(ch. hard), subs. (Winchester College).—1. A College præfect in half power. Their jurisdiction does not extend beyond ‘Seventh Chamber passage,’ though their privileges are the same as those of other præfects. They are eight in number.
1864. Blackwood’s Magazine, 86. The remaining eight college præfects (called in Winchester tongue, BLUCHERS) have a more limited authority, confined to Chambers and the Quadrangle.
1866. MANSFIELD, School-Life at Winchester College, 30. The eight senior præfects were said to have ‘full power,’ and had some slight privileges not enjoyed by the remaining ten, who were generally called BLUCHERS.
2. A non-privileged cab, plying at railway stations: see quots.
1864. Social Science Review, I., 406. The railway companies recognise two other classes of cabs, called the ‘privileged’ … and the ‘BLUCHERS,’ named after the Prussian Field-Marshal who arrived on the field of Waterloo only to do the work that chanced to be undone.
1870. Athenæum, 5 March, p. 328. Non-privileged cabs, which are admitted to stations after all the privileged have been hired, are known as BLUCHERS.
3. (colloquial).—A trade term for ‘boots of somewhat common and clumsy description’ (HALLIWELL).
1836. DICKENS, Sketches by Boz, ‘Bloomsbury Christening.’ Islington clerks … walked to town in the conscious pride of white stockings and cleanly-brushed BLUCHERS.
1854–5. THACKERAY, The Newcomes, XI. It will not unfrequently happen that a pair of trowsers inclosing a pair of boots with iron heels, and known by the name of the celebrated Prussian General who came up to help the other christener of boots at Waterloo, will be flung down from the topmost story.—Ibid., xiii. I wouldn’t have come in these BLUCHERS, if I had known it. Confound it, no. Hoby himself, my own bootmaker, wouldn’t have allowed poor F. B. to appear in BLUCHERS if he had known that I was going to meet the Duke.
