In this episode, we explore how another lost skill got turned into an insult, and why that’s never a good idea…
Continuing on with that topic of ‘lost skills’, there’s another old and now almost-forgotten skill that in some ways is the male counterpart of the spinster: the bodger.
To quote the Wikipedia page, “bodgers were highly skilled wood-turners, who worked in the beech woods of the Chiltern Hills” west of London, in England, and who used “using green (unseasoned) wood to make chair legs and other cylindrical parts of chairs”. And all of the work was done on a clever and beautifully simple piece of technology that’s called a ‘pole-lathe’.
The somewhat-bodged (we’ll come back to that word in a moment) example in the photograph above does illustrate the overall principle, but is made with a metal frame and sawn-timber and screws and elastic and all sorts of other modern stuff, whilst the original was much simpler than that. Back then, if you knew what you were doing, the only things you’d need would be a small axe, a sharp knife or ‘shaping-blade’, and a few pieces of string or the like: everything else you would make on the spot, from the materials right there to hand in the forest.
When that kind of forest is properly maintained, beech-coppice produces a cluster of long, straight, even, consistent, vertical branches, often up to ten feet long, that are exactly the right size and thickness to cut up into chair-legs and the spacers for chair-backs. But to make those items properly, and to keep the weight down, those pieces need to be shaped and tapered at each end, and perhaps given some decoration - and that’s where the pole-lathe comes into the story.
Everything’s done right there in the forest. To do the actual wood-turning, all you need is a piece of string wrapped around the cut length of wood that you want to shape. If the piece of wood is then placed between two holes, or between two pins, and you pull on either end of the string, that piece of wood is going to rotate; and while it’s rotating, you can gently press the shaping-blade into it, and shape the wood.
So to produce the power to pull on the string, you attach one end of the string to a treadle that you’d make from another piece of wood, that you tread on for the downstroke; and you’d attach of the other end of string to the mid-point of another string that’s stretched between two tall springy poles, where the string pulls them towards each other on the downstroke, and they spring apart again to power the upstroke.
The whole thing is very light, and simple to make and to pull apart again, because it’s all just lashed together with notches and pieces of string or whatever. And when you’ve used up all the coppice-timber in the immediate vicinity to make your chair-legs, you either carry the whole contraption to the next part of the forest, or make a new one when you get there; there’s no waste at all.
The catch, of course, is that the work of a bodger takes a lot of skill to do all of this well, and to create good-quality product - and also do it all fast enough to make a decent living from it, too.
And that’s where the other meaning of bodge comes into the story, because if our skill as the bodger is low, and we don’t do it well, then the end-result is going to be wonky, clunky, a poor fit, badly-made, all those other adjectives that describe poor-quality work. Verbs, too: to botch, bungle, blunder, butcher, blow-up, balls-up, bumble, bollix or bodge - anyone who fails not just at bodging, but at any skill, they’ll all get described as a bodger.
In short, the same word used to describe both very high skill, and very low skill.
Awkward…
Yet since the role and tasks of the old chair-bodger has long since been de-skilled and forgotten, nowadays it’s only the low-skill meaning that still remains. Which is kind of unfair, really, because it makes it so hard to recognise the very real skill of the chair-bodger, because that term has become so tainted.
Kind of unfair, and also kind of sad.
Oh well.
A couple of useful points we could draw from this, perhaps.
One is that de-skilling through automation can sometimes lead to a tendency to denigrate the previous skill as somehow a failure, as no skill at all - which is most definitely untrue, and also most definitely unfair. We need to watch against that tendency, and instead to respect the work that went into the previous skill. And we also need to beware of that risk that I mentioned in the ‘Spinster’ episode, that the wrong use of automation can block the path via which we learn new skills, and leave everyone stranded with no way to work their out of the mess when the technology breaks down.
And yes, we need to remember too that not all technologies need to be the super-whizbang high-tech shiny toys that we see on all those TV ads: sometimes the technology we need is something we can assemble with ease just from the everyday things that are already around us. So yeah, when (not ‘if’) all those merrily-globalised only-manufactured-in-one-place-in-the-world supply-chains start to break down, and those super-duper-chips and shiny toys that we depend on at present are suddenly no longer available to us any more, it may well be that those skills and simple technologies of the bodger and his ilk could become what we most need in that moment - and that that’s a lesson and a warning that we all need to take action on right now.
Tom, just a quick thought on your current episode. Current activity on the Sun is generating large solar flares which have the potential to impact our current technologies in an adverse manner.
Would be interesting to see how solution architects would reverse engineer current shiny toys back to a manual version if these solar flares reduce our technological capabilities to a large paper weight.