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home > Transactions > Volume 30 - 2024 > JULIAN HODGE: WALES’S BUSINESS PATRIOT

JULIAN HODGE: WALES’S BUSINESS PATRIOT

How sad it is that a slick soubriquet can often set in stone (until revisionists come along) the reputation and image of public figures. Such a fate has befallen Julian Hodge, one of the most consequential Welsh-based businessmen, whose life all but coincided with the twentieth century, from his birth in London in 1904 to his death in Jersey in 2004 at the age of nearly 100.

Hodge has suffered from being pithily summed up in Private Eye articles as the ‘Usurer of the Valleys’, a title that many of those who still remember this friend of prime ministers and of international financial figures, such as David Rockefeller, will immediately call to mind. But was it deserved and has it served only to obscure the part played by the patriotically Welsh but English-born Hodge in building the most successful and diverse Welsh financial services, industrial and commercial business ever created, and from whose benefactions a range of Welsh universities, charitable causes and other institutions have benefitted and continue to benefit?

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