A REMARKABLE YOUNG MINER

Waipawa Mail, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 8513, 5 August 1921, Page 5 (Supplement)

A REMARKABLE YOUNG MINER

"A.young man, spare, of middle height. With deep-set eyes looking out from a face sharp, keen and intelligent, earnest with the nervous mannerisms which so often bespeak something like genius this is Mr Frank Hodges," says "W.A.S.” in the “Daily Express."

Frank Hodges has often been called, by men who do not like him, the "dangerous intellectual" of the miners. His is the mind and brain which stand out. He has written bodks on behalf of the miners’ case. He has juggled with facts and figures with a bewildering mastery. Frank Hodges is 34. He was a miner before he won a scholarship at Kuskin College, Oxford. His dream was for years—emancipation from capitalism. His ideals and ambitions were formed and moulded in a coal mine. At the age of 20 he won a scholarship. He spent two years in France, and a*. 25 he was a miners’ agent. At the end of 191 S he became geenral secretary to the miners.

It was at the Coal Commission of 1919 that he first sprang into public prominence. He was the mercilessly logical counsellor behind the case for the miners. His keenness in cross-examination, his force and power of apt presentation of facts could not pass unnoticed. He it was who prepared the miners’ whole case and helped to present it.

His aim has always been to increase the value of coal to make it to be regarded as something worth —something not to be used carelessly. For this purpose he sometimes employed the extremer elements among the miners. At heart, however, he himself is not a Bolshevik. Intellectuality is a thing of fine adjustments, not to be allied easily with the grossness of Communism or Bolshevism as we know it. Hodges was born in a Welsh mining district, where imagination and vision are common, and where that restless, inconsistent, hivhly tuned thing known as the Celtic temperament is to he reckoned with. Add to this the great benefit of a good education, and one can more easily realise the puzzling figure which it Mr Frank Hodges.

Hodges knows the value of the telling word. He speaks well, though with initia signs of nervousness, and he writes well. At the compilation of arguments interwoven with facts and figures and arithmetic he is at his best.

What will he do next, this young idealist, this wizard with statistics, this thinker with the thinker’s face?”

Any man who earns a scholarship at Ruskin College at ?0, while he exhausts his body daily at the coal face, as Mr Hodges did, is wort a his salt. Any man who is elected miners' leader, as he was, at 25, by men who live in a proximity which lays bare men's, thoughts and motives, is at any rate a nun, and a white man.

Hodges went to Raskin College, the little Labour centre at Oxford, with the boundless ideals and the blazing passion which burns in V. elshmen like their own steam coal. The economics were too tame, just as the religion of the churches haJ been too tame, so he ie l the revolt which set up the Cent, ai Labour College, and the Welsh coalfield is thick just now with young men making their face haggard with toil and midnight study to compete, 40 for one place, for the chance to follow in his footsteps. Two years ot Paris made him a man of the world and a finished scholar, so he wenback like Antaeus, renewing contact with earth, to work in the mine.”