Forces’ ‘sweetheart’ remembered
LONDON Vera Lynn, the singer who became a symbol of hope in Britain during the Second World War and again during the coronavirus pandemic with her song We’ll Meet Again, died at the age of 103 on Thursday.
Known as the Forces’ sweetheart, Lynn struck a chord with soldiers fighting overseas and with the public back home through her performances and records, including The White Cliffs of Dover.
To mark her 100th birthday in 2017, a giant image of Lynn as a young woman was projected onto those white cliffs and a new album released.
She was back in the headlines in April when Queen Elizabeth used words from Lynn’s song to tell the country “We will meet again” and urged people to show resolve during the coronavirus lockdown.
Lynn died on Thursday surrounded by close relatives, her family said.
The Queen is to send a private message of condolence to Lynn’s family, Buckingham Palace said. The office of heir to the throne Prince Charles and his wife Camilla said they were remembering the singer.
“Dame Vera Lynn’s charm and magical voice entranced and uplifted our country in some of our darkest hours,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote on Twitter. “Her voice will live on to lift the hearts of generations to come.”
She died on the day Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron marked the 80th anniversary of General de Gaulle’s call for resistance to the Nazi occupation of France during the Second World War.
Lynn was born Vera Welch on March 20, 1917, the daughter of a plumber in London’s East End, and was singing in working men’s clubs at the age of seven.
She began radio broadcasts and singing with bands in the late 1930s. But it was her wartime songs that won her fame and led to British tanks trundling into battle with ‘Vera’ painted on their sides and more than 1,000 written offers of marriage from servicemen.
In 1941, she began a weekly radio broadcast from London called Sincerely Yours in which she relayed messages from British troops in war theatres to their loved ones.
She also toured Burma (now Myanmar) in 1944 and was later presented with the Burma Star medal.
Capt. Tom Moore, a veteran of that campaign who this year raised more than 33 million pounds for the National Health Service during the pandemic, tweeted: “She had a huge impact on me in Burma and remained important to me throughout my life.”
Ironically, Lynn’s biggest hit had a German title and came after the war. Auf Wiederseh’n Sweetheart, backed by a soldiers’ chorus, sold more than 12 million copies worldwide and made Lynn the first British performer to top the U.S. hit parade.
The song made her a star in the United States in the 1950s. But the noisy advent of rock ’n’ roll eventually elbowed aside her more sedate brand of nostalgia.