1910 - 1977

Founder member of uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), Co-founder of the Springbok Legion and the Torch Commando, Member of the South African Communist Party (SACP), Founder member and National Secretary of the Congress of Democrats, 1956 Treason Trialist

Jack Hodgson was a staunch trade unionist who became highly active in the SACP and in the early 1960s helped train the first MK recruits, the military wing of the ANC, both in South Africa and abroad.

In 1941 he helped found the Springbok Legion, a South African group of militant World War II veterans, and later, the Torch Commando, an organisation that protested the Apartheid regimes removal of coloured voters from the main voters roll in the Cape.

Hodgson became known as MKs demolition expert, informed by his extensive knowledge of explosives. He developed the bombs and timing devices used in the early Sabotage Campaign and to train MK cadres ahead of its launch on December 16, 1961. He was responsible for some of the earliest MK sabotage attacks against government installations and apartheid symbols.

Jack Hodgson and his wife Rica were instructed to leave South Africa in 1963, under threat of being detained by the racist Apartheid state. They settled in London, from where Hodgson continued to impart both military and underground skills to an entire generation of combatants. He could never return to South Africa and died in exile.

Did You Know?

Apartheid security operative Brigadier C.F. Zietsman said after Jack Hodgsons death that many saboteurs who entered South Africa had been through the hands of Jack Hodgson. This was one way in which Hodgson remained active in undermining South Africa after he fled the country in 1963.