Bodging

Bodging is a traditional woodturning craft, using green (unseasoned) wood to make chair legs and other cylindrical parts of chairs.

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 (post 1980) 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 (228 pence) for a gross (144 units) 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" (360 pence=£1.10s.-)

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