Tom Lodge, author of RADIO CAROLINE

Tom Lodge was born in 1936 in a cottage in the Surrey village of Forest Green, England.

You might say Tom’s family is responsible for Rock & Roll. His grandfather—Sir Oliver Lodge—was a scientist and the inventor of wireless technology in 1894, two years before Marconi. He also invented the loudspeaker. Without either of these two inventions, Rock & Roll would have floundered.

Tom’s father, Oliver W.F. Lodge was a poet, painter and a professor at William and Mary in Virginia, and was part of the so-called, “Bloomsbury set,” the group of writers, artists and intellectuals that included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Tom’s mother Diana, a painter, was also a member.

Tom was educated at Bedales School, a boarding school, where he developed an interest in music.

At seventeen, Tom hitchhiked around Europe, making money by playing his guitar in the streets.

In 1954, on his eighteenth birthday, Tom sailed to Alberta Canada.  Tom joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as an announcer on CFYK. Then in 1960, he returned to England as a CBC correspondent. Tom remained with the CBC until that day in 1964 when he met Ronan O’Rahilly and joined Radio Caroline.

He lives in Stillpoint, near Santa Cruz, California.