Born at Crowborouqh, E. Sussex. Moved to Uckfield and lived there until April 1969 when he married and moved to his present address at Ringmer. Educated at Uckfield Parochial and County Secondary Schools, and for one year at Lewes Technical College on a pre-diploma course in engineering. Left to work for the Post Office Telephones Department at Tunbridge Wells (joined September 1961). Worked for the Post Office and British Telecom for twenty seven and a half years mainly on subscribers and exchange maintenance, including many old manual exchanges.
Hodge's interest in entomology started as a schoolboy when he was aged ten. Many of his friends collected butterflies (and a few moths) but for most, including himself, this was merely a passing craze. It was not until 1967, when a cousin asked him where to find butterflies, that his interest was re-kindled and between then and 1974 he made a collection of local moths. His interest in beetles was stimulated by Roger Dumbrell whose collection of 2000 specimens in four store boxes he subsequently acquired. He also works on Heteroptera, Diptera and, more recently, Hymenoptera aculeata, but beetles remain his main interest. Much of his professional work involves the recording of water beetles. Hodge spent many years in the Buxted area when he spent his lunch hours looking for Coleoptera in Buxted Park, and his list for this locality now includes some 800 species.
During the 1980s he began to become involved in small 'expenses paid' surveys of Coleoptera for the Nature Conservancy Council and in May 1989 he decided to leave British Telecom to pursue entomology full time as a freelance consultant. His British collection amounting to some 18,000 specimens is housed in a twenty drawer cabinet and three drawers of an eight drawer cabinet with many specimens awaiting sorting and labelling in store boxes. He maintains catalogues with specimens numbered in the order that they were collected. In 1998 an opportunity arose to collect in the Algarve in southern Portugal and this sparked a new interest in the form of European Coleoptera. He has visited Portugal subsequently every year and has accumulated about 5,000 reference specimens from that country, including many that are new to the fauna. Trips to France, Germany, Gibraltar, Italy, Mallorca, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland followed and this increased his collection by a further 6,000 specimens.
Hodge has published a number of notes mostly in the EMM and the Coleopterist. In 1971, three months after starting to study Coleoptera he took Magdalis memnonia which was published as new to Britain by A.A.Allen in Entomologist's Record, 84, 1972, 22-23. Other new species to Britain followed and included Bruchidius varius, Alaobia linderi, Agrilus cuprescens and Pseudoperapion brevirostre. In 1995 he published New British Beetles with Richard Jones, and he is compiling a list of 'The Beetles of Sussex' which promises to be one of the longest lists in Britain with some 2,975 species so far. He is a member of the Amateur Entomologist's Society (Trustee since 2000), the Balfour-Browne Club and the British Entomological and Natural History Society. (Information from PJH in October 2009) (MD 11/09, 6/18)