Made by Hand…and Leg
This guy at a village fair eyed me up and down. With a befuddled look on his face, his gaze moved to the contraption I was leaning on like a straw-chewing farmer on a lunch-time break.
‘Is that a guillotine?’ he said, scratching his chin. And so begins our beguiling journey into antiquity and kookiness that is a pole lathe.
These ancient contraptions with roots lost in the sawdust of time were the tools of bodgers, the itinerant woodworkers from 17th century Buckinghamshire who made chair parts from trees in the woods, emerging only after the sun had set on a day of hard graft.
Some say this is where the bodgers got their name, their profession being a corruption of ‘badger’, that stripy-headed, ill-tempered combination of wombat and Tasmanian devil that snuffles around English woodlands and gardens at night.
Others say the bodgers are responsible for the badge of dishonour bestowed upon fly-by-night tradies who build houses without roofs and other ‘bodgie
