We’ll meet again

AS well as boosting troops’ morale with her dulcet tones, it turns out that Dame Vera Lynn was a prolific artist—a fact only really known to her family and close friends until her death last year, aged 103.

When Virginia Lewis-jones, daughter of the Forces’ Sweetheart, invited Stephanie Fuller, the director of Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft in East Sussex, to Lynn’s house, she had a small display in mind to honour her mother’s life in the village. However, confronted with more than 600 paintings, diaries and letters with servicemen, ‘we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to create an exhibition to fill the whole museum,’ she explains.

‘Dame Vera Lynn: An Extraordinary Life’ will run from January 8 to April 18, 2022, featuring 20 paintings by Lynn, a secret diary from a threemonth tour of Burma in 1944, photos and 20 costumes spanning her 90-year career, including her 1941 wedding suit, plus a newly commissioned portrait of Lynn by Neil Gower (www. ditchlingmuseumartcraft.org.uk).