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Well met, again
Singer Dame Vera Lynn, the iconic Forces' Sweetheart, has not stopped working at 92 - nor stopped giving her strong opinions in support of today's troops who are fighting unpopular wars, finds William Langley
Wherever Dame Vera Lynn goes, people ask her about the Second World War and the significant role she played in it. It's no good her blinking those still-sparkly eyes, and saying she was just a showgirl who caught the mood. "Churchill didn't beat the Germans," Harry Secombe once said. "Vera sang them to death."
At 92 this month, she is as arresting a vision as ever - whether it’s in flowing robes at her bolthole in the south of France, or resplendent in neat hats and scarlet nails "on duty" on the many publicity photocalls that she still makes for good causes.
She remains a prime adornment of our national sense of honour. Tappety-tap goes her slender, mother-of-pearl cane when she wishes to make a point, and the point she is making today is that we are selling our soldiers, our history, and, in a sense, ourselves short. Wars may differ, says Dame Vera, but the men who fight them don't change much. "You hear people go on about unpopular wars, but show me a popular one. Nobody in their right mind wants to go to war, but when it happens you have to get behind your troops."
She is dismayed by reports of towns banning military parades and of servicemen and women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan to face abuse on the streets and exclusion from pubs and restaurants. "I think it is disgusting," she says. "We have wonderful armed forces, and we should be proud of them. That's how it has always been; the special covenant between the country and its troops. Have an argument with the Government if you want to, but don't blame the soldiers."
We meet today in an appropriate setting for her - the softly-humming, low-lit labyrinth of underground rooms that served as the government's London command centre from 1940 until the end of the war. She is sitting in the very seat once occupied by Winston Churchill. She is in her element here, full of stirring tales of wartime fortitude, bravado and comradeship. At her elbow is a Thirties vintage, black Bakelite telephone, behind her a faded map of occupied Europe, and, gathered around, a throng of people scarcely able to believe their luck at seeing her in this setting. The occasion is the launch of a website designed to build a national archive of the personal memories of ordinary Britons, and the idea is an appealing one to a woman who closed her career, aged 78, with an album significantly titled, Something to Remember.
What Vera remembers most vividly is a world – barely 60 years in the passing – that was larger, simpler, yet, in many ways, more robust than ours. "It was so much less materialistic," she says. "People didn't have very much, and during the war they had even less, but there wasn't all the need there is now to be looked after, and be constantly entertained. Little things made the difference between getting by or not. Sometimes a song would do it."
No one could have foreseen that Vera's rise to stardom and Europe's descent into war would collide at the most propitious possible moment. Or that the lightly orchestrated ballads of hope and heartsickness she sang would have such a bearing on the conflict's outcome.
Vera was born in March, 1917, the daughter of Bert Welch, a hard-up East End plumber and his showbusiness-besotted, seamstress wife, Annie, and by the age of seven she was singing on stage at the East Ham Working Men's Club. She left school at 14 and took a job in a button factory, but the urge to perform already possessed her, and with her parents' blessing she went for an audition with the Howard Baker Orchestra. The wily Howard, a fellow East Ender who needed a secret weapon in his battle against the rival Billy Cotton Band, liked what he heard, and at 17 Vera made her first recording, It's Home.
Vera had by now adopted the surname Lynn (from her maternal grandmother), and, as the Second World War loomed, was locked in her own struggle for supremacy against Gracie Fields and Tessie O'Shea. Either of those two great divas from the last days of the music-hall era could have become the "Forces' Sweetheart", but Gracie was under something of a cloud for having married an Italian, and banjo-playing "Two Ton Tessie", with her conspicuous fondness for fish and chips, was considered to lack glamour. Vera, by contrast, was fresh, wholesome, unthreateningly pretty, and in perfect keeping with the times.
With the outbreak of war, she was given her own BBC radio show, Sincerely Yours, in which she sang requests and relayed messages to troops stationed abroad. "I always tried to choose cheerful songs," she says, "that soldiers missing their wives and sweethearts could relate to. We weren't psychologists, but we understood that it was important to express the right meaning, and we put a lot of effort into getting the songs right."
The anthem with which she will be forever associated, We'll Meet Again, was written in 1939 by Ross Parker and Hughie Charles, and with its lush, sentimental optimism, captured the mood of the nation as it faced up to its battle for survival. Three years later Vera recorded The White Cliffs of Dover, written by Walter Kent and Nat Burton, which sealed, with its powerful evocations of home and permanence, her status as the nation's morale-booster in chief.
Here, in the Cabinet War Rooms, now a museum beneath Whitehall, Vera finds herself irresistibly transported back in time. Recordings of air-raid sirens wail in the distance and clipped BBC voices announce news of triumphs and setbacks from the front lines. You almost expect Winnie to walk in and ask for his seat back. "I only met him once," says Vera. "I was doing a concert for the troops at Earls Court, and as I was leaving he came by in his jeep and stopped and thanked me very nicely for what I was doing.
"People don't realise that the theatres never closed. Even during the bombing, we kept going. While the Blitz was on I was playing the Palladium, and driving back to the East End every night. It never occurred to us to stop."
She was still only 27 when the war ended, an essentially unworldly, star-struck girl from the back streets, and it was only slowly, in the years that followed, that she began to understand the impact she had had on the armed forces. "I got so many letters," she says. "I still get them now, and I'm always moved by them. It seemed extraordinary that soldiers would come back from the war, and write to thank me for what I had done. It made me feel very humble, and that's why I've always done everything I can to thank them back."
She tells of soldiers who listened to her while hiding in hayricks or lying wounded in field hospitals. Of young men, frightened and far from home, who found in her songs the hope and reassurance to keep up the fight. Vera (along, it should be noted, with the redoubtable likes of Gracie and Tessie) had given much to the war effort – performing at Army camps and munitions factories, and touring the Far East war front where she lived "in a tent with a bucket".
Having thus done her bit and secured a permanent celebrity, it might have been tempting for Vera to fashion a new career, free from the risks of typecasting. Yet while she continued, throughout the Fifties and Sixties, to rack up hits at home and in the United States, she never sought to escape her associations with the war or shed her image as the soldiers' pin-up girl. Indeed, her bond with the military only deepened, and as recently as 2005, she appeared at the 60th anniversary of VE Day celebrations in London, calling upon the nation to honour her generation's sacrifice.
"I've never claimed to be a great singer," she says, "but I've always given my best, and I've loved what I've done, and had a very good life. I suppose I was lucky, or perhaps I was picked out by fate. It's best not to wonder too much. When the soldiers came back many of them didn't like to talk about what they'd done...it was that British modesty, you see, and I'm not sure I want to make a lot of what I did either."
Widowed since the death of her husband, saxophonist Harry Lewis, 10 years ago, she lives quietly between a Sussex village and her holiday home in a small town on the Côte d’Azur. She first visited the French Riviera more than 50 years ago when the town was a sleepy Provencal village, and in the mid-Seventies she and Harry decided to buy an apartment which they lived in for most of May and all of September.
She visits her French home several times a year, usually with her daughter, Virginia, who speaks the language fluently and accompanies her mother on regular excursions to the local markets. "The first thing I come for is the weather," she says. "I don’t need a car – buses go past the gate. When I bought the flat I furnished it completely differently from home. No antiques, all modern. It’s a change. I didn’t want the same kind of atmosphere."
At home, some things don't change – with the obvious exception of her retirement from performing. "I'm still involved with my charities (she is president of the Dame Vera Lynn Trust for children with cerebral palsy), and I have lots of correspondence to do. I'm always involved with things in the village." She was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1975, and gave her last public performance outside Buckingham Palace on VE Day 1995.
Above these underground rooms, the world is not a happy place. Vera, ever the optimist, understands that times are tough, but also the extent to which great challenges can bring out the best in human nature. "It's in our hands," she says, briskly tapping the cane. "When the last war started, we’d only just got over the one before, which was supposed to be the war to end wars. And there've been plenty since then, haven’t there? There are always problems in the world."
The answers to them are harder to find now, she admits, but good will triumph in the end, and one day, she has no doubt, the bluebirds will be back.
