What a Dame! A tribute to Vera Lynn
The late Vera Lynn – Oldie of the Year in 2018 and a great friend to the magazine – wrote her last piece for us in May, aged 103
Barry Cryer
Comedian and friend Vera was very brave – she had some hairy times out in the jungle in the war.
But she wasn’t just brave: another great thing about her was that she could laugh at herself. And so she was a joy to work with.
On the 1972 Morecambe & Wise Christmas Show, starring Vera, I worked with my co-writer, John Junkin. Eric Morecambe came up with the inspired thought that Vera comes on the show and doesn’t know they want her to sing. John worked out how to pull off the gag:
Ernie says to Eric, ‘How can we get her to sing?’ and Eric says, ‘Short of starting another war, I’ve no idea.’
Vera was so famous – and so easy-going – that she was a rich source of jokes. She did so many Royal Variety Performances that she was nicknamed King’s Lynn.
I was told this one by the great lyricist Don Black:
‘Do you know who started the war?’ he asked me. ‘Vera Lynn’s agent.’
She was such good company. I remember going to a show with her, where Bill Cotton, Controller of the BBC, was on stage. His father, Billy Cotton, had been one of Vera’s first bandleaders.
‘So nice to see Vera Lynn here tonight,’ Bill Cotton said that evening. ‘It was so sad that she had to leave my father’s band.’
‘I didn’t leave,’ Vera cried out, laughing. ‘He sacked me!’
I’ll miss her enormously.
York Membery
Her regular interviewer So farewell, Dame Vera, who, at the age of 103, has finally bowed out and joined her beloved husband Harry and ‘the boys’ of the ‘Forgotten’ 14th Army (pictured left) in the skies above.
I was lucky enough to interview the legendary Forces’ Sweetheart several times over the past decade and still can’t quite believe she has gone for good – she lived through so much that part of me felt she was somehow indestructible.
Every time I visited Vera at her handsome detached home in Sussex, with its beautiful garden which she so appreciated in her later years, she always made me feel truly welcome – unlike some celebrities who are charm personified in front of the camera, but very different away from it.
Sitting down with her in her living room, surrounded by photographs of Vera the wartime legend with the Queen, the Queen Mum (the royal to whom she was closest), family and friends, I would feel the years melt away as she talked about the past.
Dame Vera had an astonishing memory and spoke vividly of the ‘poppop’ of the anti-aircraft guns she would hear driving home from the BBC through the darkened streets of London during the blackout in her little green Austin 10, her tin helmet at her side.
She had a special place in her heart for the troops of the 14th Army, whom she visited in the mosquito-infested jungles of Burma during the Second World War. They were engaged in a particularly fierce struggle with a fanatical Japanese enemy. When I interviewed her for this magazine earlier this year, for the 75th anniversary
‘Our 2018 Oldie of the Year, aged 100 … Oldie of the Century, more like!’
of VE Day in May, I could swear a tear or two fell from her eyes as she spoke movingly of how she still thought about ‘the boys who never made it home’.
Rest in peace, Vera – you’re gone but you’ll never be forgotten.
Harry Mount
Oldie Editor When the Oldie of the Year Judging Panel met in 2018, there could be only one winner.
Nearly 80 years earlier, in 1939, Vera Lynn had topped a Daily Express poll of readers’ favourite musical performers. And she had remained number one in many of their hearts ever since.
In her citation in The Oldie, one of our judges, Quentin Letts, wrote of her soldier fans, ‘The boys adored her as a girl next door, a sister figure, a familial companion in the dust and violence of war. Years later, when Vera sang to veterans, she noted quietly that, “in two strokes, they’ve tears in their eyes – they remember the boys they left behind”.’
In the year before she became our Oldie of the Year, aged 100, she had written a book about Burma with her beloved daughter, Virginia Lewis-jones. Her latest album, Vera Lynn 100, had
sold more than 100,000 copies. She had saved the White Cliffs of Dover, backing a National Trust campaign to stop them being developed. And the Queen, in a private capacity, had attended her tribute concert at the London Palladium. Phew – Oldie of the Century, more like!
Virginia Lewis-jones graciously collected her mother’s award on her behalf. Dame Vera sent a delightful thank-you letter to Oldie Towers afterwards, writing, ‘I am very grateful to you for recognising me with the Oldie of
the Year award – I am touched by the gesture.’
We were touched that she accepted, and deeply moved by her words – and by her writing paper, with five Spitfires at the foot of the page and blue skies with puffy white clouds at the top, a memory of those lovely lines from We’ll Meet Again:
‘Keep smiling through, just like you always do
Till the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away.’