Green’s Dictionary of Slang

old-fashioned, conservative .

1865		Sherborne Mercury (Dorset) 11 July 6/2: The Bridport Stick-in-the-Mud Railway Company are doing nothing again all this beautiful weather.
1886		R.L. Stevenson Kidnapped 44: He said [...] what a pleasure it was to get on shore with money in his pocket, and spend it like a man, and buy apples, and swagger, and surprise what he called the stick-in-the-mud boys.
1898		Edinburgh Eve. News 11 Mar. 2/7: The Stick-in-the-Mud liberals. Whatever Mr Gladstone did, and he had a great many faults, but he never stuck in the mud.
1924		Exeter & Plymouth Gaz. 4 Aug. 8/2: That policy [...] was not reactionary of the stick-in-the-mud kind, a but a sound and vigorous one.
1939		Hull Dly Mail 8 Aug. 9/6: ‘Stick-in-the-Mud’ comedy of small town life in Lancashire.
1959		A. Salkey Quality of Violence (1978) 154: Yet Marshall isn’t that sort of man. It’s true he’s slow and easy and a little ‘stick-in-the-muddish’.
2005		M.B. ‘Chopper’ Read Chopper 4 145: An old stick-in-the-mud judge.