Before "bodger" was a name over a Colorado workshop door, it was a trade practiced by the men and women who turned chair parts by hand in the beechwoods of England.
The real bodgers worked the beech forests of the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire, England, especially around High Wycombe, from at least the early 1800s. Rather than haul heavy, unseasoned timber back to a workshop, a bodger would buy a stand of trees from a local estate and set up camp right in the woods, often little more than a thatched lean-to, turning green beech into chair legs and stretchers on a foot-powered pole lathe simple enough to build and move on site.
By the mid-1800s, nearby High Wycombe had grown into the center of English chairmaking: by the 1870s, some 150 workshops there were turning out roughly 4,700 Windsor chairs a day, and it was bodgers, working alone or in small camps out in the beechwoods, who supplied the turned legs and stretchers that fed that industry.
A bodger's camp moved with the timber. Once a stand of beech was bought from a local estate, the bodger, often with his family, would set up a temporary hut nearby (sometimes little more than a timber frame covered in turf, thatch, or an old tarpaulin), and stay for as long as that patch of woodland lasted, anywhere from a few weeks to a full season.
The work was seasonal and entirely outdoors: felling, cross-cutting into rough billets, and turning, in whatever weather the Chilterns offered. Many bodgers worked in father-and-son pairs, or with a wife handling finishing and stacking while the men kept the lathe turning. The trade passed down the way most rural crafts did: by watching, and by doing it badly a few hundred times before doing it well.
Before a billet ever touched the lathe, it was roughed into an octagon on a shave horse, sometimes called a "bodger's mare," a simple foot-clamped bench that let a bodger hold the wood steady with one foot while shaping it with a draw knife.
The lathe itself was a spring-pole lathe: a treadle below, a cord wrapped around the workpiece, and a springy pole or sapling overhead that pulled the cord (and the wood) back after every downward stroke of the foot. It only cut on the push, half the time a modern lathe spends cutting, but it needed no engine, no belt, and nothing that couldn't be built or repaired with what was already standing in the woods.
Bodgers turned their legs and stretchers from freshly felled, unseasoned ("green") beech, not because it was easier to find, but because it was easier to cut. Green wood gives way under a turning tool almost the way clay gives way under a potter's hands; the same billet, left to dry for a season first, would have fought the tools every inch of the way. The rough-turned parts were left to season afterward, so that by the time they reached a chair factory in High Wycombe, the joints could be assembled dry and tight, a detail that had as much to do with why old Windsor chairs held together for generations as any glue or joinery did.
None of it was measured with calipers. A bodger judged a leg's diameter by eye and by the feel of the tool against the spinning wood, working fast enough to turn a full day's output and accurately enough that the tenon on the end of that leg would still seat properly in its socket weeks later, after the wood had moved. That combination of speed and precision, achieved without a single powered machine, is most of what made the work a trade rather than simple labor.
Bodgers sold their output by the gross, 144 matching legs or stretchers, to agents or directly to the chair factories in town. A skilled bodger could turn out a full gross in a single day, but it was piecework in the truest sense: no piece, no pay, and a bad run of timber (knotty, twisted, or split) cost him time he'd never bill for. Despite the skill the work demanded, wages lagged well behind most other rural trades of the period, in part because so much of a chair's final value was captured downstream, once the factories had assembled, finished, and sold it.
That arrangement, skilled hand work at the bottom of the chain and value captured at the top, wasn't unique to bodging. It's a big part of why the trade eventually gave way once the factories found ways to bring turning in-house.
The trade faded as factories mechanized the work: powered lathes, and eventually entire mechanized turning shops, let High Wycombe manufacturers bring leg and stretcher production in-house, cutting the itinerant woodland bodger out of a supply chain he had once been central to. It effectively ended with the death of Samuel Rockall in 1962, one of the last professional bodgers, whose work in the woods had been filmed not long before.
Decades later, the pole-lathe craft he practiced was taken up again by hobbyists and professional turners who still call themselves bodgers today, drawn less by economic necessity than by the same thing that pulls a lot of woodworkers into a workshop in the first place: doing something well, by hand, the slow way.
In contemporary British English slang, bodging can also refer to a job done of necessity using whatever tools and materials come to hand.
Watch: Film of the Dying Breed of Bodgers in the Chiltern Hills →
Working wood by hand, one piece at a time, with whatever timber and tools are actually at hand: that's the thread connecting a beechwood camp in the Chilterns to a one-person shop in Conifer, Colorado.
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