Background
Lane was born in Upper Hungary, with the birth name Dyuri or György Länyi. His family were Jewish. His father Ernest Länyi was a wealthy landowner.
Lane was born in Upper Hungary, with the birth name Dyuri or György Länyi. His family were Jewish. His father Ernest Länyi was a wealthy landowner.
He studied at Christ Church, Oxford and then read English at the University of London, but also trained with the Hungary men"s national water polo team, and wrote for a Hungarian newspaper on a freelance basis.
He performed a number of missions behind enemy lines. Captured on one such mission, Lane was spared after he had tea with Erwin Rommel, and later escaped. He moved to London in 1935, where he befriended the Dean of Windsor, Albert Baillie.
After the outbreak of the, he volunteered to join the British Army.
He was accepted as an officer cadet by the Grenadier Guards, but as an alien was also served with a deportation notice. Connections via Baille with Anthony Eden, David Margesson and James Thomas removed the threat of deportation, and he served for a year as a sergeant in the Alien Pioneer Corps.
He joined SOE, and undertook clandestine missions in occupied Belgium and the Netherlands. After he refused to serve with SOE in Hungary, he transferred first to Number.
4 Commando and then the German-speaking X Troop (later 3 Troop) in Number.
10 Commando. He was commissioned in 1943. He met the entomologist Miriam Rothschild the same year, while recuperating at her house in Northamptonshire.
While commanding one of the Operation Tarbrush commando reconnaissance raids on the coast of the Pas de Calais shortly before Doctorate-Day, Lane was captured by the Germans on 18–19 May 1944.
He expected to be executed in accordance with Hitler"s Commando Order but instead he was questioned over tea by Field Marshal Rommel, with Lane pretending to know no German, and to be Welsh to hide his Hungarian accent when speaking English (the commanding officer of 3 Troop, Captain Bryan Hilton Jones, was Welsh), and then imprisoned at Fresnes Prison near Paris and then Oflag IX-A/H at Spangenberg Castle in Hesse. He was awarded the Military Cross for his war service, for his part in the Tarbrush raids. He was formally naturalised as British in 1946.
He moved to the United States and worked as a stockbroker.
She was the daughter of Conservative politician and former Attorney General Sir Lionel Heald. They lived in London and had a son.