Seventy Years Ago

.

.

I can remember that in my teens I was not at all impressed by singers like Vera Lynn, Gracie Fields or Ann Shelton. We all seemed to be jigging about to songs like “Green Door” or “Rock around the Clock”.

Things change with age and although I never owned any of her many records, I do have a couple of dozen sheets of songs by ‘Our Vera’.

.

.

I read the other day that at the age of 92, she had just entered the album charts at number 20.

Her album, We'll Meet Again - The Very Best of Vera Lynn, returned her to the charts almost six decades after she topped them in the 1950s.

The album was released to coincide with last week's 70-year anniversary of the declaration of war, which fell on Thursday.

A spokeswoman for her record company Decca said: ''She has proven that music of this vintage and significance can still resonate with the British public.''

The album features 24 songs from Dame Vera's golden years, including Auf Wiederseh'n Sweetheart, which was a number one hit in the US in 1952.

.

.

Dame Vera was born on March 20, 1917 in London and her singing career was already flourishing when war broke out in 1939.

She was awarded the title Forces Sweetheart following a newspaper poll, and travelled thousands of miles - often at great personal risk - to entertain the troops.

She also had a BBC radio show on which she performed songs such as We'll Meet Again, I'll Be Seeing You, Wishing, and If Only I Had Wings.

.

.

The most popular songs’in her arsenal’ were, of course, We'll Meet Again, which she first recorded in 1939, aged 22, and There'll be Blue Birds Over the White Cliffs of Dover, which was released in 1942.

For a while the British government worried that Vera Lynn's songs might prove deadly to our own troops, given their capacity to reduce grown men to tears.

'There was talk of them being banned,' she says, 'because they might make troops fighting abroad feel homesick and become deserters.

I just said, "Judging by the thousands of letters I get each week from the boys, the songs are doing more good than harm." They weren't fighting songs, nor were they propaganda, but they were optimistic. They reminded the boys what they were fighting for. They felt it was like hearing from home.'

.

.

Vera Lynn soon acquired the unofficial title of the Forces' Sweetheart. This came after she was named the most popular recording artist in a BBC poll of British Army soldiers.

.

.

"Give us a kiss, our Vera!"

.