Tom Lodge - Early Life

Early Life

Lodge was a figure in British radio of the 1960s. He was a disc jockey on Radio Caroline. He was the son of the writer Oliver W F Lodge and his wife Diana, and a grandson of the physicist Sir Oliver Lodge. He was born on 16 April 1936, in Tanleather Cottage, Forest Green, Surrey. When World War II broke out, his family left England. He was brought up in Maryland and Virginia. At the end of the war he returned with his family to England and lived near Painswick, Gloucestershire. He was educated at Bedales School, England, where he developed his interest in music. He took lessons on the violin and the clarinet, taught himself the guitar and mouth organ, and played the stand up bass in a four piece skiffle band, called the "Top Flat Ramblers".

When Lodge was eighteen, he travelled to Hay River, Northwest Territories and worked in commercial fishing on the Great Slave Lake. While fishing with a colleague, he was blown out into open waters on an ice floe. His companion died, but Lodge was rescued by some trappers. He described his adventures in his first book, Beyond the Great Slave Lake (published by Cassells in 1957 and E.P. Dutton in 1958). In 1956 he returned to England. He married Jeanine Arpourettes in 1957. They returned to Hay River, Canada, where he ran a fishing business. They had three sons: Tom Jr. (b. 1959, Yellowknife, North West Territories, Canada), Brodie (b. 1961, London, England), and Lionel (b. 1962, Inverness, Scotland). All three sons are musicians, and song-writers, Brodie and Lionel singers also and currently living in Canada, Tom Jr is in his ninth (originating as 'the two toms' with Tom and Tom Jr, and continued the long distance Caroline collaboration) of a weekly Sunday (9-11 p.m. U.K. time) music show which Tom Jr uploads from Canada to Radio Caroline in the U.K., www.radioicaroline.co.uk . Radio Caroline turns fifty, this coming March 2014, Tom also has 3 grand children, and one great grand-daughter