Our mother, Lesley Anne Lane, who has died aged 91, witnessed at first hand many events of the 20th century, notably in race relations, since her husband was Sir David Lane, the Conservative politician, who in 1977 was appointed the first chair of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE).
The daughter of Sir Gerard Clauson, a civil servant and linguist, and his wife, Honor (nee Husey), Lesley Anne grew up in Notting Hill, London, and attended St Paul’s school. She was 15 when the second world war broke out and had two narrow escapes. First, she dodged the machine-gun fire from a German aeroplane while walking along a road in rural Sussex. Then she escaped with superficial wounds while fire-watching in Whitehall, when the two colleagues next to her were killed by a direct hit from a bomb.
The war prevented her from going to university and she joined the Colonial Office. Her job took her to Tanganyika, now part of Tanzania, in 1949-50, to work on the groundnut scheme – a huge British government programme designed to grow enough protein to feed the empire. The project was an expensive failure, but it provided her with an interesting year.
She met our father through mutual friends in London in the early 1950s and they married in 1955. As he moved from work in the private sector into politics, as Conservative MP for Cambridge from 1967, and then to the CRE, she was always at his side, and shared the ups and downs of life in the public eye. She also served as a school governor in central London for many years, as a hospital volunteer, and in various voluntary sector positions in Cambridge.
She had breast cancer at the age of 58 but survived it, and subsequently had a lasting perception of living on borrowed time, for which she was grateful.
Our parents had a happy retirement near Cambridge and after our father died in 1998 our mother observed pragmatically that “nobody likes a moping widow”, so she soon made new friends and had more time to follow her own interests, especially in the arts.
She was dedicated to her four grandchildren and wanted to pass on her own history, values and experiences. Her strongest term of disapproval was “unsatisfactory”.
She is survived by us, by her brother, Oliver, and by her grandchildren, Roe, Katie, Isabel and Tom.
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