The Oldie of the Year awards
A girl next door who became the nation’s sweetheart
Seldom, nowadays, does one meet girls called Vera. Pity. It is a strong name, meaning ‘truth’, and evokes that most stalwart of songbirds – our peerless Oldie of the Year, Dame Vera Lynn.
Soon to celebrate her 101st birthday, Dame Vera was the popular star (‘pop singer’ seems not quite right) who boosted our country’s morale in the Second World War. Her hits included The White Cliffs of Dover and We’ll Meet Again, which she has described as ‘a greetings card song’. She explained, ‘It has a basic human message that people want to say to each other but are too embarrassed actually to put into words.’
Few singers would cheerfully compare their work to greetings cards but Dame Vera is without affectation. That may be why her fame has endured – and why she has so resoundingly been voted our champion in her 101st year. An earlier poll she topped was in 1939 when the Daily Express asked readers to name their favourite musical performers. Vera was ‘flabbergasted’ when she won. She was dubbed the Forces’ Sweetheart.
Her career began when she sang at an East End club at the age of seven. She quit school four years later to tour the country with a music-hall variety show. Dropping out of education aged eleven? Today’s social workers would freak. In 1928, it seemed a sensible option for a working-class family from East Ham.
Vera’s plumber father added her earnings (she was often making as much as him) to the family pot. By the mid-1930s, despite a lack of any formal training, she was crooning for bandmaster Joe Loss and for Bert Ambrose and His Orchestra. One of Ambrose’s regular numbers was Dinner At Eight – ‘Darling, you can’t be late, don’t forget, dinner at eight, two gardenias at your plate! Under the table our hands will meet!’ It was a more restrained age, when lust quivered on half-bitten lips while strings soared.
One of her fellow musicians was clarinettist Harry Lewis. They would marry in 1941. ‘He wooed me with
chewing gum,’ said Vera. Harry, a shrewd geezer, became her manager and they remained devoted until he died in 1998.
With her precise enunciation, Vera swooped through A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, another dreamily nostalgic serenade. Her voice was never quite sultry, yet it had a sumptuousness and seriousness. This was not some fey ingénue or furtive minx. The Lynn larynx radiated an almost 21st-century female independence. When she sang of lost love, listeners felt she understood.
War came, and the gardenias and nightingales yielded to air-raid sirens and ration books. She brought her sturdy vibrato to bear on the tub-thumper There’ll Always Be An England. It was a hit. Vera, who became a dame in 1975, has never been ashamed to be patriotic, yet she has managed to be that without sounding nationalistic. She established a powerful solidarity with ‘the boys’, which is what, to this day, she calls the servicemen she entertained more than seventy years ago.
In those war years, she visited army field hospitals and sang to dying men at their bedsides. She made a dangerous, arduous trip to Burma to cheer the ‘Forgotten’ 14th Army commanded by Bill Slim. They were up against it before she arrived; afterwards, they surged to victory. Slim understood that soldiers did not necessarily want martial music or (had they not suffered enough?) skirling bagpipes. Plaintive love songs could remind them of the values – some sunny day at home – for which they were fighting.
Vera was a knockout in her Ensa uniform, curls crammed inside jaunty military cap, above-the-knee culottes making a virtue of her slender pins. She posed in Jeeps and on military motorbikes and stood amid hundreds of affection-starved, battle-scarred soldiers to sing of distant sweethearts. The boys never once misbehaved. They 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’. That’s why ‘pop star’ won’t really do. Readers, this is no Lily Allen.
In the 1950s, she became the first British singer to hit number one in the US charts. She remained a regular on chatshows and at Royal Variety shows. She has done masses for charity.
Over the past year, the Queen, in a private capacity, attended her tribute concert at the London Palladium. Dame Vera’s picture was projected on to the White Cliffs of Dover – which she promptly helped rescue, backing the National Trust campaign to raise £1m to save them from development. Oh, and she wrote a book about Burma with her devoted daughter, Virginia Lewis-jones; and her latest album, Vera Lynn 100, sold more than 100,000 copies. Not bad.
I have come across her just once, 25 years ago, when she and I rode in one of Lord Montagu’s ancient, open-topped cars in the London to Brighton Run. We were frozen but she never complained. She modestly and graciously acknowledged the public’s cheers. About halfway, we stopped for coffee and Eccles cakes. Either because she was slimming – or maybe because she disliked Eccles cakes – Vera would not indulge. So Harry (who, dressed in raffish dogtooth suit, had been following us in a modern Jag) and I scoffed the lot.