Wanted: a sweetheart

Posted by Barbara on March 16, 2025 in Blog, Dame, History, Music, Nostalgia, Security, security | 2 comments

We are all gradually – and probably not quickly enough – coming to terms with the fact that kind Uncle Sam who we could always turn to for help is behaving more like wicked Uncle Ernie in the Who rock opera Tommy.  With all the talk of increasing our defence budget, creating new alliances and building up our armed forces, there is only one question to answer: who will be the forces’ sweetheart of the 21^st century?

S/he will have a hard act to follow; Dame Vera Lynn was in a class of her own, with a career that spanned 96 years. Yes, that was not a typo. Vera Margaret Welch was born in East Ham on March 20,1917.  She began performing publicly at the age of seven and adopted her maternal grandmother’s maiden name ‘Lynn’ as her stage name when she was eleven, joining Madame Harris’s Kracker Kabaret Kids (doncha love it?), a singing troupe. After leaving school at age 14, Lynn was spotted by a booking agent who found work for her at parties and events. In 1935 she sang the refrain on several big band records and began performing on the radio with the Joe Loss Orchestra and then the Casani Club Band.  She released her first solo recording, ‘Up the Wooden Hill to Bedfordshire’, in 1936.

Lynn teamed up with bandleader Benjamin (‘Bert’) Ambrose in 1937 and performed on his radio programme, Life from Mayfair, until 1940. It was on this programme in late 1939 that she premiered what would become her trademark song: We’ll Meet Again.

Lynn was given her own BBC radio show, Sincerely Yours, Vera Lynn, in November 1941. The following year she recorded The White Cliffs of Dover’, another song that for many came to epitomize the sentiment of the war years. In 1942 she appeared in the film We’ll Meet Again, in which she portrayed a character based on herself.  Then in 1944 Lynn joined the Entertainment National Services Association (ENSA) and spent the spring and summer performing for troops stationed in Egypt, India, and Burma, now Myanmar.

After the war, Lynn toured across Europe and continued to broadcast her radio programme.  In 1952, she became the first English artist to hit number one on the American record charts. By the end of the 1960s she was suffering from emphysema and performed much less, but her recordings remained popular.  In 2009 she became the oldest living artist to have a number one album in England with We’ll Meet Again: The Very Best of Vera Lynn. Eight years later she became the oldest living artist to have an album in the top ten on the British charts with 100, which featured reorchestrations of her classic hits and was released in honour of her 100th birthday.

In 2000 Lynn was named as the Briton who best exemplified the spirit of the 20th century.  So who will take up damesnet’s challenge for the 21^st? Are you fit to be the forces’ sweetheart/heartthrob and able to exemplify this century’s spirit?  Will you live for 103 years like Vera? Answers most definitely on a postcard please; no emails, texts or Whatsapp messages.