The Forces’ Sweetheart
Famously sung by Vera Lynn, “We’ll Meet Again” still resonates some 80 years after it was first released. Brian Willey, who knew the composers personally, tells the story behind the song.
Brian Willey on Vera Lynn and We’ll Meet Again
THE song “We’ll Meet Again” achieved a unique status during World War II. It became an anthem for servicemen wherever they were in the world, and the ultimate expression of their hope that they would see their loved ones again.
In more recent history it’s appeared at the conclusion of the 1964 film “Dr. Strangelove”, the 1979 film “Yanks” and the 1986 BBC TV serial “The Singing Detective”. As recently as 2005 it featured during the sixtieth anniversary celebrations of VE Day, went to the top of the charts again in 2009, and was sung by Alfie Boe on
the 2017 album released to celebrate Dame Vera Lynn’s own centenary.
With such recent success, the song has transcended the generations, moving much younger listeners with no direct experience of the war.
“We’ll Meet Again” was the brainchild of two talented composers, Ross Parker and Hugh Charles, and having known them, I am aware that their individual lives were as uniquely interesting as the life of the song itself.
Hugh Charles was born in Manchester on July 24, 1907. He was a superb cricketer at school, with Lancashire County Cricket Club attempting to woo him, but he turned down the offer and took the musical route to earn his fame and fortune.
Albert Rostron Parker was also a Mancunian, born on August 16, 1914. He had an unexceptional education, but taught himself to play the piano and began writing songs from an early age. That ability eventually became his passion and he made the move to London to market his wares.
The two men met at the Irwin Dash Music Company in London’s then music publishing mecca, Denmark Street, and their talents combined on their first hit song, “I Won’t Tell a Soul (That I Love You)” in 1938. Recorded by all the major London
dance bands and their vocalists, it was also Vera Lynn’s introduction to their work, and she released it as a record. It was soon after, amid rumours that war was imminent, that the pair grasped that departures would soon become customary and that a goodbye song might be a good idea.
There were plenty available, but astutely Charles and Parker realised that they were all too melancholy. Optimism was to be an essential ingredient, so they got to work and, assiduously avoiding the word “goodbye”, “We’ll Meet Again” was the result.
For a first recording, who else but Vera Lynn, having already recorded one of their compositions, would do? At that time she was broadcasting with Ambrose and his Orchestra, and the dance band leader had to be convinced that a new song had sufficient audience appeal for a recording by his band to be justified.
Eager to get a recording released, but realising that all the major band leaders would be of the same opinion as Bert Ambrose, the two composers suddenly had a bright idea. A brilliant pianist named Arthur Young had taken a great interest in a newly introduced keyboard instrument described as a polyphonic synthesiser. It was named the Novachord, and Vera Lynn, with accompaniment by Arthur Young playing the Novachord, would be a whole new sound, sure to attract attention in its own right.
So Vera was secured as the recording artist and, in September 1939, after war was declared, the song was made. It immediately sold well. Another version with Mantovani’s orchestra was released in late October, sung by Jack Plant, and others followed suit: Lew Stone’s Band with Sam Browne, Jay Wilbur’s Band, also with Sam Browne, Jack Hylton’s Orchestra with Dollie Elsie, and the Joe Loss Band with vocal by Chick Henderson – all of these versions were on sale by the end of the year.
Later, with the USA entering the World War II arena, many American artists also recorded the song – Peggy Lee with Benny Goodman’s
Orchestra, The Ink Spots, Sammy Davis Jnr, Perry Como and Johnny Cash – to mention just a few.
But the song is synonymous with Vera. The smiling Forces’ sweetheart who would stand, a mere slip of a girl, before thousands of enthralled men and sing those transcendent words.
Asked what she thought it meant to all our boys by Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs back in 1989, she replied, “I suppose I reminded them of their sisters, or their sweethearts or their young wives that they’d left behind.
“It was very satisfying to think that you could entertain,” she continued. “Even when I went abroad to Burma, my audience could be two or it could be 6,000, and to see all the boys come in with their guns and just sit down on the grass and you could for a little while take them back home just in memory . . . yes, you did think you were doing something.”
She never saw herself as having a unique power, though, and remains stoically down to earth: “You just felt you were doing your bit.”
Providing brief respite, and hopefully more lasting positivity, to the Allies was something Vera did tirelessly, performing the song throughout the Blitz, and most famously in Burma in 1945 when she braved the journey in a Sunderland flying boat. She often performed the song live on the Sunday night wartime radio show, “Sincerely Yours”, too, which would follow the nine o’clock news and sometimes a speech from Churchill.
In London, performances didn’t stop because of an air raid.
“Every day I used to go off and my mother and father must have been absolutely worried out of their minds about whether I would be coming back, but I never used to think about that,” Vera said.
“I used to get in the car and off I’d go, and if there was a raid en route you’d get out and lie in the gutter. During the evening performances, if the raid started you didn’t take any notice, you just carried on singing, and if the raid was still on and we couldn’t go home anyway, we’d have a nice party on the stage.
“We’d have dancing and a sing-song and gradually people would get tired and they’d think, ‘Oh, let’s chance it’ and go home. [If you stayed] you just found the safest wall and just sat on the floor and hoped that you’d be all right.”
Like Parker and Charles, it was Vera’s natural musical talent, spotted at a young age, that led her to stardom. When she was seven she sang down at the local working men’s club, earning seven shillings and sixpence – “I was very proud of that” – and she never had any professional voice training, a teacher telling her that “she had a very strange voice” and refusing to train her unless she affected an operatic style – which she refused.
Despite Vera’s singing ability, her mother was anxious for her to follow in her footsteps learning dressmaking. However, after a brief unhappy stint at a factory sewing on buttons, Vera’s father encouraged her to pack it in.
The whole family got behind her and together decided on a new stage name of “Lynn”, which had been her grandmother’s maiden name, rather than her original surname, Welch.
Hugh and Ross’s lives were also defined by the war. Ross Parker was twenty-five when the war began, and being fit and well, he was recruited into the army and initially stationed at the Roman Way Camp in Colchester.
As co-composer of “We’ll Meet Again”, he had already become well known, and eager to continue creating more songs, he would regularly retreat to a nearby pillbox fort in order to find peace and quiet to write. By then they had had a further success with “There’ll Always be an England”, which became a song that Gracie Fields felt compelled to include in every performance she gave.
Despite Ross being in the army, he and Hugh Charles managed to continue their collaboration with a string of hits: “Blue Skies are Round the Corner”, “I Shall Always Remember You Smiling”, “I Shall Be Waiting”, “Mem’ries Live Longer Than Dreams”, “Berlin or Bust”, “The Navy’s Here” and “There’s a Land of Begin Again”.
Many of them were recorded by Vera Lynn and other singers of the time, such as Denny Dennis, Issy
Bonn and Jack Cooper, and played by the popular bands of Ambrose, Jack Hylton and Lew Stone.
So well known did the pair become that they were considered celebrities, and in January 1940 the Decca Record Company commissioned them to record a medley of their best-known songs. It was issued as a 78 on
Decca F 7356 and became a hit – a unique occurrence for songwriters.
The necessities of war eventually spelled the end of the partnership. Ross, in service with the Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment, was shipped overseas for duty in Burma and India. At the end of the war, with the rank of Major, he was transferred to South East Asia Command in Ceylon to become Head of Programmes for Radio SEAC and regularly broadcast as “Ross ‘The Larker’ Parker”, entertaining on his “Happy Piano”.
There he worked alongside David Jacobs and Desmond Carrington, both of whom would become BBC radio favourites on the Light Programme and later Radio Two. Returning to Britain in 1947, he resumed songwriting as a solo composer with a hit song, “I’ll Make Up for Everything”.
With recordings by Petula Clark, Steve Conway, Vera Lynn, and in America, the Ink Spots and Frank Sinatra, all looked fair for his future.
Hugh Charles composed some 50 songs with other writers including Noel Gay and Sonny Miller; works such as “Russian Rose”, “Silver Wings in the Moonlight” and “Till Stars Forget to Shine” for that other Forces’ sweetheart, Anne Shelton. He worked with his own production company from the mid-1960s and in 1984 the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA) honoured him with a Gold Badge of Merit for his services to the British music industry.
In 1986 he was awarded an Ivor Novello Award for attaining distinction in the art, craft and heritage of British song-writing.
The tribute was given for his past achievements, for the award, established in 1955 did not exist during his main writing years. He was delighted, not only with receiving the award, but to be sharing the stage with such luminaries as Sir Yehudi Menuhin, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Bee Gees, Freddie Mercury, and film score composer George Fenton, and if that wasn’t enough, by being presented with his award by Dame Vera Lynn in person.
During the 1960s and onwards, in my capacity as a BBC Light Programme and Radio Two producer, I had the pleasure of occasionally working on broadcasts with Vera. A delight to work with, she was always well-rehearsed and thoroughly professional. In her recording days she was even known as “One Take Lynn” for never singing out of tune or getting a lyric wrong.
She continued to perform “We’ll Meet Again” long after the war at reunions and commemorative events in Britain, but also Australia and Canada, prompting Sue Lawley to describe her as “the one veteran of the war still on active service”.
In response, Vera laughed her warm-hearted laugh, “Well you could say that, I suppose!”
Now, at the age of one hundred and two, she naturally no longer performs, but the legacy of these three talents lives on every time we hear that timeless melody and those touching heartfelt words.