of St Ippollitts in the County of Hertfordshire. He had been appointed by the new Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, soon after Margaret Thatcher won the 1979 general election. His appointment was welcomed in the legal profession, where Lane was regarded as a genial figure ("Geoffrey Dawson, Baron Lane. Good to have you back again."), but eventually not welcomed by Lane himself, who disliked the work. The overdue retirement of Lord Widgery, whose physical ill-health and increasing dementia had become a suppressed scandal, led to Hailsham picking Lane to follow him as Lord Chief Justice from 1980. Lord Chief Justice Shortly after taking over as Lord Chief Justice, Lane attracted political controversy when he called for a general reduction in prison terms. His appeal judgments frequently cut the length of sentences and he was known to be a member of the Prison Reform Trust. He had served as deputy chairman of the Parole Board from 1970 to 1972. After the publication of lengthy interviews with members of the jury in the trial of Jeremy Thorpe, Lane supported moves (later made in the Contempt of Court Act 1981) to ban any publication of reports from within the jury room. Lane also opposed the proposal to extend rights of audience in the higher courts to solicitors. One of the areas of crime in which Lane did not support shorter sentences was rape. In 1982, Lane stated that sentences for rape should include immediate prison time, except in the most exceptional circumstances, which was taken as an implied rebuke for a Judge who had attracted controversy for fining a rapist £2,000 and saying that the victim was "guilty of a great deal of contributory negligence". Lane made it clear he rejected the general concept that victims of rape could have given their attackers an excuse. Much later in his career, Lane was responsible for a judgment in the case of R v R which for the first time held that a husband could be guilty of raping his wife, overturning the irrebuttable presumption at common law that a wife consented to sex with her husband. Many observers regarded Lane as a defender of traditional 'Victorian' morality rather than a supporter of mild feminism. In 1983, he gave the Darwin Lecture at Cambridge, in which he stated that he believed that the word "gay" should not be used to mean homosexual, and that instead the