THE WAR
While working at Lee's, Betty came into contact with employee Victor John Tarbett, an analytical chemist who analysed dyes for weaving and matching colours for restoration work. He had been educated at Manchester Grammar School and gained an MSc. from Manchester University. He later became a managing director of the company.
During the war some employees at the works were exempt from National Service and conscription because the management had secured Government contracts to make khaki materials for army uniforms, and webbing for rucksacks. To protect the factory from the relentless bombing of Liverpool and Merseyside, a rota of two men and four women to stay overnight in the factory for night time fire-watch duties was set up. Betty and 'Jock' Tarbutt were often in the same team; they had already come into contact through Jock's visits to report to or consult with the Lee brothers, but during the long nights of fire-watching they gradually made friends and discovered they had the same interests. They shared a love of reading, poetry and music: Jock would take Betty to concerts at the Liverpool Philharmonic, to plays, to opera and ballet. He was fourteen years older than Betty, married with a young daughter; but for the duration of the war his wife, for safety reasons, had moved from the Wirral to Formby, near Southport, while Jock stayed at the family home in West Kirby to be near his workplace. Eventually Betty and Jock became romantically attached.
From what my mother told me, and reading my father's letters to her, addressed to 'Darling Eve' (her middle name was Evelyn), which she kept all her life, I gather that Jock intended to divorce his wife, Dorothy, to marry my mother. Whether I was planned or an accident I don't know, but when the time came Dorothy threatened to commit suicide if he left her, so he stayed with her.