Harold Birch was Edna Birch's husband and Lawrence White's lover.
Harold asked his close friend from church, Edna Burrows, to marry him several times but each time Edna turned him down until she learned her sixteen-year-old sister Lily was pregnant and neither Lily nor the baby's father Joe Scarlet wanted the baby. Edna wouldn't allow the baby to be adopted so she and Harold married in about 1963 and together they raised Lily and Joe's son Peter as their own child. It was a marriage of convenience which was never consummated, although Edna dearly loved her husband.
Soon, Harold embarked on an affair with his friend Lawrence White. When Edna discovered their affair, she phoned the police, as being gay was illegal at the time. Harold was released without charge as he was a respectable married man, but Lawrence was sent to prison. Harold told Edna that Lawrence had hung himself in his prison cell, which Edna believed until she met Lawrence in 2014.