1910s. OED's earliest evidence for bodger is from 1911, in the writing of G. Eland.
The earliest known use of the word bodger is in the 1940s. OED's earliest evidence for bodger is from 1940, in the Truth (Sydney). It is also recorded as a noun from the mid 1500s.
- History
- Etymology
- Tools
- Accommodation
- High Wycombe Lathe
- Working Practices
- Notable Bodgers
- Cultural References
- See Also
- External Links
The term was once common around the furniture-making town of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, England. Traditionally, 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. Chairs were made and parts turned in all parts of the UK before the semi industri...
The origins of the term are obscure. A few dozen chair leg turners around High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire are called this .
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'sor bodging tools included: 1. the polelathe and a variety of gouges and...
A bodger commonly camped in the open woods in a "bodger's hovel" or basic "lean-to"-type shelter constructed of forest-floor lengths suitable for use as poles lashed, likely with twine, together to form a simple triangular frame for a waterproof thatch roof. The "sides" of the shelter may have been enclosed in wicker or wattledmanner to keep out dr...
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 factorymethods.
Traditionally, a bodger would buy a stand of trees from a local estate, set up a place to live (his bodger's hovel) 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 ...
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 furn...
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" –...
You might find the word bodge, meaning to botch or mend clumsily. However, actually a bodger was a skilled craftsman that made chair legs and braces. The craft of bodging goes back about five hundred years but I am unaware of anyone making a living as a bodger these days.
The itinerant craftsman who made the chair legs was known as a bodger or chair-bodger. According to Collins Dictionary, the use of the term bodger in reference to green woodworking appeared between 1799 and 1827 and, to a much lesser extent, from 1877 to 1886 and from 1939 to present.
Feb 17, 2001 · Bodgers were skilled itinerant wood-turners, who worked in the beech woods on the chalk hills of the Chilterns. They cut timber and converted it into chair legs by turning it on a pole lathe, an ancient and very simple tool that uses the spring of a bent sapling to help run it.
