Betty Jones was born in 1926, the sixth child in a family of eight, in the industrial Black Country town of Dudley, West Midlands.

After a difficult and unhappy childhood, she joined the Land Army at the ‘illegal’ age of sixteen and spent three and a half very happy years at Croome Farm in Worcestershire. After that she became a part-time member of the Territorial Army until she married at the age of twenty-four.