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High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, England
- 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.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodging
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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.
A short guide to bodging - a bodger was a skilled craftsman that made chair legs and braces. A woodland skill where tools like a pole lathe were used.
- 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" –...
During the 19th Century hundreds of bodgers set up lathes in the woods around High Wycombe where they would turn legs and stretcher rails for chairs from green timber. Chair-bodgers were also to be found in many other areas of England and Wales, but were most prevalent in Buckinghamshire.
Oct 13, 2004 · ARTIST Michael Myers hushes his voice when he speaks about the legendary Bodgers who lived in shacks in the woods around High Wycombe when it was a thriving furniture town in the 40s and 50s. To Michael, the woods behind his home in Melbourne Road were his "streets", and contained secrets that were to fascinate him to this day, decades later.
Many woods in the Chilterns were left to grow into stands of tall beech trees. This then became the resource for bodgers (those who turned chair parts on pole lathes), with chairmaking and other woodworking industries centred on High Wycombe and Chesham.
The local bodgers worked in Hampden Woods, after the Parish Woodlands in Loosley Row, Lacey Green and Speen had been felled. A very few small pockets of trees still survived but they were privately owned.
