Margaret Hodge - Early Life

Early Life

Margaret Eve Oppenheimer was born in Egypt in 1944 to Hans Oppenheimer and his wife Lisbeth (née Hollitscher). Hans had left Stuttgart, Germany in the mid-1930s to join an uncle in his metals trading business based in Cairo and Alexandria, where he met his fellow-emigrant Austrian-born wife. Married in 1936, the couple had five children, four girls and a boy.

After the start of World War 2, the couple and their eldest daughter were left stateless, and hence stranded for the duration of the war in Egypt. After the birth of their son Ralph and Margaret, with Lisbeth pregnant with their fourth child, the couple decided to leave Egypt as Anti-Semitism grew in the Middle East during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The family moved to London, where Oppenheimer started family-owned steel-trading company Stemcor, today the world's largest privately owned steel-trading corporation and the sixth largest UK company in private hands, with an annual turnover of £2.1Bn in 2011. Hodge is a shareholder, and lists her holdings in the MPs Register of Interests.

After the birth of their youngest daughter Susan in 1951, Lisbeth was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and died in 1953 when Margaret was 10. Faced with building up his business and caring for five young children, Margaret was educated at boarding school, first at Bromley High School and then Oxford High School. She then studied at the London School of Economics, where she obtained a third class BSc Economics degree in 1966.

She worked in market research from 1966 to 1973. From 1992 to 1994, she was a senior consultant to Price Waterhouse.

She married Andrew Watson in 1968; they had a son and daughter. The couple divorced in 1978 and that same year she married Henry Hodge (later Sir Henry), going on to have two daughters. Sir Henry Hodge was a fellow Labour Borough Councillor and Chairman of the National Council for Civil Liberties who went on to become a High Court judge; he died in 2009.