Great British heroes: Vera Lynn - "The Forces Sweetheart"

Great British heroes: Vera Lynn - "The Forces Sweetheart"

BHT Staff | @BHTravel_ Mar 16, 2023

 

In the bleak years of World War II, Vera Lynn’s songs captured the spirit of their times and charged the morale of British servicemen everywhere.

 

Perhaps surprisingly among the great British heroes mentioned most often by British Heritage readers has been Dame Vera Lynn. If Winston Churchill brought the bulldog tenacity to Britain during the dark years of World War II, Vera Lynn expressed the nation’s heart in song.

 

A young Big Band singer before the war, in 1940 Vera Lynn began her own radio show, Sincerely Yours. Across the pretelevision, wartime airwaves, Lynn’s broadcast went beyond British shores to the nation’s troops abroad. She sang what came to be the great “standards” of the war and sent messages to soldiers overseas connecting them to home. Lynn toured abroad and performed for troops, visited hospitals and became an icon of British morale.

 

 

Jerusalem Post .> Israel News 

 Israel Culture

Dame Vera Lynn: The passing of a British icon

If any one person, apart from Winston Churchill, could be said to symbolize the Second World War for Britain, it was Vera Lynn.

By NEVILLE TELLER

 

Published: JULY 2, 2020 08:37

DAME VERA LYNN, 1973

(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Churchill with his speeches rallied the nation’s fighting spirit; Vera with her songs touched its heart.

 

The effect of both on people’s morale was profound. It persists, refusing to be eradicated.It was on June 18, 1940 that, with France on its knees and suing Hitler for peace, General Charles de Gaulle broadcast to the French people from London. He delivered a message of defiance. “The flame of French resistance must not, and will not, be extinguished.”

 

June 18, 2020 – the 80th anniversary of that historic broadcast − was therefore chosen as a fitting day to mark enduring Anglo-French friendship. French President Emmanuel Macron visited the UK to participate in a formal commemoration ceremony and to bestow the Légion d’honneur on the city of London. It was in the very midst of this formal remembrance of the Second World War that the news of Vera Lynn’s death at the age of 103 became public. Immensely saddened as the nation was at the announcement, it seemed in a fortuitous way to have occurred on the most appropriate of occasions.

 

BORN IN London as Vera Margaret Welch to a plumber father and a determined dressmaker stage-mother, Lynn was singing in working men’s clubs from the age of seven. At age 11 she took her grandmother’s maiden name as her stage name, and at 15, having already become her family’s biggest wage earner, she was signed by one of the UK’s big bands. She released her first solo recording when she was 19, and within three years had amassed combined sales of more than a million discs.

 

Jewish musicians and artists were prominent in 1930s England. Bert Ambrose (born Benjamin Baruch Ambrose in Warsaw) was a well-known bandleader and violinist. It was while singing with the Ambrose orchestra that Vera met her Jewish husband, Harry Lewis, a clarinetist and saxophonist. She married him in 1941, and they stayed married for 57 years. Their daughter, Virginia, was born in 1946.

 

As war loomed nearer, valiant efforts were made in the UK to try to rescue Jewish children from the Nazis. In the end more than 10,000 were brought across to England in the so-called Kindertransport operation. Kindertransport was a visa waiver scheme initiated by the UK government, but with financial support largely provided by charities and volunteers.

 

In a 2017 interview, magician and mentalist David Berglas, speaking of Vera Lynn, said, “She was one of the few artists to do a show for Jewish refugee children, to bring them over before war broke out. She was singing with the Ambrose orchestra and took part in a charity show to raise funds to get them out of Germany. I thank her from the bottom of my heart – because I was one of those children.”

 

 

When war was declared in September 1939, Lynn was already a star, well established on the variety circuit with a rising profile on radio. She volunteered for war work, but she was told the best thing she could do was to keep on being an entertainer. Before the end of the year, she had recorded the song that would always thereafter be associated with her:

 

“We’ll Meet Again."“We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again some sunny day… So please say hello to the folks that I know, tell them I won’t be long. They’ll be happy to know that as you saw me go, I was singing this song...”

 

It was a song she was to sing and record innumerable times in the five years of war that followed, but also in the many anniversaries she attended over the succeeding years. At the time she first recorded it, show business in Britain had almost been shut down, the big bands had broken up and the musicians scattered. During the first months of the war, music on BBC radio was reduced to old records and the Wurlitzer, or theater organ. So Vera is accompanied on the record not by an orchestra, but by a Novachord, an early version of the synthesizer. The recording is still available on YouTube.

 

Its underlying message of hope − that scattered families would eventually be reunited after the conflict – struck a chord with troops abroad and their relatives at home. In a poll run before the end of 1939 by a popular newspaper, Vera Lynn, voted by servicemen their favorite entertainer, gained her nickname of “Forces’ Sweetheart.” She never lost it.

 

Israel and Britain share an ordeal never experienced by the United States − a genuine threat to their very existence. In Israel’s case, of course, it has proved a recurring nightmare. For the United Kingdom, the experience of June 1940 is seared deep into the national psyche. Starting with the declaration of war in September 1939, the Nazis swept all before them. Their Blitzkrieg tactics saw Poland, Norway, Belgium, Holland and France succumb with astonishing speed. By the end of June 1940 only two things stood between Hitler and the conquest of Britain: the English Channel and the Royal Air Force.

 

This dark period was when Lynn’s songs caught the public mood so well and boosted morale – songs like “The White Cliffs of Dover:”

 

“There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover tomorrow, just you wait and see… The shepherd will tend his sheep, the valley will bloom again, and Jimmy will go to sleep in his own little room again.”

 

One of her songs that perfectly caught the mood of the time was said to have been inspired by the diary kept by a little Dutch boy who escaped from Europe as it was being overrun by the Nazis – “My Sister and I.”

 

“My sister and I remember still a tulip garden by an old Dutch mill, and the home that was all our own until ... But we don’t talk about that. We’re learning to forget the fear that came from a troubled sky. We’re almost happy over here. But sometimes we wake at night and cry. My sister and I recall the day we said goodbye, then we sailed away, and we think of our friends that had to stay. But we don’t talk about that…”

 

Her place in the public imagination was broadened by her hugely popular radio show in 1941-1942, Sincerely Yours, which she described as “a letter to the men of the forces in words and music.” Thanks to the BBC’s shortwave transmitters, they were heard across the world.

 

Throughout the war she traveled to battle fronts as far afield as Egypt, India and Burma to perform for troops. It was a bond that remained long into peacetime, with Lynn a constant champion of veterans’ rights.

 

IN 1976 Lynn was made a Dame, and to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the end of the war in 1995 she performed in front of thousands of people outside Buckingham Palace. In 2000, she was named as the Briton who best exemplified the spirit of the 20th century.

 

As the 75th anniversary of the war’s end approached, in May 2020, the UK was facing another crisis – the coronavirus pandemic. In a televised address in April, the Queen evoked Dame Vera’s wartime message, assuring families and friends who were separated during the COVID-19 lockdown: “We will meet again.”

 

 

Born in London, the writer is a graduate of Oxford University and made aliyah in 2011. His latest book is The Chaos in the Middle East, 2014-2016, and he blogs at www.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com

A Mid-East Journal

 

 

 

2차대전 때 영국인들 위로하던 명가수 베라 린 별세

2020-06-19 01:13

 

향년 103세…2차대전 당시 군과 국민들 사랑 한몸에 받아

엘리자베스 여왕, 애도 메시지 보내기로…존슨 총리 "그녀 음성 길이 남을 것"

베라 린이 1995년 런던 하이드파크에서 열린 2차대전 종전 50주년 기념 콘서트에서 관객들의 환호를 받고 있다. 오른쪽엔 가수 클리프 리처드. [로이터=연합뉴스 자료사진]

(파리=연합뉴스) 김용래 특파원 = 2차 세계대전 당시 영국 군 장병들과 국민의 사랑을 한 몸에 받았던 영국의 여성 가수 베라 린이 18일(현지시간) 별세했다고 BBC 방송 등 영국 언론들이 보도했다. 향년 103세.

베라 린은 제2차 세계대전 기간에 '위 윌 밋 어겐'(We'll Meet Again), '데어 윌 비 블루버즈 오버'(There'll Be Bluebirds Over), '더 화이트 클리프스 오브 도버'(The White Cliffs of Dover) 등의 히트곡으로 사랑을 받았다.

 

2차대전 중이던 1941년에는 '친애하는 당신들에게'(Sincerely Yours)라는 제목의 주간 라디오 방송을 시작해 전장 각지에서 싸우던 장병들과 나치의 폭격에 시달리던 영국 국민들을 위로했다.

영국의 전차부대 장병들은 탱크에 '베라'라는 이름을 적은 채 전투에 나설 만큼 베라는 군인들에게 스타 중의 스타였다.

린은 이후에도 이집트, 인도, 미얀마(옛 버마) 등 영국 군대가 주둔한 곳이라면 어느 곳도 마다하지 않고 순회공연을 다니며 지친 장병들을 감미롭고 선명한 목소리로 위로했다.

그래서 린에게는 '군의 연인'(The Forces' Sweetheart)이라는 별명이 붙었다.

 

1917년 런던의 이스트엔드에서 배관공의 딸로 태어난 린은 일곱 살 때부터 노동자들이 드나들던 클럽에서 노래를 부르기 시작해 1930년대 라디오 방송에 출연하면서 이름을 알렸다.

지난 4월 엘리자베스 2세 여왕이 신종 코로나바이러스 감염증(코로나19) 사태를 맞은 영국에 대국민 메시지를 발표할 때도 린의 히트곡 제목인 '우리는 다시 만날 거예요'(We will meet again)를 인용할 만큼 린은 절체절명의 위기를 맞은 영국인들의 영혼을 위로하던 가수로 평가된다.

 

높은 인기에도 대중 앞에 잘 나서지 않았고 평생을 잉글랜드 남쪽 브라이턴 인근에서 남편 해리 루이스와 함께 조용히 살았다. 뇌성마비 아동을 위한 자선 재단을 설립해 아픈 어린이들에게 꾸준히 도움을 주기도 했다.

 

엘리자베스 여왕은 린의 유족에게 애도의 메시지를 보내기로 했다.

보리스 존슨 영국 총리도 트위터에서 "베라 린 여사의 매력과 마법의 목소리는 우리의 가장 어두웠던 시절에 우리나라를 도취시키고 또 지탱해줬다. 그녀의 음성은 후손들에게도 계속 살아남아 마음을 고양할 것"이라며 애도했다.

yonglae@yna.co.kr

베라 린의 2009년 모습. [AFP=연합뉴스 자료사진]