Lodge's direct connection with Liverpool virtually ceased after his extended visit of 1927, though he sent his congratulations to the University on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its charter on 10 May 1928. He still featured from time to time in the local press, and the Liverpool Daily Post reported on his eighty-fourth birthday in 1935 that he was “still very vividly remembered” in the city. The same newspaper noted the award of the Faraday Medal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1932, and carried a lengthy review of his autobiography, Past Years, in November 1931. Lodge was last seen in the North at the British-Association meeting at Blackpool in 1936 when “he rose, a venerable figure, to propose the vote of thanks to Lord Stamp for his presidential address”.

By this time the University Physical Society had become almost submerged under its own mediocrity, its beginnings under Lodge long forgotten, its meetings hardly reported, even in The Sphinx. In this regard, it almost certainly reflected the character of Lodge's successor. In an article for The Sphinx of 30 October 1930, M. H. Collinge was moved to ask: “What's the matter with the Physical Society. Having continued peacefully in its allotted path for years and years, its initial momentum is in danger of being exhausted unless something drastic happens. Perhaps it is the general atmosphere of peace which pervades the building that is so destructive to activity and originality.”