According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the wayzgoose was originally an entertainment given by a master-printer to his workmen to mark the beginning of the season of working by candlelight. In later use, it meant an annual festivity held in summer by the employees of a printing establishment, consisting of a dinner and (usually) an excursion into the country. Traditionally this was held on or around 24 August, Bartholomew-tide. Bartholomew Fair, familiar from the title of the play by Ben Jonson, was the main charter fair in the quarter of the City of London home to the book trade, and Bartholomew is the patron saint of bookbinders and all leather-workers (amongst other things). Coincidentally, this is also the date in 1456 on which Gutenberg completed his bible. Over time, however, the date of the wayzgoose varied to any day in late summer.
A notice for an OUP wayzgoose held in July 1900 – it’s worth bearing in mind that printers (and most people engaged in industrial labour at this time) usually worked at weekends, or at the very least until lunchtime on Saturday.
The origin of the term wayzgoose is not entirely clear. Earlier evidence of the word suggests it was originally waygoose, without the z. The earliest evidence for waygoose in the OED is from William Robert Scott’s Records of a Scottish Cloth Manufactory at New Mills, Haddingtonshire (1682) – ‘To write to the master to give the servants there way-gouse the night befor the fareiday of Haddington and bestow upon itt 15 s. sterling’. The spelling with the z is not found until the late nineteenth century, with one exception, Nathaniel Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary of 1731. Bailey believed that the word stemmed from the meaning of wayz as a bundle of straw or stubble, hence wayz-goose or stubble-goose. In the nineteenth century people began using Bailey’s spelling alongside the traditional waygoose, and it seems to have stuck. A further theory was that a stubble-goose was served at the holiday’s feast, although no link has been proven.
The editors of the first edition of the OED were keen to ascertain the correct etymology. With the Press print shop on their doorstep, they had an obvious source of information to tap. Dictionary archives show that in 1923 OUP’s head printer Frederick Hall wrote to OED editor William Craigie about the origin of the term wayz-goose; an image of the letter can be seen here. Hall’s successor John Johnson wrote again in 1930, this time to supplement editor Charles Onions about the variant spelling wayze-goose. Neither response was particularly enlightening.
In the end, the editors erred on the side of caution and gave a summary of the various theories in their etymology of the word. They stated, however, that Bailey’s assumptions, and also the link to the eating of a stubble-goose, seemed unlikely. The entry featured in the fascicle for ‘wavy-wezzon’, published in July 1926.
The dictionary slips for the etymology can be seen below. The last passage about the wake-goose spelling (and its possible link to the dialect verb wake, meaning to work by artificial light) was omitted from the published version, presumably due to lack of evidence. Harry Carter’s History of Oxford University Press (1975) does refer to the print shop holiday as a wake-goose however, quoting rules of the Bible Press from 1709 with reference to ‘Christmas, Easter, and the Wake-goose’. This is interesting in terms of Oxford, because two other uses of wake to refer to a feast are locally relevant. St Giles’ Fair has taken place for many centuries, reputedly since at least the sixteenth, taking place on the days following the patron’s feast day. Coupled with the post industrial revolution sense of an annual factory holiday, this certainly makes wake an interesting term in relation to OUP. The ‘wake-goose’ form remains unrevised, and we look forward to seeing what the modern editors of the dictionary find out in good time.
In any case, wayzgoose events at OUP seemed to be jolly and sometimes raucous affairs. In 1919, in the first issue of the staff magazine The Clarendonian, a potted history is given. It begins ‘Prior to the year 1851 the Wayzgoose was an afternoon affair at some local inn…followed by a supper, which, if the accounts given by our seniors are to be trusted, did not invariably end in harmony.’ It goes on to say that the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the opening up of the railways led to the wayzgoose becoming more of a holiday than a day trip. An extract given from a local newspaper for the 1854 wayzgoose states ‘On Saturday, July 15, the men and boys employed on the Bible Side of the University Press enjoyed their annual holiday. The former, through the liberality of their employers and by an arrangement with the Great Western and the South Western Railway Companies, were enabled to spend a day or two on the sea-shore, arriving at Portsmouth about noon on Saturday and returning on the Monday evening following’.
In addition to those wayzgoose trips made on the railways, many were made by road, usually by charabanc, another evocative and half-forgotten word, but one with a much simpler etymology. It originates from the French char-à-bancs meaning benched carriage, as the vehicle contained rows of benched seats. Originally charabancs were pulled by horses, but motorised versions later emerged. They were usually open-topped, sometimes with a folding canvas roof, and were synonymous with seaside trips, sight-seeing and work outings in the early twentieth century. By the 1920s they were replaced with motor coaches more resembling their modern equivalent but the use of ‘sharra’ to describe them continued well into the 1960s and beyond.
Departmental excursions at the Press remained popular until the 1960s, when a trip to the country or seaside by bus or train became less appealing. The wayzgoose was resurrected, however, on the occasion of OUP’s quincentenary in 1978, when 340 print shop employees were taken to the theme park Alton Towers over three Saturdays. The word itself still has currency, preserved as a quaint archaism to describe printing and literary events in the main, but also social events in a wider context.
