While I would agree that the verb to "bodge" has the connotation of doing shoddy work, I have neither read nor heard of a shoddy worker ever being described as a "bodger". Sounds like Guardian new-speak to me.

As Mark has said, a bodger was a turner using a pole lathe. They were not chairmakers, they were turners pure and simple. They supplied the chairmaking industry with the components of a chair, legs, stretchers etc. and they worked in green (unseasoned) wood. They were mostly based in the beech forests of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire which was the centre of furniture making in England.

One possible explanation of why "bodging" came to be synonymous with poor quality work may lie in the fact that the spindle diameters and the corresponding bored holes do not have to match exactly, the movement of the wood across the grain as it dried provided a sound mechanical joint, and this was very much a matter of "eyeballing ", so I suspect that "bodging " a job originally meant doing it "near enough" instead of measuring precisely, and that the term later came to mean poor quality work of any description.

Btw, anyone who has not seen a pole lathe in action should try to see a demonstration by a bodger at a craft fair. It is one of the great low-tech inventions.

Murray