"Rod Speed" wrote in message
...
Brian Gaff wrote

A friend of mine,no longer with use called it his bodger...

Someone I know has the name of greg bodger.

Cant imagine what his ancestors got up to for the life of me.

Presumably they lived in huts* in the woods around High Wycombe
and made Windsor Chairs.**

Bodging use to mean using a high level of skill to make
highly practical objects using a very restricted range of
tools. Unfortunately those skills didn't necessarily
incorporate very much business sense and so they never
got rich as a result.

It's only latterly that its come to mean making a Horlicks
of something.

The High Wycombe furniture business was revived in the
1920's by a chap called Lucian Ercolani. Although they
also made Windsor Chairs he wasn't himself descended
from bodgers. The clue is in the name.


michael adams

* At a time when most other yokels lived in similar or worse

** Chairs where all the joints consisted of turned ends
fitted into augered holes. And chair seats were fashioned
with spokeshaves.

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