Lodge was a figure in British radio of the 1960s. He was a disc jockey on Radio Caroline. Caroline and other pirates forced the government to deregulate radio, hitherto a monopoly of the BBC. He was the son of the writer Oliver W F Lodge and his wife Diana, and a grandson of the physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, was born Thomas Odoard Marshall Lodge on April 16, 1936, in Tanleather Cottage, Forest Green, Surrey, England. When World War II broke out, his family left England and 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 and 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 years old he traveled to Hay River, Northwest Territories and worked by commercial fishing on the Great Slave Lake. While fishing with a colleague, he was blown out into open waters on an ice floe. His friend died, but he was saved by some trappers. He described his adventures in his first book, "Beyond the Great Slave Lake" (published by Cassells 1957 and E.P. Dutton) 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.