Bodging

Bodging (full name chair-bodgering ) is a traditional woodturning craft, using green (unseasoned) 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. 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.

Bodging (full name chair-bodgering ) is a traditional woodturning craft, using green (unseasoned) 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. 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. 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.-) 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 (one gross) including legs and stretchers- this would include cutting up the green wood, and turning it into blanks, then turning it". Although the last of the original itinerant bodgers were relegated to the history books in the 1950s, the subsequent revival of interest in pole lathe turning since 1980 has seen many current chairmakers now calling themselves bodgers. ==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 synonyms kludge and fudge, is serviceable: a "botched" job most certainly is not. Douglas and Lucretia Bodger were brother-and-sister characters 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. In John Winton's comic naval novels, a major character is "The Artful Bodger". Film of the dying breed of bodgers in the Chiltern Hills.

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