Vera Lynn, Singer Who Roused U.K. in World War II, Dies at 103

(Bloomberg) -- Vera Lynn, the British singer whose upbeat rendition of “We’ll Meet Again” spread optimism and cheer to U.K. soldiers and civilians during World War II, has died. She was 103.

Lynn died on Thursday at her home in East Sussex, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of London, her representative Andrew Gordon confirmed to the New York Times.

For British soldiers fighting Nazi Germany and Japan in Europe, Africa and Asia, Lynn’s voice over the radio was an uplifting link to home. In addition to “We’ll Meet Again,” which became the U.K.’s wartime anthem, her best-known songs included “White Cliffs of Dover” and “Yours.”

An estimated 100,000 people heard her sing “We’ll Meet Again” during a 1995 concert at London’s Hyde Park, part of the 50th-anniversary celebration of victory over Germany.

“It’s nice to know that your career is not just forgotten,” Lynn told BBC Radio in 2002. “And what is nice is that the children know me, because they’ve heard about me from not so much their parents as their grandparents. So I’ve gone down through the generations.”

Queen Elizabeth II named her a Dame of the Order of the British Empire in 1975. The queen alluded to Lynn’s signature song in an April national address, assuring Britons separated by coronavirus restrictions, “We will meet again.”

War Begins

Lynn was 22 and on the verge of stardom when World War II broke out in 1939. A BBC survey of British Expeditionary Force troops in France early in 1940 established her as their favorite female singer, and soon she carried the enduring nickname “the Forces’ Sweetheart.”

Beginning in 1941, Lynn had her own half-hour program on the BBC, sending messages of encouragement, along with her music, to British troops abroad.

She also made dangerous trips to war zones, including Burma (now Myanmar), India and Egypt. Veterans of Britain’s Far East campaign awarded her a Burma Star medal in 1985 in recognition of her wartime visit.

“Some of the boys I met had been out for six years,” Lynn told the BBC. “They used to say to me, ‘If you’re here, England isn’t so far away.’”

In “We’ll Meet Again,” Lynn sang: “Don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again some sunny day.”

Her rendition would prove durable, playing over footage of atomic-bomb explosions at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film “Dr. Strangelove.” Also, the Pink Floyd song “Vera,” on the 1981 album “The Wall,” asked, “Does anybody here remember Vera Lynn? Remember how she said that we would meet again some sunny day?”

Early Start

Vera Margaret Welch -- she later appropriated a grandmother’s maiden name, Lynn, as her own -- was born March 20, 1917, in London’s East End to a family that enjoyed song and dance. Her father, a manual laborer, was master of ceremonies for dances at a local working men’s club. Her mother was a dress maker.

Lynn started singing in local clubs at age 7. Four years later she left school to join a traveling song-and-dance variety troupe.

In 1935, with the Joe Loss Band, Lynn broke into performing on the radio. Two years later she became the resident singer with the well-known Ambrose Orchestra.

“When war first started, I thought, ‘Well, there goes my career. I shall finish up in a factory, or the army, or somewhere,’” Lynn told the BBC. “You imagine all the theaters closing down, which didn’t happen.”

When air-raid sirens would sound during a live performance, Lynn said, audience members “could stay in the theater and the show would go on. And then afterward if the raid was still on they’d come up on stage and we’d have a little dance.”

Tops Charts

She concentrated on motherhood in the years after the war but returned to music with great success in the 1950s. Her 1952 recording of the German song “Auf Wiederseh’n Sweetheart” topped the U.S. charts, making Lynn the first British singer to achieve that feat.

Lynn’s husband of 58 years, Harry Lewis, a saxophonist with the Ambrose Orchestra who became her manager, died in 1998. They had a daughter, Virginia.

In 2014, when Lynn was 97, a double-CD of her wartime hits reached No. 13 on the U.K. charts.

“It is wonderful to hear these songs again that were at the top of the charts so long ago,” she said, according to the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper, “and it’s warming to think that everyone else is listening to them too.”

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