100th birthday tomorrow, 20 March - Happy Birthday, you're voice connected families over thousands of miles and many years. Let's hope she makes No 1. next week.
Too cackhanded to get this picture to rotate, but I'm assuming Vera Lynn didn't have a private jet in 1944 as this claims?
I think the first jet airliner was the Comet in the late forties. First small jet was probably the Sabreliner in the late fifties.
D-Day: We toasted invasion from the runway, says Vera Lynn [The Times] The original “forces sweetheart”, now 102, was travelling back from a trip serenading soldiers in Burma when the aircraft she was aboard stopped to refuel in Djerba on June 6, 1944. Hmm - no mention of jet here just 'aircraft' TD Dame Vera recalls D-Day landings THE NEWS of the D-Day landings broke over the radio of a private plane transporting Dame Vera Lynn back from Burma
ha ha really private jet oh sorry news reporter found it we'll meet again dont know where dont know when with a sound studio
The worrying thing is that the author titles herself "Defence Correspondent"....... can't put it down to as plain typo either.
Updated on line to now read aircraft; D-Day: We toasted invasion from the runway, says Vera Lynn Guessing the comments from Times readers were harsh
Well, the article does cite an academic work with a chapter on a "ban on crooners" by the BBC for a period. Surely someone (not saying someone here, I don't even know where you'd go looking) would be able to confirm if such a thing happened? "Chapter 6 examines the BBC's 1942 “ban on crooners,” an act of reform by highbrow idealists within the Corporation, which distilled wartime concerns with popular music, mass culture, and masculinity. With the military setbacks of 1942, vocal members of the press, government, and public argued that sentimental songs and singers demoralized the forces, frequently citing Vera Lynn's program Sincerely Yours, which featured heartfelt sentiment. In July, the BBC banned “sloppy” lyrics, male crooners, and overly sentimental female singers from broadcast. Until the end of the war, the Dance Music Policy Committee vetted hundreds of songs and vocalists. While the effectiveness of BBC censorship in ending sentimentality and crooning was questionable, the energetic public debate about sentimental music's impact on the morale and virility of fighting men demonstrated the wide range of opinions of what constituted good wartime masculinity and how best to sustain the nation's morale." https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/v...72014.001.0001/acprof-9780195372014-chapter-7
I can't comment on crooners and Dame Vera but can confirm that there was a reaction in some quarters mid war to what was deemed to be unnecessary frivolity as a distraction from the serious business of war. The Ministry of Information was complaining about B movie comedies starring the likes of Tommy Trinder taking up screen time which could be given over to showing improving documentaries etc. Looking at the wartime programme of my local cinema it is clear that such comedy shorts were great favourites and the powers that be wisely allowed them to continue.
My Nan was never a fan of Dame Vera. I suppose when you keep hearing 'We'll Meet Again' on the radio, but your husband never does return from Burma, it might grate a little. Understandable I think.
Dame Vera Lynn wins gin trademark battle "A gin company has been ordered to pay Dame Vera Lynn £1,800 in legal costs after losing a case to trademark the singer's name for its drink. Halewood International applied to register the trademark "Vera Lynn" in June last year, due to its use in cockney rhyming slang for the word gin. The 102-year-old opposed it on the basis that using her name could be seen as an endorsement of the product. The firm had argued 'Vera Lynn' is more known as slang, than for the singer."