By Rafe Calder
A gross is 144. In the Chiltern beech woods, a bodger was reckoned to have a job done when he had piled up a gross of chair legs and the stretchers to go with them.
That is the sort of fact the sources give, and it says something about the trade. It was counted, not admired.
What a Windsor is
Wikipedia’s article on the Windsor chair says it has a solid wooden seat, often carved into a shallow saddle. The back legs and the back uprights are not continuous. The legs and the back are round-tenoned, or pushed into drilled holes, so the seat does the structural work. Legs, stretchers and spindles were traditionally turned on a pole lathe. The back, and sometimes the arms, are steam-bent, which gives the bow. Traditional Windsors are usually painted, partly to hide the mix of woods.
The woods differ by part. The article says English chairs typically use elm for the seat, because of its interlocking grain. It names maple for the undercarriage in some chairs, because it turns crisply, and oak, ash and hickory for spindles and bows, because they split and bend well. The Amersham Museum’s page on chairmaking in the Chilterns says typical woods there were ash and beech with an elm seat, and that yew could also be used. It adds that Chiltern legs were slender, and Midlands ones more bulbous.
Where the name comes from
Wikipedia says the exact origin is unclear. It says the modern design appeared in England by the 16th century, when wheelwrights began coping out spindles as they shaped wheel spokes, and that it probably developed from West Country, Welsh and Irish stick-back chairs. The name may come from the Berkshire town of Windsor, a trading centre between producers and London dealers. Amersham Museum says something different in emphasis: “Windsor” describes the construction method, not the design, and it defines a Windsor as, in effect, a stool with an added back. We report both.
Three trades
Wikipedia says three craftsmen traditionally made a chair. The bodger made legs and stretchers on a pole lathe. The benchman made seats, back splats and sawn parts. The framer assembled and finished the chair.
What a bodger did
The second Wikipedia article, on bodging, calls a bodger an itinerant craftsman who turned chair legs and other round parts from green wood, working close to where the tree fell. The method it describes: cut the felled tree into billets about the length of a chair leg, split them with a wedge, rough-shape them with an axe, refine them with a drawknife, and finish them on the pole lathe. Other tools were gouges, chisels, a coarse saw, adzes and a shave horse. The lathe was often made on site, and the article says the High Wycombe lathe, with a wooden bed, was the preferred type until the 1960s. Finished parts were piled to season until a quota was reached, usually a gross of legs plus stretchers. Three stretchers went with each set of four legs.
The Chilterns Conservation Board, a heritage and landscape body, says bodgers worked in the woods with foot-powered pole lathes, supplying turned parts to workshops and factories in and around High Wycombe.
The word
Wikipedia says the origin of “bodge” is uncertain. The modern trade sense first appears around 1910, Johnson’s 1766 dictionary has a related older meaning of hesitating, and the Oxford English Dictionary’s 1972 supplement lists “bodger” as a Buckinghamshire dialect term for a chair-leg turner. Amersham Museum adds that the workers did not use the name for themselves.
How big the trade was
The Chilterns Conservation Board says chairmaking in the Chilterns goes back at least to the 17th century, that High Wycombe was becoming the leading centre in Britain by the mid-19th century, and that by 1877 there were 150 workshops producing 4,700 chairs a day. Amersham Museum gives a different series for the same area: four chair factories in 1790, 20 in 1830 and 100 in 1877. One source counts workshops, the other factories, and we do not reconcile them. A talk listing from a Buckinghamshire heritage group says chairmaking began as a woodland craft and grew into an industry because of nearby beech and transport links to London and Oxford. Wikipedia’s bodging article says about 30 bodgers were working around High Wycombe in the early twentieth century.
The other hands
The Chilterns Conservation Board says that by the end of the nineteenth century many women worked in the chair industry caning and rushing seats, a job called matting. Amersham Museum says girls made the rush seats, and that the work was labour-intensive, with child apprentices and some workers part-paid in tokens.
The end of it
Wikipedia says the last original itinerant bodgers largely disappeared in the 1950s and the trade died out in the 1960s. The Chilterns Conservation Board names one man, Sam Rockall, who died in 1962, as the last of the Chilterns bodgers. Wikipedia says that since 1980 pole-lathe turning has revived, and that many chairmakers now call themselves bodgers.
Dates in order
- 16th century: the modern design in England, according to Wikipedia.
- 17th century: Chilterns chairmaking, at least, according to the Chilterns Conservation Board.
- 1718: earliest known reference to a Windsor chair, according to Wikipedia.
- 1724: first steam-bent chairs shipped to London from Windsor, according to Wikipedia.
- 1790, 1830, 1877: four, 20 and 100 factories, according to Amersham Museum.
- 1877: 150 workshops and 4,700 chairs a day, according to the Chilterns Conservation Board.
- 1962: Sam Rockall dies, according to the Chilterns Conservation Board and Wikipedia.
- 1980 onward: pole-lathe revival, according to Wikipedia.
Side by side
The 1877 figure is 150 workshops in one source and 100 factories in another. The origin of the name is a town in one account and a construction method in another. Our reading: the trade was small shops and big sheds at once, so both counts may be true of different things. That is our inference, and neither source says it.
What kind of sources these are
Wikipedia, which anyone can edit; a heritage and landscape body; a local museum’s research page; and an event listing. We read no furniture museum catalogue and no chairmaker’s page.
Questions a buyer would ask
Which parts are turned and which are carved? What is the seat made of, and what are the legs and bow? Is the chair painted, and if so what is under the paint? Was it made by one person or a team? We give no prices, no names of makers and no care advice.
What we left out
We left out the 1908 rates of pay and the 242-turnings sum, because the figures did not reconcile with the rest of the article. We left out American Windsors, the list of seven back forms and anything about a living chairmaker.
Quick answers
What is a bodger? According to Wikipedia, an itinerant craftsman who turned chair legs and other round parts from green wood near where the tree was felled, using a pole lathe, in the Chiltern beech woods.
Why is it called a Windsor chair? Wikipedia says the name may come from the Berkshire town of Windsor, a trading centre between producers and London dealers. It says the exact origin is unclear.
How is the bow of a Windsor chair made? Wikipedia says the back, and sometimes the arms, are steam-bent wood, which forms the bow; the legs and back are pushed into drilled holes in a solid seat.
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Roam first. Shop later.