SOME SUNNY DAY
MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Dame Vera Lynn

To my wonderful Harry, with whom I was so fortunate

to share my life for all those years.

And to ‘The Boys’, to whom we all owe so much—

your spirit and humour live with me to this day.

Never forgotten.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter One: Overture & Beginnings

Chapter Two: One-&-six for an Encore

Chapter Three: Vocal Chorus

Chapter Four: A Taste of Ambrosia

Chapter Five: Wild About Harry

Chapter Six: A Country at War

Chapter Seven: Sincerely Yours

Chapter Eight: Off to see the Burma Boys

Chapter Nine: A Journey with a Legacy

Chapter Ten: A House is a Home

Chapter Eleven: After the Interval

Chapter Twelve: Not My Style

Chapter Thirteen: Round & About

Chapter Fourteen: Everybody’s Talking

Chapter Fifteen: Never Quite Retired

Index

Copyright

About the Publisher

Acknowledgements

Imust thank all my family, of course, for their constant support and love.

And there are too many others whom I have met and worked with over the years to thank here, so I will mention just three: my dear friend Wally Ridley, for his help in those Denmark Street days; Joe Loss, for selecting me for my first broadcast; and Norman Newell, who produced all my early records. These three men were instrumental in making my life the extraordinary event that it has been.

Introduction

Iwill always remember the moment war was declared at the beginning of September 1939. I was sitting in the garden of the new house I had bought in Barking with Mum and Dad. Life was going well for me: I was singing with Bert Ambrose’s band, fulfilling what was really the only ambition I had ever had: to be the best singer with the best band in the land. Before the announcement came, anyone would have told you that times were not easy, but my life was certainly not bad.

On that day I remember we were all drinking tea in the garden, my dad sitting in his deckchair as he loved to do. He was always brown from sitting in the sun. Naturally we had the radio on all the time because everyone was interested in what was going on. For weeks everyone had been on tenterhooks, not knowing what was going to come. And that’s when I heard the news. The first thought that came into my head was a selfish one: Oh dear. There goes my singing career. Everything I have dreamed of, I thought to myself, is over. The men—including all the musicians I knew in the band—would all be going away to fight. And I would be headed straight for the munitions factory. I was only twenty-two. It seemed like the end of my world.

At that point no one thought that entertainment would become essential during the war. And I certainly never thought I would have the chance to continue singing. I was already very familiar with the words to ‘We’ll Meet Again’ by then, but I had no idea that that particular song would become the tune people most associated with the war era. Or that my voice would become the one that most reminded people of the hope for the future we needed to have at that time.

Seven decades later I remember that day as clearly as if it were yesterday. So it makes me especially proud and honoured to know that all these years later people still want to mark the anniversary. This year, 2009, marks seventy years since the outbreak of the war as well as the sixty-fifth anniversary of D-Day, the biggest wartime operation ever. It’s difficult for me to believe that it was that many years ago, because in my mind there are times when it feels so recent. It thrills me to know that people still remember and still care. It’s so important.

This year also marks exactly seventy years since I first sang that well-known song, the one that made my name, on tour with Ambrose’s band in the autumn of 1939. Ironically, precisely a year before that, I was on stage while history was being made. On 29 September 1938 I was performing at the Hammersmith Palais in London. Meanwhile the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was in Munich for a meeting with Hitler. This was the meeting where Chamberlain believed he had received the reassurance that there would be ‘peace for our time’. Which, as we know now, unravelled within the space of the next twelve months.

In many ways I feel honoured and privileged to have become a symbol of that era. It’s very humbling. But there have been times in my life when I have felt uncomfortable about it too: it is something to live up to when people call you a national treasure, and that is certainly not an expression I would use myself. I just see myself as someone who found herself in the right place at the right time—or perhaps we should call it the wrong time—and I just happened to have a voice which suited the era and, somehow or other, has stood the test of time.

I’m told that schoolchildren today still learn the words to ‘We’ll Meet Again’. That thrills me. It seems that the songs I am remembered for from the war have passed from generation to generation, so that young people today know about them. I still feel a part of things. I have kept myself busy in my semiretirement: I have a garden I look after (with help) and I still drive—but only locally. I feel fortunate that I’m in a position where for the past thirty years I have been able to spend time on the charities I support, such as Breast Cancer Research and my trust, which helps children with cerebral palsy. And, of course, I still like to help organizations such as the Royal British Legion, which supports ex-servicemen.

Almost forty years ago I published an earlier version of my memoirs. This was at a time when I was still appearing regularly in my own television show and—astonishingly to me—my career was still going strong some thirty years after the war. Towards the end of that decade—the 1970s—I began the slow process towards retirement, although I have never really wanted to step completely out of the spotlight. Now that I am ninety-two, barely a week goes by without someone asking me to cut a ribbon at some event or other, and I am more than happy to oblige.

At my ripe old age, though, I felt it was time to revisit that era properly and get everything down on paper in a final account. I have also found that as the years pass I remember some things with a clarity that I didn’t have before. My trip to Burma, for example, looms large in my memories as one of the pivotal moments of my life. I didn’t really understand that when I was in my fifties. In this book, for the first time I have been able to recall that trip in a lot more detail—and I even found the red leather Collins diary I carried with me throughout. I’m particularly fond of that little diary, because I wasn’t supposed to keep it: we were not allowed to take any notes in case they fell into enemy hands. I wrote in it in tiny spidery handwriting that I thought the enemy would never be able to read.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of the events I am involved with today revolve around wartime. I still attend many charity events and veterans’ anniversaries, and often the ones that I find most moving are to do with Burma. Five years ago I attended a grand reunion for Burma veterans at London’s Imperial War Museum. It was the sixtieth anniversary of a number of decisive battles fought by the ‘Forgotten’ Fourteenth Army in the vicious Burma jungle campaign. More than a hundred veterans attended, many in their eighties and nineties. To my astonishment, there was one man there I recognized, although I wouldn’t have known his name—Neville Hogan. It turns out I met him on my tour of Burma in 1944. I sang a concert for the Second Battalion Burma Rifles. He was sick in hospital at the time and I visited him there. When I asked him what I could do for him, he said, ‘A kiss.’ I held his hand and kissed him on the forehead.

At the reunion he was now eighty and I was eighty-seven. I kissed him again on the forehead. He remembered my visit to his camp vividly and told a reporter about it afterwards: ‘Dame Vera came into the room and visited every soldier individually. She stood at the side of the bed and asked each one if she could have anything sent over for them. She was fantastic. She used to come and play off the side of a truck and boost everyone’s morale.’ I’m very proud of that. To think that I entertained audiences from 2,000 to 6,000 in that blazing heat. The boys would just come out of the jungle and sit there for hours waiting until we arrived and then slip back in once we’d left. What I enjoyed most, though—and still do now—was chatting to the troops. What they needed was a contact from home rather than a concert. I knew it was my place to provide that. It was the least I could do. When I talked to the men and women who served at war about their thoughts and how they felt about going into action, many of them would just shrug, saying, ‘It’s what we are trained to do.’ Their humility was matched only by their courage, honour and duty.

That was their vocation; singing was mine. People have always been amazed to learn that I can’t read music. I told a newspaper in 1943, ‘I learn a tune pretty easily although I can’t read music. I get the words into my head and then run them over and over again until I don’t have to bother any more because they just come out naturally. Then I can think about the singing.’ They called me ‘a natural born singer, who sings like a thrush, sweetly and spontaneously’. And they added: ‘There are plenty of people who can read music who could not sing like Vera in a thousand years. And there are not many who would not give their ability to read music for a voice like hers.’

It makes me laugh to read what else I told them for that article: that I wanted to retire before long (seventy years later and I haven’t really retired at all), that I wanted to get the garden going properly (that took another fifty years) and that I wanted ‘a couple of kids, maybe, when I get time’ (I had one daughter, Virginia, born in 1946; work got in the way of having the bigger family I had once dreamed of). My music publisher, Walter Ridley, added his thoughts at the time: ‘The secret of the kid’s success is that she’s genuinely sincere and sounds it.’

I like to think that he was right and that is why my voice and my songs are remembered now. If, in any small way, that can go towards encouraging people to commemorate the sacrifice of those who fought in the Second World War, then I am glad. We should always carry on remembering what happened seventy years ago. Even now I am constantly inspired by the work and bravery of our servicemen and women. Simon Weston, for example, the hero who was badly burned during the sinking of the Sir Galahad during the Falklands conflict, has become a good friend of the family. Earlier this year (June 2009) I was with him at the opening of a new burns research laboratory at the Blond McIndoe Research Foundation. It is based at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, where Sir Archibald McIndoe treated hundreds of burned air crew during the Second World War. There were a lot of burns victims during the Second World War—I remember visiting so many of them myself—and centres like this continue to be invaluable even today. Many of them—like this one—are funded solely on charitable donations. I feel it’s important for me to keep going if I can help in any way at all.

As I look back on my life, I am grateful to have survived that time and to be a symbol of an era which must never be forgotten. If that is my legacy, then I am proud of it. We still have servicemen and women serving abroad now and who knows when they will be called upon to fight for their country in the future? It’s for the ones who are fighting now that we must always make sure that the ones who fought in the past are not forgotten.

As for me, although my last official public performance was in 1995 at the VE Day Golden Jubilee concert outside Buckingham Palace, people still seem to hold me in mind. I feel privileged to have done three Royal Variety shows across three decades—in 1960, 1975 and 1986—and to have performed with some of the favourites of the last century: Bing Crosby, Morecambe and Wise, Cliff Richard. All in all it has been quite a journey for a plumber’s daughter from East Ham who almost didn’t make it to her third birthday.

CHAPTER ONE Overture & Beginnings

The funny thing is, I don’t remember singing as a tiny child. It’s only from my press cuttings that I know that apparently I could sing five songs right through by the time I was two. And I’m sure that when I was two and a half my uncle George taught me two old favourites—‘K-K-K-Katy’ and ‘I’m Sorry I Made You Cry’—because I’ve been told this many times. But I believe that a person’s life only really begins with what they can remember for themselves. So my story has got to start, strangely enough, with the time I nearly died. I was not quite three years old.

I have a recollection of being all on my own in some kind of a tent, surrounded by steaming kettles. I can’t shake off the impression that the tent was out of doors. Wherever it was, it was certainly in East Ham Hospital, and I was in isolation there with a dangerous illness called diphtheric croup. The steam was part of the treatment, I suppose.

I found out when I was older that at one stage they didn’t think I was going to live, and it’s peculiar to look back now and realize that there very nearly wasn’t anything to tell. I don’t know how long they kept me in the tent, but I was in hospital for three months altogether, and came out in time for my third birthday in 1920.

By that time I’d missed Christmas, so I had my Christmas and birthday all in one, in March. Mum even got me a Christmas tree from somewhere. I was Vera Welch then, and we lived in Thackeray Road, East Ham. All my life most people have thought, Oh, Vera Lynn, she grew up in the East End. But it’s not really the East End at all. East Ham is in fact classified as Essex. That ground-floor flat in Thackeray Road is my other earliest memory. I can see the little kitchen and wash-house now—especially the wash-house, where I went through a right terrible scrubbing from an aunt who’d come in to look after me. My mother had had to go off somewhere for the day—to make a visit to a hospital, I think—and this aunt was taking care of me, and when the time came for her to wash me she scrubbed and rubbed me dry so hard that I can feel the rough towelling even now, all these years later. In the kitchen was a high dresser along one wall, and that sticks in my memory because my brother knocked an egg-cup off it and broke it and got a clip round the ear for it.

These trivial incidents must have made a tremendous impression on me, for they remain vivid in my mind’s eye after ninety years. I know for certain that they took place before I was four, because when I was four we moved to another of those straight, flat East Ham streets, Ladysmith Avenue, to share a house with my grandma. And there we would stay until 1938, when at the age of twenty-one I’d made enough progress as a singer to be able to buy a house for my mum and dad and myself not far away in Barking.

In many ways we were just another typical working-class family. We were a small family: just me, my brother Roger, who was three years older than me, my parents, and my grandma, of course. I have very few recollections of my parents’ parents, although I have some beautiful old-fashioned pictures of them all. I vaguely remember my mother’s father, who died when I was four years old. From the photographs you’d think that we were well off, because everyone was always dressed in their Sunday best if they were having their photograph taken or if they were going out somewhere special. There’s a favourite shot I have of one of my aunts wearing a tweed suit, a fur tippet and a hat on the beach. I even have a photograph of my father on holiday in the countryside wearing what looks like a bowler hat. It was not because people were wealthy that they dressed like that: they just wore their best clothes to go out.

My mother, Annie, was a dressmaker and my father, Bertram, did all sorts of jobs. To this day I haven’t the faintest idea how my parents met—I never asked them. They were just ordinary people to me. My mother was a bit smart, though, because of her dressmaking. She made all her own clothes. Before she was married, she worked for a London dressmaker who took on royal commissions. She was the one who taught me how to sew and make things properly. My father worked as a plumber and he’d been on the docks. In those days, you took any job you could get. That’s how it was when I was a child. Despite this, my father was an easy-going man who liked to laugh—and he was a very good dancer.

That’s what was unusual about my childhood in a way. Thinking back on it all now, I realize that the things which helped to determine that I would go on to have a career as a singer were part of my life very early on, even though they may not have stayed in my mind in the same way as the kettles and the wash-house and the rough towel and the broken eggcup. We had quite a social life. There was Uncle George, my Dad’s brother, who had taught me those songs and would even wake me up to sing them for him. He used to appear in the working men’s clubs doing a George Robey impression, with a little round hat and the arched eyebrows; he had an act with his sister as well, and they wrote some of their own songs. Dad himself was very active in the East Ham Working Men’s Club, and was master of ceremonies at the dances there on a Saturday night: I used to see him in his white gloves and patent pumps, calling out the names of the dances, and feel so proud of him. During the long period of the club-going days—almost the first two decades of my life—he worked not only in the docks, but also as a plumber’s mate, as a glass blower, at the Co-op and, during the Depression, sometimes not at all; but whatever he was doing, I think it was his club activities he really lived for—his darts, his billiards and above all his dancing. In fact the whole family was very socially minded, and I was taken to the club as a matter of course from my very earliest childhood. Now I come to think of it, it was at a concert in the East Ham club that I was first taken ill that time.

Even after we moved to Ladysmith Avenue and lived with my grandma, Margaret Martin, my mother’s mother, there was never any question of leaving me at home. For a start, Grandma always came with us anyway, until she got too old, but that had nothing to do with it—it was simply the accepted thing that we should all go as a family. So, what with my dad being master of ceremonies at the dances, and one of his sisters being on the music-hall stage in a small way, and Uncle George singing his songs and doing his George Robey act, and Mum occasionally seeing to some of the club bar work and the catering (‘There’s money in cups of tea,’ she used to say in her practical way), I got accustomed very early to the idea of helping to provide entertainment.

Besides, we were a great family for singing: there were good voices on both sides, and no reluctance to use them. Grandma had a lovely voice, untrained, but much more of a concert performer’s voice than the voices of the rest of us. She used to sing ballads like the popular ‘Thora’, by Stephen Adams, and ‘Until’, and she still sang at the party we gave for her eighty-fourth birthday. Dad had a good voice and his party piece was ‘Laugh and the world will be smiling, weep and you’re weeping alone’. There always seemed to be sing-song parties going on round at my other grandmother’s in Gillett Avenue—which was the next road—with my aunt at the piano and everybody doing something.

My father was a very easy-going man, very quiet. He never made demands, never asked for anything. My mother was the one with the push and the get-up-and-go. She was the one who got me into singing professionally. She had it in mind from before I was seven. She was considered one of the smart girls when she was young and she had carried on sewing professionally once she was married. In those days when you married you had to leave your job—you couldn’t carry on—so she just did her dressmaking at home for people. She cared about her appearance but wasn’t what you’d call glamorous nowadays. She didn’t use make-up, only powder, because it wasn’t done to wear make-up in those days, but she always used Pond’s Cold Cream, and I used to sit on the bed and watch her put it on at the mirror at her dressing table. People called her ‘nice-looking’: she was pale with dark, bobbed hair, which she set herself in waves. One of my favourite photographs of her shows her wearing a black dress cinched at the waist with a silver belt buckle and she’s wearing a beautiful lace collar. That’s just how I like to remember her.

As a child I wasn’t interested in dressing up and showing off myself. I suppose at those early house parties I was like most little girls—torn between a desire to show what I could do and shyness at the idea of standing up and singing in front of a roomful of people. Oddly enough, in time I really came to resent being asked to sing at parties and hated it when Mum would encourage her friends to call out those dreaded words ‘Come on, give us a song.’ And I have to confess I still hate that sort of thing; even today, if I’m at a party, I get very uncomfortable at the thought of having to get up and sing. That’s why, at the sing-songs round the piano which we occasionally have at home, no matter who’s there I’d never ask them to do a turn.

Besides the entertainment that the immediate family and the club could offer, there was that of the professional variety theatre. The old lady opposite my grandmother’s in Ladysmith Avenue had a girl living with her as some kind of companion and this girl would sometimes take me to the East Ham Palace, where it was threepence to go up in the gods. This was our local variety theatre, right next to East Ham Station. I’d gaze down from our seats practically in the roof and dream of being on a stage like that myself one day. They had all sorts of different acts on there: comics, singers, dancers, acrobats, magicians—they weren’t necessarily famous but they were professionals, all working the circuit. A comic called Wood sticks in my mind and I saw Florrie Forde there when I was about ten years old—I remember her on stage all dressed up and singing songs. She would probably have had top billing as she was a very popular Australian entertainer best known for singing, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ and ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’. She had entertained the troops during the First World War and she would perform until the day she died in 1940, straight after an engagement singing for the troops. She made a lasting impression on me.

After I started singing in public at the age of seven, my childhood changed. I tended to be working when most little girls were simply enjoying themselves. So I was not much like other little girls. Even earlier than that I was a solitary child. I don’t remember having any friends before my school days, and for a long time even after I went to school I was never allowed to visit any other child’s house. There was a girl in the street with whom I was friendly when I was little. That was Maudie Monshall. If I played outside, it was just outside the front door. I wasn’t allowed to wander. I wasn’t allowed in the street to play and it was a big privilege to be given permission to go and play in the park for an hour. I wasn’t consciously aware that my mother was being strict and protective, but looking back now I think she must have been. She was nothing like so strict with my brother, Roger. Three years older than me, he seemed to go pretty much where he liked and to make whatever friends he chose; he was always off out somewhere. Not that I really minded being on my own such a lot, for just as I didn’t feel at the time that my mother was being unusually firm, so I never thought about all those friends I didn’t have. Certainly in those days, children never questioned their parents.

There was certainly no shortage in the immediate neighbourhood of children about my age—this was a time, remember, when large families were still not uncommon, and there were several near by, though for some reason there were far more boys than girls. One of the girls who lived opposite was a little horror called Mary, who tipped up my doll’s pram and smashed the face of the doll. In those days dolls’ heads were all made of china, and an accident to your favourite doll often proved fatal. I obviously took great care of the one that replaced it, for I’ve still got it and I’d hate anything to happen to it, because once when I young I actually used it on stage as a prop. It was dressed exactly as I was; I sang ‘Glad Rag Doll’, and won a prize.

Little girls seem to divide into two kinds—those who love dolls and those who don’t. My own daughter, Virginia, never had any time for them—only teddy bears—but I was very much a doll person, so obviously a good deal of my solitary playing revolved round them. Luckily there was a garden at the house in Ladysmith Avenue, and as well as being a place to play, it was a plaything in itself. Strictly speaking, it was my grandmother’s garden, but I had a tiny piece of it for myself, where I built a rockery. One of my ambitions was to grow up and have an enormous rockery; like the horse I was going to have one day. I still haven’t got it, but I look back on that little heap of stones with great affection. I made a tiny lawn in front of it from tufts of grass weeded out of other parts of the garden, and which I used to cut with a pair of scissors. I would keep myself busy for hours in that garden.

My very close friend, Maudie, used to come and play sometimes, and we found a special use for the arched trellis that ran across the garden. With Maudie as my audience, I used to pretend I was entering a stage—through the arch, a quick bow or curtsey graciously to right and left, and into my performance. Sometimes we’d do a double act, playing to just a strip of lawn and my grandmother’s gladioli. Or so we thought. I didn’t discover till years later that the neighbours had been watching these antics all the time. I must have presented a strange picture—this tiny girl, gravely acknowledging imaginary applause, unconsciously preparing for the future.

At the bottom of the garden there was a shed, which seems to have been my dad’s province, and I remember he would sit in it singing that music hall favourite ‘I Wouldn’t Leave My Little Wooden Hut For You’. In everything he did out there I would be his mate, talking to him in a special kind of dialogue we had, where he called me Jim and I called him Bill. One of the jobs he would do out there was to mend all the family’s shoes on one of those three-footed iron shoe lasts you used to be able to get. He’d cut the leather and hammer away. I don’t know if he held the nails in his mouth the way professional cobblers do, but I can remember him working the raw, pale buff edges of the cut leather with black heel-ball (the stiff wax used by cobblers) to get a good professional-looking finish. He had a passion for bright-green paint, so in time the dustbin, the coalbox, the doors and the window frames all ended up a vivid green. And I loved to paint pictures—and still do—so I used to pinch this paint for doing grass.

There was always a lot of grass in my paintings, but not just because I had plenty of green paint handy, nor because I was a town-bred child longing for the country. I did long for the country, but I was lucky enough to know what it was really like. This is another reason why I believe that my childhood was a little different from that of the average East Londoner in the early 1920s. For that I have to thank Auntie Maggie and the fact that she lived at a place called Weybourne. The nearest towns are Farnham and Aldershot, one on either side of the Surrey-Hampshire boundary, and they have grown now until they almost meet each other. But when I was a little girl, Weybourne, more or less halfway between the two, was not much more than a straggle of houses by a crossroads, with plenty of open country round about.

And there, every year, my mother, my brother Roger and I would spend the whole of August, with my father joining us for part of the time, staying with Auntie Maggie, Uncle George and Cousin Georgie. Those visits to Weybourne were the high point in my young life. If the steaming kettles and the illness and the tiny incidents in the flat in Thackeray Road make up my very first impressions, that’s all they are—a succession of fleeting images. But my memories of those holidays in Weybourne are among the most precious things I possess, and they have coloured the whole of my life. There is no doubt that they shaped my future: at every moment of stress or discomfort in my life, I have been able to draw on them. Years later in 1944, when I found myself in the unbelievable, sticky heat of Burma, I suddenly remembered the cool taste of water taken from a well near Weybourne when I was a girl. When I returned from Burma one of the first things I longed for was the English countryside, and that is exactly where I returned. It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with the quiet rural life.

Children love ritual, and I loved every detail of the ritual of those holidays. I have a special memory which captures everything wonderful about that time: my mother, father and my Auntie Maggie are lying in a field next to a hayrick, laughing their heads off. It was a time for all of us to relax and have fun. It began with the excitement on the station platform at Waterloo, and I can even recall the sense of disappointment I felt the first year that the trains were electric and not steam. The very smell and sounds of the steam train were part of knowing that the holiday had begun. The next part of the ritual was the arrival at Aldershot station and seeing my cousin’s face poking through the slatted gate at the side of the platform. Then we’d set off to walk to Weybourne; sometimes it was very early in the morning, and if my uncle had been on night duty—he was some sort of lorry driver—he’d meet us at a little coffee shop near the station and help us carry our cases. It seemed a very long walk, though it couldn’t have been more than about a mile, and at the end of it there was another ritual: my auntie, who was living then in part of a very old house (which has now gone), would always be watching for us over the hedge. Unpacking was another ceremony: the new plimsolls, the gingham dress made for the occasion by my mother—these were the very symbols of freedom, to be taken from the case with full understanding of their significance. It was as if the holiday couldn’t start until all these little rites had been observed.

There were certain things that had to be done each year as well; otherwise the holiday wasn’t complete. There was an old barn at the back of the house, with a rope we used to swing on; we would go there at the first opportunity and enjoy the creepy darkness and mustiness. (It reminded us of Maria Marten and the Red Barn—one of the plays I knew from the club at home about the famous murder in the 1800s of a country girl by her squire lover in a barn). When we had grown up a little and Auntie Maggie had moved into a new council house across the road, there were four walks that must be taken each holiday: up the hill to the common, along the road to Farnham one way, to Aldershot in the other direction, and down the hill for the really long trudge to Crooksbury Hill and Frensham Ponds. Frensham was all of six or seven miles away, but we thought nothing of it. At least, Mum and I and Roger didn’t, but my cousin hated walking, and grumbled all the way. Frensham meant a swim and a bus most of the way back. Crooksbury Hill you can actually see from Weybourne, and when we got back from there we used to say to each other, ‘Look, that’s where we’ve been—all that way.’ There were shorter walks too: of an evening across the fields, for lemonade outside the Six Bells Inn; or along the rough farm track and across a humpback bridge over the railway to where a lovely old couple called Bill and Annie Walker had a cottage with a well in the garden where we’d stop for a drink of their water.

On the whole, Weybourne didn’t mean incidents so much as atmosphere; it was walks and flowers and green grass and fresh air and picnics. It was people: a real aunt and uncle, plus a crowd of friendly adults we always knew—in the fashion of the day—as aunties and uncles. It was like having a huge family in the country, and a whole circuit of houses to visit. There were the usual cuts and bruises, the quarrels and the getting into trouble, which are part of childhood, but I remember Weybourne mostly as a place of calm pleasures and small but intense excitements.

The one major excitement befell my brother Roger, not me, and happened a little later. He would have been about twelve, which would have made me nine. There was a pub called The Elm Tree, and near by a real elm, an enormous one on a crossroads. Roger was standing under this tree one day when he saw, careering towards him down the lane, a big metal army wagon with two huge bolting horses at the head of it. They appeared to be coming straight at him, so naturally he dodged round the tree, only to find when he emerged from the other side of the trunk that the runaway horses and the wagon still seemed to be heading for him. Wherever he put himself, the horses were apparently bent on getting Roger. The driver had completely lost control—in fact by this time he might well have jumped or been thrown off—so obviously the thing was lurching from side to side so much that it gave the impression of being all over the place. Roger can never remember how long he kept up this scuttling backwards and forwards around the tree, though at the time it felt like ages. But within what must in reality have been only a few seconds, the horses had rushed past him and they ended up by going through the window of the frail little shop, Mason’s, where we bought our sweets. Roger was probably a bit shaken for a while, but nothing upsets you for long at twelve and afterwards it made him feel rather proud and manly. (Not long after this Roger and I became much closer—which we hadn’t really been as small children—when we started ballroom dancing together in our teens. We used to practise in the clubs.)

Otherwise Roger’s memories of Weybourne are not as vivid as mine. The annual visits went on until I was almost out of my teens, but I was the one who kept going back long after that—until Auntie Maggie moved right away, in fact. Throughout my childhood I always told myself that nobody could have been more miserable than I was at the end of every August. My gloom would get deeper and deeper as we came closer to Waterloo, and would reach its lowest—almost despair—on the final bus ride back to East Ham. ‘Why have we got to come back to all the streets and houses? Why can’t we always live in the country?’ I’d ask my mother. And my mother, who always said she wouldn’t want to ‘shut herself away’, as she called it, in some village, probably dismissed it as end-of-holiday grizzling. But I was in deadly earnest, which is why I live in the country now, in Sussex. The dream that I had as a little girl, to never have to leave the country, eventually came true for me. I realize, of course, that I’m able to live in the country because of the career I chose—or perhaps I should say because of the career that chose me—and I was deep into that even before Roger thought the horses were after him.

CHAPTER TWO One-&-six for an Encore

People find it hard to believe that I started singing regularly in the clubs when I was seven, but there’s nothing strange about it at all, really. With the club life practically in my blood, with a tradition of party singing deeply ingrained in the whole family, and with my own voice already—so I’ve been told—distinctive in some uncanny way, finding myself singing songs to a real audience, with just a piano for accompaniment, felt almost as natural and inevitable as growing up. I look very serious and grown-up in the photographs from the time, dressed in silk and satin dresses with ruffles which my mother designed and made herself. In one—I must be about seven—I am dressed as a fairy wearing a dress with a sequinned bodice and have a huge net skirt!

The costumes, along with everything else in my early career, were largely down to my mother’s influence: she wanted me to perform. I have to say now that I didn’t particularly enjoy singing. The idea came from the family—it certainly didn’t come from me. For me it was a case of ‘Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington’. But I had no choice. It was my mother who saw that I started doing formal concerts. And, to my amazement, I got paid for it, although obviously I didn’t see the money myself.

It didn’t happen entirely automatically, of course; somebody had to provide the first push. That came from a man named Pat Barry, who was a male ‘soubrette’ on the working men’s club circuit. ‘Soubrette’ is an odd kind of word, but it used to be bandied about in the business. Originally it meant a girl who sang and danced. By the time the concert parties and then the revues had come along, the word had taken on the meaning of a young female member of the cast who could sing and dance and act, and was therefore useful in several ways. Pat Barry’s talents were singing and tap dancing and clog dancing. A sort of jack-of-all-trades for the stage, then.

Pat knew the family, he’d heard me sing at parties and he thought that I was good enough to appear as an act; and he not only persuaded my mother and father that I ought to go on, but—being an all-rounder himself and keen on the idea of having at least a second accomplishment to call on—he told me I ought to learn to step dance as well. So once a week round at his house he’d teach me to dance on a proper little slatted step-dancing mat on the kitchen floor—a roll-up mat of wooden slats on straps that your shoes would ‘clack’ against. I was tall and leggy as a child and, although that first big illness seemed to have left me unable to run far without getting out of breath, I was acrobatic and nimble enough, and did pretty well. But for me, singing—with all the appropriate actions—was to be the main thing, and the club would bill me as a ‘descriptive child vocalist’.

The clubs themselves were part of a network of entertainment of which, unless you grew up in it, you could be completely unaware. There have been working men’s clubs in practically every industrial and thickly populated working-class area since the end of the nineteenth century, and the East London clubs I started in were just a few out of literally hundreds of such places. The old Mildmay Club at Newington Green was one of the best known.

I appeared many times at the Mildmay, with its large hall where the rows of chairs had ledges on the backs of them to hold glasses of beer, and where the chairman and committee of the club sat in front of the stage at a long table. That was the standard practice and, very much as in an old-fashioned music hall, the chairman could quickly gauge the mood of an audience. This was very important, because it was the committee who decided, according to the strength of the applause, whether you were worth an encore or not. That made all the difference to the money you earned: an extra encore earned you a shilling and sixpence. An encore also meant you were well in, and if it happened in a club you were new to, you could be sure that the entertainments secretary would have taken note of how you went down and would book you again.

In the working men’s clubs the entertainments secretaries were roughly the equivalent of agents, and like agents they were always visiting other clubs, on the look-out for new acts. They were unpaid, but every so often the club would run a benefit night for its entertainments secretary. These were known as ‘nanty’ jobs (the word comes from niente, Italian for ‘nothing’), because the performers offered their services free. Artists would try hard to appear on these shows, for apart from anything else, they were the accepted way of getting into a new club. If you could do a nanty job for an entertainments secretary who didn’t know your act, then it worked like an audition. If he liked you, you’d go down in his book of contacts and you could expect him to remember you later for a paid performance.

Some artists remained more or less permanent fixtures on the club circuit; others used the clubs as a way into ‘the business’ and a step towards bigger things. The comedy team of Bennett and Williams began in the clubs as a double act known, if I remember rightly, as Prop and Cop; the comedian and actor Max Wall started in the clubs too. The Beverley Sisters’ parents were a club act called The Corams. These were names and faces from the bills I used to appear on as a child.

For my first appearance, when Pat Barry got an entertainments secretary to put me on, I learned three songs and had a new dress made: white lace with little mauve bows—I can see it now. You didn’t have ‘dresses’ in those days; you had one dress and that was it. (When that one got shabby, if you were lucky you got another one.) I had a pair of silver pumps, a tiny briefcase from Woolworth’s for sixpence and my rolled-up music, and off I went. Later I would suffer from nerves, like everybody else, but at seven I was simply too young to feel anxious. The thing that excited me was the medal I’d been promised for going on. Our next-door neighbour in Ladysmith Avenue was Charlie Paynter, the trainer/manager of West Ham United football team, and he had said he’d give me a West Ham United medallion if I sang in public. He kept his promise, and I was thrilled, because he was a very important man in our locality. My parents would have been with me that first time too, but I don’t remember them telling me that I’d done well or anything like that. I just remember not wanting to do it but knowing that I had to. The applause made me feel good, though, and I got an encore—and got paid for that.

I don’t remember what I sang on that first occasion, but I know that from my earliest days I seemed to be attracted naturally to the straightforward sentimental ballad. In spite of—or maybe, come to think of it, because of—the happy times I had with my dad, I practically cornered the market in ‘daddy’ numbers: ‘Dream Daddy’; ‘I’ve Got a Real Daddy Now’; and a genuine 22-carat tear-jerker called ‘What is a Mammy, Daddy?’ I sang that at a competition once:

What is a mammy, daddy?

Everyone’s got one but me,

Is she the lady what lives next door

Who cooks our dinner and sweeps up the floor?

I’ve got no mammy to put me to bed

And tell me to go out to play.

Daddy I’ll be such a very good girl,

If you’ll bring me a mammy some day.

Everybody was in tears, and there was tremendous applause, but I didn’t win. When the results were announced, the audience kept shouting out, ‘What about the little girl in the red dress?’ and, in the end, I got a consolation prize. This particular competition took place not far from home in Poplar, East London, and it was one of a whole series run at various cinemas in London by Nat Travers, a local cockney comedian. Afterwards he came round to me and my mum and said, ‘Sorry about that, ducks, but come to Tottenham Court Road next week. I’ve got another competition on there and you’ll be all right.’ But my mother was furious and wouldn’t let me go in for any more of his contests.

Remembering a song, once I’ve learned it, has never been a problem for me, and I could still probably sing you an hour and a half’s worth straight off without repeating myself. I’ve always been able to decide quickly how to sing a song—how to phrase it, what to emphasize. But I had enormous difficulty in learning the words in the first place. I would sit on the floor at home for hours on end, going over them again and again, while my mother doggedly picked out the tune on the piano. Often there’d be tears, and even when I’d finally managed to get a song into my head and came to sing it in public for the first time I’d be petrified in case I forgot the words. Ever so many times I wished I could give the whole thing up, just for this one reason.

Finding material was comparatively easy. The writing and publishing and selling of popular songs was a business then just as it is now, but it was a different kind of business. Live public performances were what counted, not the plugging of records, and anybody who was known to appear regularly in front of an audience could count on being welcome at the various music publishers’ offices, which were then nearly all in Denmark Street, just off Charing Cross Road, the British ‘Tin Pan Alley’. This was where all the music publishers were based, and if they knew you could put a song over, they were often willing to give you copies. So, from quite an early age, I was a familiar little figure up there—something which was to stand me in good stead later when I started broadcasting.

That ‘descriptive child vocalist’ billing was no mere gimmick. Even when I was very small I had an unusual voice, loud, penetrating, and rather low in pitch for my age; most songs had to be transposed from their original key into something more suitable. When I became better known, the publishers would usually do that themselves, but at first I always had to go to someone outside. We found a Mr Winterbottom, who would do you a ‘right-hand part’ for sixpence a copy; if you wanted a left-hand as well it came to one-and-six, but we just used to have the top line done because most of the club pianists were so experienced at this kind of work—which was more than a cut above the ‘you-whistle-it-and-I’ll-follow-you’ school—that was all they needed.

You’d merely hand your music over and they would improvise a bass part on the spot. One or two were actually publishers’ pianists by day—the men whose job was to demonstrate songs to prospective professional customers. (All that has gone now, but forty and fifty years ago that was the accepted way of selling a performer a new number, and those pianists could transpose anything into any key, at sight.) Every now and again you would come across a club pianist who wasn’t much good, but they must have been in a minority, because I can’t recall any great musical disasters.

One minor catastrophe was not the pianist’s fault but mine. Without being a typical ‘stage mother’, my mum always took a very close interest in every aspect of my singing, and my programme for any given appearance was usually the result of a kind of joint decision. We didn’t disagree often, but there was one night when I very much wanted to do one song, and she thought I ought to do another. I must have been a stubborn child, for in the end I won, and it was decided I would sing the one I wanted. I gave the pianist the music for it, but the moment he’d rattled through an introduction (and I must say club pianists’ introductions could sound pretty much alike), I immediately began singing the other one. For a few disorganized bars the two numbers tangled with each other; we both stopped and started, like two people trying to pass one another but always ending up in each other’s way. We did the only thing we could do, and began again from the top. Audiences don’t dislike this sort of thing as much as some artists believe; as long as it doesn’t happen too often, there’s something strangely reassuring about seeing somebody else make a mistake.

That much I accept, and could accept even then. What I couldn’t take were the efforts of some well-meaning entertainments secretaries who would see my deadpan little face and urge me to ‘Smile, dear—smile’. I’d come back at them with, ‘I’m not going to smile; I’m singing a sad song’—and I usually was—‘so why should I have to grin all over my face?’

I was aware that I did not have much choice but to go on stage. Money was short in those days, so any money I could earn helped to swell the household coffers. I hardly ever wanted to be at these concerts, though, and later I was always nervous before I went on. Nobody asked me if I wanted to sing or not. You didn’t argue in those days; you did as you were told. That makes me laugh now, when I think of how youngsters are today. It never entered my mind to be angry with my mother, but there were times when I wasn’t happy. I don’t ever remember saying the words, ‘I don’t want to do it and I’m not going to,’ which is what kids of today might do. This went on until I was about fifteen or sixteen—it wasn’t until I started singing with bands that I started to enjoy it more.

I did club work for something like eight years, mostly in east and north London and on the Essex fringe, but also over the river in places like Woolwich and Plumstead, which were comparatively easy to get to because of the Blackwall tunnel. Coming back from Woolwich one night we missed a bus and had to walk all the way through the tunnel, which had only a tiny pavement and wasn’t really designed for pedestrians, to pick up the tram at Poplar. And there were many other nights when I would wait at Poplar in the cold and wet, and being so tired that I’d fall asleep on the bus long before we got home. While I was still small enough, my dad would sometimes give me a piggyback home late at night, and it was wonderful to stop on the way for fish and chips and what we used to call wally-wallies, which were big dill pickles. Occasionally on the way to a club, when the shops were still open, we’d call in at the little grocer’s near the end of the road for a penn’orth of broken biscuits. These were a great bargain because biscuits came in big square tins in those days and were bought loose— any that got broken were sold off cheap, even the most expensive ones.

Nowadays if child performers earn any money the parents are able to build up the child’s bank account and put money aside for their future. But in my day they were only too glad of the money to keep the house going. Although my father had a job, when I started earning money that helped pay the food bills. In fact the money I earned more than fed me. If I had concerts on the weekend and a cabaret somewhere I could earn seven shillings and sixpence. Unless I did two places in one night, which I did regularly: then I could earn more. And if the public wanted an encore, then the men sitting around the committee table in the club would put money in a kitty—up to one shilling and six. That was useful because it paid for our fares, either on a sixpenny tram or on a shilling-all-night tram. In those days my dad was probably earning about three pounds fifty a week. So there were some weekends when I could almost make in two nights what my father made in a week.

I was not allowed to spend any of the money I earned myself. I didn’t feel good or bad about it; I didn’t think about it. I just did the concerts, knowing that whatever money I earned, it would go into the household. In my younger days going to school I would be given a penny to buy a chocolate cupcake from the bakery opposite the school, and I would have that in my break. It was a little spongey cake with chocolate melted on top, which used to go all hard and crispy—it was so nice. As long as I had my penny for the school break, I never thought to ask for anything more than that. I knew that the money made a big difference to the family as it was a lot of money in those days. You don’t analyse these things when you’re young, but we were always well fed, although not by today’s standards, maybe. The children of today just help themselves to whatever they want. You weren’t allowed to help yourself back then—we would have eaten at mealtimes but rarely between. The only time we had a bowl of oranges on the side was at Christmas. The rest of the year fruit was kept in the larder. I didn’t consider our family poor, though: we were just middle of the road. We never really went short of anything.

I was certainly never hungry. My mother was a plain cook but a good cook. Most women were in those days. There wasn’t all the fancy cooking that we do today. It was basic. We had a roast every Sunday—Mother used to make very good Yorkshire pudding—and then the cold meat on the Monday. And we always had two different sorts of potatoes: roast and boiled. I was thinking about that the other day when I was peeling potatoes: that at home on Sundays there was always a choice. They don’t do that nowadays, do they? You get either boiled or roast, but not both. Funny how things change.

All this time, of course, I was at school, and although the work I did in the clubs was mostly at weekends, the two things still managed to clash—sometimes in unexpected ways. At my junior school in Central Park Road I once asked if I could borrow a copy of the sheet music of ‘Your Land and My Land’, and when I told the teacher what I wanted it for she said, ‘Oh, you sing, do you?’ Obviously she remembered, because one morning at assembly not long after that I was suddenly called on to sing this song. I was petrified, and I had every reason to be, for as I’ve mentioned, my voice was of a rather unorthodox pitch for a little girl, so when the school played it from the original song copy, it was in completely the wrong key for me. It was a terrible mess, and although it wasn’t my fault I was crimson with shame. They must have thought, Good God! How can this child go on stage and sing!

As a matter of fact everything we sang at school was pitched too high for me. Most of the time I couldn’t get up there, and the only alternative was to go into a kind of falsetto voice, which was disastrous. The school disliked my singing voice so much that ironically I was only allowed in the front row of the choir because I opened my mouth nice and wide and it looked good.

If I was ever tired at school it was automatically put down to my going out singing late at night ‘in those terrible places’. My voice and the sort of singing I was doing were much looked down on. One teacher in particular was most unsympathetic. One day she wouldn’t let me go home early in time to get to a competition at East Ham Granada, so when we did come out of school I had to run all the way home, where my mother was waiting with my things—this was the time I sang with my doll—and then we both ran all the way there. I wasn’t much of a runner, and I arrived out of breath, just as the last competitor was coming off. I flew on, somehow struggled through my number—‘A Glad Rag Doll’—and won first prize. Ten bob, it was, and it bought me and my mum enough of that red ripply material that everybody used for dressing gowns in those days to make us a dressing gown each.

I was never keen on school—probably because I wasn’t good at any of the academic subjects. I could never spell; I couldn’t add up; I couldn’t assimilate the facts in history and geography. I never tried very hard at French; I didn’t need French, I was going to be a singer—I can actually remember thinking that. How foolish can you be? I’ve bitterly regretted my poor record at that kind of subject ever since, and it’s left me with a permanent sense of inferiority in certain kinds of company. As if in compensation, I was always good at anything with my hands—drawing, painting and sewing. Gardening too, even then; when we made a crazy paving path at my secondary school, Brampton Road School, I took charge of laying out the pieces. Maybe it’s still there. Cookery was something else I was good at, and botany, though my marks in that came mostly from my little sketches. I wasn’t a great reader, but I read quite well out loud in class—I suppose there was some kinship there with projecting a song. I tended to be good at what came easily to me, and made heavy weather of everything else, like learning songs. But I just wasn’t academic. In fact I never learned to read music, not even to this day.

The whole act of going to school was rather like learning new words, as a matter of fact, because no matter how much I may have disliked it, I never tried to get out of it; I knew it had to be done. I suffered a great deal from bilious attacks as a child, but even if I’d been up nearly all night and felt like death the next morning, when my mother would ask me if I wanted to stay at home, I’d have to explain that I had to go—I musn’t miss school. It turned out in later life that one of the things that was causing the biliousness, and the being ill after eating, say, strawberries, was a troublesome appendix, which would eventually catch up with me right on the stage of the Palladium during the Blitz. But at the time I was just another of those bilious children, with maybe that difference—that instead of using the weakness as an excuse for taking it easy, I felt I had actively to fight it. If I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing, I feel I’m slacking. I’ve got to deserve a rest; I feel each day that I’ve got to earn my day. My mother was the same, never still. She didn’t slow down until the mid-1970s, when infirmity forced her to (she died not many years after that), and my recollection of her during my childhood is that she was always rushing about. She wanted to get a lot done, and I suppose I do, too.

We shared that practical streak. As mentioned already, my mother had been a dressmaker before I was born, and not only made all my dresses and costumes during those early years but, when the Depression came and my dad was out of work for a spell, went back to dressmaking rather more seriously in order to help out, and I suppose my seven-and-sixes must have been quite a help.

When I was eleven the pattern of my young career changed a little. I still carried on with the solo club singing, but I also joined a juvenile troupe with the ringing title of Madame Harris’s Kracker Kabaret Kids, and that was when, for professional purposes, I changed my name.

I never doubted that I was going to be a singer, and the instinct that had prompted me, when I was very tiny, to sing ‘Dream Daddy’ and follow it up with ‘I’ve Got a Real Daddy Now’ suggested that I ought to adopt a more comfortable— and more glamorous—stage name than Vera Welch. The main concern was to find something that was short and easily remembered, and that would stand out on a bill—something that would allow for plenty of space round each letter. We held a kind of family conference about it, and we found the answer within the family too. My grandmother’s maiden name had been Lynn; it seemed to be everything a stage name ought to be, but at the same time it was a real one. From then on, I was to be Vera Lynn.

In spite of its exotic name, Madame Harris’s Kracker Kabaret Kids was run from a house in Central Park Road, East Ham. As a juvenile troupe it prospered, and it quickly outgrew Madame Harris’s front parlour and transferred its activities, every Saturday morning, to the local Salvation Army hut; we used to pay sixpence each towards the cost of hiring it. I don’t know exactly how Madame Harris advertised the tuition she offered, but it’s my guess that she must have been an early exponent of ‘Ballet, Tap and Acro.’, that faintly ridiculous-sounding description you used to see on local advertising boards and among the small ads in local papers. Acrobatic I certainly was, with my long legs and my ability to kick high; while Pat Barry’s wisdom in insisting on my doing some tap dancing meant that I was halfway there as far as dancing was concerned. After a while I used to teach the kids while Madame Harris banged away at the piano. In fact it became something of a family concern, for my mother and Mrs Harris, between them, made all the costumes for our shows.

The troupe was a very busy performing unit, working the clubs as I had always done, but going rather farther afield, usually travelling in a small coach. On a trip to Dagenham once the driver got it into his head that he had to get us there in a great hurry, and drove like a madman all the way. We were terrified, and I seem to remember that we spent most of the journey screaming. He must have been driving very badly, because on the whole children are only aware of that kind of danger when it gets physically alarming, and I have a very clear recollection of being pitched all over the place. When you consider how much higher off the ground all the cars and buses were in those days, you can understand our certain belief that we were going to turn over. How we managed to dance and sing properly at the end of it I can’t think.

The other trip that sticks in my mind was part of what turned out in the end to be a rather longer stay away from home. It must have been during the Christmas holidays one year, because we’d been booked to do three nights in pantomime at—wait for it—the Corn Exchange, Leighton Buzzard. I don’t know whether the extra distance was a strain on the Kracker Kids’ finances, or whether the coach contractor was out of favour after the Dagenham Grand Prix run, or what, but this time we’d hired a vegetable van, with a flap at the back, to take us to and from the engagement. The arrangement lasted one night only. You know that old tag line ‘We had one but the wheel came off’? Well, it did, somewhere out on the edge of London where the tramlines ended. We were on the way home in the small hours of the morning when one of the wheels of this van came off, and there we were, a bunch of kids and a few mums stranded in a freezing street in some unfamiliar suburb. Keeping ourselves warm was the main problem, and we ran up and down for what seemed like hours, trying to keep our circulations going while we waited for the first tram to come along.

Eventually we got home at about six in the morning, though God knows what sort of state we were in, and we somehow went back to Leighton Buzzard the next night. But Mrs Harris decided we weren’t going to take any more risks and she found somewhere for us to stay for those two nights. All I can remember of our dubious accommodation is that we had to go up a winding staircase and all the girls were put in one room, the boys in another and the mums somewhere else, and in the middle of everything my mother was wandering about with a spoon in one hand and a bottle of syrup of figs in the other, dosing us one by one. This was in the heyday of parental belief in laxatives, of course, and what with that and the candles we had to carry to find our way to the loo it was like something out of Oliver Twist. Now I stop to think about it, the Leighton Buzzard Corn Exchange itself must have been pretty Dickensian, because all the backstage passages were unlit, and we had to use candles to find our way around the rambling passages. That must have been the first occasion when entertaining other people caused me to spend a night away from home. I couldn’t possibly have guessed then that eventually I should lose count of the times that happened, and that for part of my life that would be the rule rather than the exception.

I’m sure I was too busy concentrating on the job in hand to think of things like that, and in any case I always took my career a step at a time. It was very much a matter of steps then, too, for with one or two exceptions we were a strong dancing team. Which doesn’t mean we were short of soloists. Apart from myself there was Leslie, a boy soprano, who eventually made some records as Leslie Day, ‘the 14-year-old Wonder Voice Boy Soprano—Sings with the Perfect Art of a Coloratura Soprano’. My cousin Joan was in the troupe, too. Where I was tall and thin, she was short and tubby. She didn’t go on with it after the troupe days ended—she was my mother’s sister’s daughter, and had been rather pushed into it—but she had a terrific voice, and used to sing meaty songs like ‘The Trumpeter’. Unfortunately, she couldn’t dance to save her life. We used to try to teach her, but she’d just clop from foot to foot, saying, ‘I hate this, I hate it.’ Another boy, Bobby, who was a future Battle of Britain pilot, was a kind of juvenile lead, and we had little Dot, Bobby’s sister, who was tiny and sang Florrie Forde numbers and one or two Marie Lloyd songs, like ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’. Eileen Fields was another soubrette type. She and I would do duets occasionally—we dressed up as an old couple for one of them and sang ‘My Old Dutch’. Mrs Harris’s daughter, Doreen, was a good singer too, and in fact she practically ran the troupe; later on she became the wife of Leon Cortez, an actor who went on to appear in Dixon of Dock Green, The Saint and Dad’s Army in the 1960s. Doreen and I were the ones who went on into the profession itself, and when Doreen left to start broadcasting Mrs Harris asked me to take over instead. Soon after that, Mrs Harris packed it in altogether, and I took over the school for a year until I, too, got involved in other things.

I was with the troupe for about four years, and had a lot of fun. Some of the children clearly had no liking for it and no talent, and had merely been conscripted into it by ambitious mothers, but on the whole I don’t think we can have been too bad. We certainly did plenty of work, especially during the school holidays, when we often did shows on the stages of the big local cinemas. As juveniles we were subject to fairly strict controls and licensing regulations; you had to be over fourteen to appear on public stages after a certain hour at night without a licence, which ruined our chances when cousin Joan and I went in for a competition once. We were both under age and neither of us had a licence, but we got through to the semifinal without anyone bothering to check up. Then they said, ‘When you come tomorrow you’ll have to bring your birth certificate with you,’ but they said it to Joan and not to me. They never said it to me because I looked fourteen, even though I wasn’t. But they wanted Joan’s birth certificate, and that would have given the show away. We tried for hours to work out some way round it, but in the end we had to admit defeat, so that was us out of the competition, even though we felt we had a good chance of winning.

I don’t suppose ‘That’s show business’ had become a common phrase by that time, but presumably I accepted that setback (if that’s what it was) as simply one obstacle which time would remove. For in due course I would be fourteen and such problems wouldn’t arise.

I would also be free to leave school. Fourteen was the official leaving age, though you could stay on another year if you wanted to. The drama teacher begged me not to leave, because she wanted to put me into all sorts of productions, but all I wanted was to get away from school. Once I’d left, of course, I began wanting to go back. I realized I’d wasted a lot of precious time by not concentrating; I felt ignorant, and I wanted to return and make up for it.

Not that I ever doubted for a moment that I was going to be a professional singer. Judging by the way she stood over me while I learned my songs, by the way she helped with my costumes and by the way she came with me to whatever show I was doing, whichever club I was working at, I don’t think my mother could have doubted it either. But when I left school she wavered, offering the classic and very reasonable objection that there wasn’t enough security in the life of a professional popular singer. Actually her plan seemed not to have been for me to work at all in the ordinary sense, but to stay at home and help her while carrying on as usual—only more actively—in the clubs. In other words I was to continue to do as much singing as I could get, but that I wasn’t to regard it as my profession.

I didn’t fancy that, because the girl next door had stayed at home after she left school, and in no time at all she seemed to have turned into an old maid. I didn’t want to be like that, so I decided I ought to have a job and I went and signed on at the Labour Exchange. It took them six weeks to come up with something, by which time I’d already lost any enthusiasm for the idea before I even went to a little factory at East Ham to start sewing on buttons for a living. I sat down with a number of other young girls, but we weren’t even allowed to talk. When lunchtime came I went into a little back room with my sandwiches and felt thoroughly miserable. The day seemed never ending.

When I finally did get home, my dad asked me how I’d got on.

‘Horrible,’ I said. ‘You must do this and you mustn’t do that. I don’t want to go back there any more.’

‘How much do you get?’ he asked.

‘Six-and-six.’

‘A day?’

‘No, for the week.’

‘Be damned to that,’ he said. ‘Why, you can earn more than that for one concert. You’re not going back there. What do you have to put up with it all for?’

So I never did go back, and I got a postal order for one-and-a-penny for my day’s work. I can’t say that at this stage I really had any idea myself what I wanted to do with my life. Children thought differently in those days to how they think today. Now they have ideas of what they want to do, but in those days you just went along with what your mother or father said.

But it was fairly typical of my father to side with me over the button factory. He was very much the one for going along with the wishes of his children. In fact he was an enormously easy-going man altogether. While my mother was the sort who, for some years to come, would wait up for me after a show so that I dare not linger or go to any of the many parties that were held, Dad would have said, ‘Go on, mate, do as you like, mate; enjoy yourself, I’m going off to bed.’ Only two things ever really seemed to upset him, and they were quite trivial. If you gave him a cup of tea that hadn’t been sugared he’d carry on as if you’d tried to poison him; and he hated being expected to go to tea at anybody else’s home.

It was the strong principles of my mother that laid down the rules that gave our household and my childhood their peculiar flavour. For example, most families at that time, no matter what their religious views, tended to encourage the children to go to Sunday school, if only to get them out of the way for an hour or so on a Sunday. We were positively not allowed to go to Sunday school. My mother didn’t think it was right to go to church or Sunday school during the day on Sunday, and then go singing in the clubs on Sunday night. I think she was wrong, but that’s what she believed, and there seemed nothing strange about it at the time.

At the latter end of my period with Mrs Harris’s juvenile troupe I was starting to work quite hard as a young entertainer. By the time I left school at fourteen I had, to all intents and purposes, already been earning my living as a performer for seven years, and after that one day’s orthodox employment I never thought of doing anything else. I more or less ran the troupe, and I sang and danced with it, but I still went out solo as well. The engagements were mainly club dates, as they had always been, but I was beginning to add slightly more sophisticated cabaret bookings to my diary—private social functions and dinners. On a ticket to one of them I suddenly found I was being described as ‘the girl with the different voice’. That was a label I should hold on to, I realized. It was nothing spectacular, but it was progress, a kind of hint that I wasn’t to remain working round the clubs for ever, and that I could expect in time to move on to something else.

That something else was to start when I was fifteen, and doing a cabaret spot at Poplar Baths. It was a nerve-racking evening when everything happened at once: I had a foul cold, I encountered my first microphone and I was heard by Howard Baker, the king of the local bandleaders. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the moment my life really took off.

CHAPTER THREE Vocal Chorus

You can get a real flavour of the period from the advertisements and Howard Baker’s ads were hardly humble:

HOWARD BAKER BANDS

- The Gig King -

Definitely the largest band organization in the country. Howard Baker Bands supplied. Also leading agents for outside combinations. We also supply first-class cabaret and concert artistes for all functions.

Nowadays wording like that has a faintly preposterous ring about it. But in the early 1930s, celebrity was infinitely graded, and while Howard Baker was not a household name, like Roy Fox or Lew Stone or Jack Payne (all bandleaders in their heyday in the 1930s), and he isn’t familiar to later generations, he was every bit as successful as he implied in those pompous ads. Nobody disputed his claim to be the Gig King.

The word ‘gig’ in those days nearly always meant just a one-night engagement. Musicians today seem to talk of almost any kind of job as a gig, even a long residency somewhere or a complete tour. But then ‘gigging around’ in essence meant doing musical odd jobs. It wasn’t anything like as lowly as it sounds, because back then in the 1930s, long before disco had been heard of and jukeboxes were still a rarity, the demand for live musical entertainment was tremendous and musicians would be booked to appear at anything from twenty-first birthday parties through weddings and firms’ dinners to large private and public dances—‘all functions’, just as the advert said.

Howard Baker began as a cornet and trumpet player, and found that he got so much work in the early twenties that he had to farm some of it out, so he set up an agency to supply bands to this greedy market. On a really busy night there could be anything up to a couple of dozen Howard Baker bands—in addition to the one he ran himself—keeping his name before the foxtrotting couples. Some of his bands went quite far afield, but since he was based in Ilford, his greatest fame was in the London area and the Thames-side Essex towns; as provider of the music for a function in Poplar, he was the obvious choice.

This meant that he and I were working the same patch. The clubs I worked at regularly, except for the ones on the Woolwich side of the river, lay within an area drawn between, say, Dagenham and Finsbury Park. Since I had some minor local fame in those parts, it’s quite possible that Howard Baker wasn’t unaware of me before the evening when he actually made a point of listening to me.

Poplar Baths doesn’t sound a particularly promising place for furthering a career—it was a bath house that was used for concerts and events in the winter months. I was booked to appear there in the cabaret spot at some social gathering or other, and the dance music was being provided by Howard Baker. Considering how important the occasion turned out to be, it seems awful to say now that I can’t remember who arranged it, but somebody had persuaded him to hear my act, so that while I was working I was doing a kind of audition. I knew in advance, because I remember being in tears over the fact that this was my big chance and I’d only gone and caught the most dreadful cold. And my colds really were distressing—still are, as a matter of fact—because that bout of diphtheric croup seemed to have left my bronchial tubes with a permanent coat of rust on them; at least, that’s what it feels like whenever I catch a cold. But I told myself that I’d got to go, and do my best. I suppose it’s adrenalin that sees you through situations like that, because cold or no cold, he seemed satisfied.

The microphone was another unexpected problem. Microphones weren’t in general use then, and this was the first time I’d ever had to work with one. I can see it now: I walked on to the stage and there was this thing, and at first I stood well back from it. It was then that I realized that if I were to use a microphone, I was going to have to start learning an entirely different technique. I had to find out how to employ it as an instrument, and make it work for me. I can’t have adapted myself too badly that night, for I went down well with the audience and Howard Baker took me on as vocalist with the band!

That brought about several changes right away, not the least of which was that I was now worth ten shillings an appearance. There was a great deal of learning and unlearning to be done. As a child performer—almost a novelty—I had literally acted out my songs dramatically (because I was sometimes billed as a ‘descriptive child vocalist’ I often did the full ‘Shepherd of the Hills’ gesticulating bit) and I had to unlearn all that. I was part of a band, and apart from the new experience of having to blend my voice with a whole lot of other instruments, it meant that while I was singing I had to stand still. Holding the microphone with one hand was a big help in that; but there was another convention of the period which made it easier than it might have been. You can imagine that a band playing all the popular tunes of the day was constantly adding new stuff to its book. With my dreadful slowness at learning an unfamiliar lyric, that would have been agony for me. But strangely enough, nobody minded seeing a vocalist standing there clutching a song sheet in those days, which not only helped me over the words problem but gave me something to do with my hands. When I wasn’t singing, of course, I had to sit or stand politely to one side.

It was the microphone itself, however, that was the revelation. I’d sung in some big places without one—none of our cinema gigs with the juvenile troupe, for instance, had ever involved a microphone—and had developed a pretty piercing sort of delivery. I learned very quickly to lower my volume, but I found out at the same time that that also meant lowering the pitch: as I reduced the pressure on my voice, so it simply dropped into a lower key. I was suddenly faced with a whole set of new keys to deal with.

I suppose I was young enough not to be consciously bothered by it all, for I didn’t seem to have any real difficulty in adapting myself to the needs of band singing. I’m sure there must have been some awkward moments, because having adjusted my approach to compensate for the microphone, I would still run into venues where there wasn’t one. In fact, with Howard Baker at the old Holborn Restaurant one night, I actually used a megaphone, which was a bit of a giggle, since I’d only ever seen one in a film—probably wielded by Rudy Vallée, an American singer and bandleader I loved. Using a megaphone is a very strange sensation, because while you’re having to sing your sentimental words, you know all the time that you look more like a rowing coach than a singer. It was all good training, and I’m especially glad that I had to discover for myself so early on what a microphone could do. For many years people complemented me on the way I used a microphone and I’m sure it’s because of what I learned back then.

As far as the public and the press were concerned, I wasn’t a singer though, I was a crooner. Anybody who sang with a dance band in the thirties was a crooner (soon they would even invent the word ‘croonette’, for there was no such thing as unisex in those days) and when I came to qualify for my first press cutting, towards the end of 1934, it was headed, with a great flourish, ‘STAR IN THE EAST—East Ham’s Latest Contribution to Crooning’. The crooner’s status was rather ambiguous, because while it was clear that no band could afford to be without one of each gender, band singers as a whole were treated very condescendingly by most of the press. ‘To many people “crooning” has become an insidious word relative to immediate action in switching off the wireless, walking out of the cinema or smashing up the gramophone,’ the East Ham Echo said at one point in the piece about me. Admittedly it found me ‘not guilty’ of whatever it was that people found so objectionable about crooners, but the fact that the remark was there at all, in an otherwise complimentary article, suggests that the poor crooner was the current whipping boy or girl and was probably held responsible for the country going to the dogs.

I’d been singing with Howard Baker’s various bands for close on two years when that piece appeared, and he’d kept me very busy indeed. I still did the occasional solo date, but I was getting most of my work from him. He had enough bands out at any given time for it to be possible sometimes to do more than one appearance for him in the course of an evening, and I would get ten shillings for each.

With work coming in at that rate it made sense to have a telephone put in the house, which was a big thing in those days. It was one of those old-fashioned telephones with two parts, one for your ear and one to speak into. It had the dial on the base and it was black. When you picked up the phone to make a call, you spoke directly to the operator and gave them your number. Ours started with Grosvenor and then a fourdigit number. Having a phone was very exciting, and for some reason we had it in the front parlour, by the fireplace. (Actually, that wasn’t such a bad idea, now I come to think of it. Next to the bathroom, if you had one—we didn’t—the coldest place in an English house in those days was the hall, yet the telephone was always stuck out there among the hats and coats.) It was decidedly a necessity and not a luxury, for Howard would often call me at very short notice to go and sing with one of his bands somewhere, and soon I couldn’t have got along without it. Grangewood 380-something, the number was, and it’s sad to think that those pretty exchange names have gone now, and been replaced with these long numbers which are impossible to remember.

So it was that I got a call which gave me a week and a half with Billy Cotton and, with it, my first taste of the big time. A one-time amateur footballer for Brentford FC, Cotton became a well-known bandleader in the 1920s and went on to be a television personality in the 1950s. Back in the thirties Howard Baker had some kind of business tie-up with Billy Cotton on the agency side, and I believe that some of the members of the Baker bands would occasionally ‘move up’ into Billy Cotton’s band. I got the impression that Billy Cotton had never been terribly keen on girl vocalists, but I suppose he thought he’d try one again, and he’d heard about me through Howard Baker, so I went to some bleak audition room and sang for him. He used the customary formula ‘I’ll let you know’, and I went home not really expecting to hear any more about it. But he phoned, and said would I go to Manchester—just like that—and he’d give me five pounds for the week.

In the 1930s there was always some magic about the figure of five pounds. If you ever heard an adult say of another, ‘He’s getting five pounds a week,’ you knew that this person had made it. But more important than that, it looked like a big step up in my career. Mum had to come with me, of course, since I was only sixteen going on seventeen—as the song says —and that meant she had to flap round and organize someone to look after Dad at short notice. I played a week of Mecca ballrooms in the Manchester area, and the most memorable thing about the whole trip was not singing with the band but the awful place where we had digs. My only other experience of staying away from home on a job had been those two nights of candles and syrup of figs at Leighton Buzzard. This was worse—a tiny room, with one bed in it, which my mother and I shared. When we came home from the show each night there was an awful greasy supper of fish and chips or sausages waiting for us, and a great roaring coal fire halfway up the chimney, making the room so hot you could hardly breathe. If they didn’t manage to poison us there was always a strong chance we’d choke to death; they seemed determined to get us one way or the other.

The following week Billy Cotton took me on to Sheffield, where the band had a week’s engagement at a theatre, but this time I only lasted three days. I’ve never been absolutely certain what went wrong. It certainly wasn’t what or how I sang, because I seemed to be very well received. I think the trouble arose because he would announce me as a little girl he’d more or less discovered, who was getting her first chance, and then I would come out full of the bounce and confidence and technique of many years’ experience. He used to get furious: ‘You’re supposed to be an amateur,’ he’d say, ‘not a seasoned professional!’ I’d come back at him: ‘I can’t help that; I can’t undo everything I’ve taught myself. I’ve been doing it for nearly ten years.’ That may have been the reason, although I also got the impression that he just didn’t want to be bothered with having a young girl in among his hard-bitten musicians—the Billy Cotton Band of those days was always a pretty wild bunch. Anyway, he sent me home in the middle of the week. Though he did have the grace to say a few years later that it was the worst day’s work he’d ever done.

So it was back to Howard Baker. I don’t think I felt too badly about it. The digs in Manchester had been ghastly, and I’d learned that theatre dressing rooms could be considerably more squalid than the modest but adequate accommodation in the clubs. But going out with a nationally known band, appearing before large audiences to whom I was a total stranger, had been good experience for me. I’d always taken everything a step at a time, and if this particular step hadn’t led very far, well, that was to be expected once in a while.

The next step I tried to take didn’t lead anywhere at all. I was working in some club in East London, and a couple of boys who had an act said to my mother, ‘Why don’t you take this girl up to the BBC?’ We didn’t do anything about it right away, but eventually we wrote to them for an audition. The result was that I went along and sang for Henry Hall, who was doing very well in charge of the BBC Dance Orchestra—Hall was the bandleader who recorded the delightful ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ with the BBC Dance Orchestra in 1932. He turned me down. Many years later he used to say that it was because my voice was not one that would have blended with his music. Whatever it was, he considered me unsuitable. I must have been disappointed, but no matter, there was another step in the offing, and when I eventually took it, it was to have far greater consequences.

All these years I’d been going to the music publishers, shopping for new songs. The people in all the publishers’ offices knew me and were kind to me, but the closest, kindest friend of the lot was Walter ‘Wally’ Ridley. He later became a producer for EMI Records, but in those days he worked on the ‘exploitation’ side of the music publishing house of Peter Maurice in Denmark Street. An exploitationist would try to match the right song with the right artiste, and Wally always kept his eyes and ears open for songs he thought might suit me, he’d keep an eye on the music they wrote or bought in from the songwriters doing the rounds and would play what he deemed the best or most appropriate over on the piano for me, and generally offered encouragement and advice—he was a talented singer and composer himself. Naturally there was a Denmark Street grapevine, and through this Wally came to know that a very promising young bandleader named Joe Loss was looking for a girl singer for some radio broadcasts he’d got coming up. Wally suggested that I should try to get an audition, and in fact persuaded Joe to come over to the office. Wally played for me and I sang for Joe. To my delight Joe, with no hesitation, said, ‘Yes. Fine,’ and that was it. I hadn’t had time to get worked up or nervous about it, but there I was, at one jump, lined up to do my first broadcast. To the generation brought up on records and television, the chance of a live broadcast on sound only, at a time when there were still plenty of people who didn’t have a radio at all, can hardly appear to be anything to get excited about. But in 1935 wireless listening was growing in popularity and to get on the radio was the biggest single opportunity that could come the way of a new artist. You first proved yourself in broadcasting, and then, if you were lucky, you made your records.

This was just the start of an extraordinary sequence of events in my life at this stage. For, in the very same week that I successfully auditioned for Joe Loss, there was a further rustling of the Denmark Street grapevine, this time to the effect that band leader Charlie Kunz was auditioning for a girl singer to do some broadcasting with his Casani Club Orchestra. Wally suggested that I should try for that as well, which might have seemed unnecessary, since Joe Loss had said he’d use me. But at that time Charlie Kunz was the really big name; Joe was coming up very fast, and already had the band at the Astoria, Charing Cross Road. (The Astoria was a wonderful venue, incidentally: it was built on the site of an old pickle factory in 1893 by Edward Albert Stone, who built the four other Astorias across London (in Brixton, Streatham, Finsbury Park and the Old Kent Road). It opened as a cinema in 1927 but by the 1930s it had become a popular theatre and live music venue. That was Joe Loss’s stomping ground.) Charlie Kunz, on the other hand, was far more established, he was tremendously popular and he was making records. Anybody who became associated with that band stood a good chance of going really far.

People later made out that someone connected with Charlie Kunz heard me broadcasting with Joe Loss, and that I was snapped up for the Casani Club broadcasts. The truth is rather less romantic: I went down to the Casani Club at Imperial House in Regent Street and did an orthodox audition for Charlie and the owner, Santos Casani. Santos, by the way, had been an international ballroom-dancing champion, a specialist in the once wicked tango, before he started his nightclub. That famous newsreel clip of a couple dancing the Charleston on the roof of a London taxi was a stunt fixed up by Santos Casani. He’d also been a very young pilot in the First World War.

Neither Santos nor Charlie had heard me before, as I hadn’t done a broadcast by then; so it wasn’t by any means a walkover or a foregone conclusion. It was between me and several other girls, and I didn’t think I was really sophisticated enough for them. Eventually the choice was narrowed down to me and one other girl, and after what seemed like a good deal of debate and consultation, they picked me. I could hardly believe it—within the space of a week I’d auditioned for, and been accepted by, two very important bandleaders to do the one thing that every young singer would give her eye teeth for: to sing on the radio.

If it was a matter for a small glow of pride, it was also a matter for plenty of tact, for while there was no question of Joe Loss taking me on permanently, I had given him a verbal undertaking to do three broadcasts with him. One of the conditions of working with Charlie Kunz, however, was that I shouldn’t broadcast with anyone else. But Charlie was wonderful about it—as he was about everything else—and he let me keep my word to Joe. So by the time I came to be first heard over the air, in August 1935, although it was with Joe Loss’s band, I was actually signed to Charlie Kunz.

If I can remember the colour of the lilac bows on the dress I wore the first time I sang on stage, and if I can remember unpacking new plimsolls at Auntie Maggie’s, I ought to recall a good deal more clearly than I do the sensation of being on that historic first broadcast. But I don’t, and I think the reason must be that once I got started I broadcasted very frequently, and all the recollections have gelled into one picture of microphone, red light, song sheet, instruments and studio clock. I’m not trying to suggest that I quickly became blasé, for although I always tried to regard singing simply as my job, I don’t think I ever treated it casually. The thing is that even I was surprised by the amount of radio work I did within weeks of beginning. I have a cutting headed, in my own gawky block capitals in the scrapbook I kept, ‘East Ham Ecko’—I told you I couldn’t spell—‘Sept. 13th 1935’ that states that I’d made seven broadcasts already. Even more amazing—though I really cannot recall giving it much of a thought at the time—is that in those few weeks I was given the opportunity to reach not just a national audience but an international one, as I’d also done an Empire broadcast by then—the Empire Service being the forerunner of the World Service. With the help of this medium, through the huge clumsy microphone, I had been lifted out of East Ham and East London and given the key to the world. Or so it seemed to me. In one single month, my career had made more progress than it had in the whole previous decade, and—although I didn’t really know it then, perhaps—the points had been set for the way it was to continue for some years to come.

I don’t know whether it was cheek, candour or lack of being able to see where my proper future lay, but I seem to have told the writer of that Echo article that what I really wanted to do was to go into films. It was true. I had actually worked in a film studio even before I did my first broadcast with Joe Loss. Trivia fans might like to look out for a 1935 film called A Fire has been Arranged, starring Bud Flanagan and Chesney Allen—the famed comedy duo—and actor Alastair Sim, and provided you don’t blink at the crucial moment you might spot me in a crowd scene. It all came about because another act appearing with me at a club in Woolwich one night said they did some occasional film extra work, and why didn’t I try it—it might be a way of getting my nose into something new. I was given the address of an agent and not long afterwards I went along and put my name on the books. When they asked me what I could do, I said I was a singer.

‘What else? Can you ride a horse?’

‘Yes.’ (I couldn’t.)

‘Can you play tennis?’

‘Yes.’ (I was a lousy, if keen, tennis player.)

I said yes to everything, because I was convinced they’d never send for me. And of course they did, and I had to go to Twickenham, not, as it happened, to ride horses and play tennis and sing, but to wander about those terrible front sets at the very generous rate of one pound a day. For this infinitesimal part I made myself a whole outfit in grey flannel, including a big cape with a red lining, and a little grey hat. When the film came to the local cinema I just had to go and see it, and Mum came with me. I caught a glimpse of myself wandering by in a street scene, and that was it—my first and only piece of film extra work, but it had been enough, obviously, to whet my appetite. That I got the chance later to star in three films had nothing to do with that little episode, but arose out of my real career as a singer.

This crowd work led, indirectly, to another strange little episode. At the top end of Charing Cross Road there was an Express Dairy Tea Room, where I used to go after I’d been the rounds of the publishers’ offices. It was used a lot by theatrical and musical pros, and I was sitting over a cup of coffee there one day when a tall, thin young man struck up a conversation with me. It emerged that he was out of work, and on the strength of my recent experience in the Flanagan and Allen film, I told him he ought to try the agencies to see if there was anything going as a film extra. He thanked me and said he would. It turned out years later that I’d been talking to Cardew Robinson, the comedian and actor who became famous as ‘Cardew the Cad’. (Many years later he was in Carry On Up the Khyber and Last of the Summer Wine.)

I appeared briefly in one other film during this time. It was in the great days of the ‘short’, a film of anything between five and fifteen minutes, which formed part of that buffer between the second feature and the big picture. The newsreel, the Disney cartoon, the travel film, the interval with the icecreams and, in big cinemas, the organist who rose out of the floor—some, or all of these, would give the audience a chance to go to the loo and find their seats again before Clark Gable or Errol Flynn captivated them for the next hour and a half. One of a series of six ‘British Lion Varieties’—the type of short that went into that slot—was by the Joe Loss band, and I sang one of the numbers, ‘Love is Like a Cigarette’. I was hardly a film star, but it was an improvement on a fleeting glimpse of me in a crowd scene.

For a time I was destined to be heard rather than seen. Although I did all the Casani Club radio work with Charlie Kunz, I was never one of the regular artists at the club itself. From my point of view this was a very good arrangement, because it meant that I got the cream of the work without having to cope with those gruelling club hours, which force entertainers to become nocturnal animals and live their lives upside down, so to speak. I would do Saturday-night broadcasts with Charlie, and all his overseas programmes. Not only that: being the kind and considerate man that he was, he also used to take me on his Sunday concerts—not because he needed anyone to help him with his act, for he was enormously popular, but just to give me an extra few quid and a little more exposure and experience.

In my dress and mannerisms I must have been completely unsophisticated still, but musically he respected me, and from the start he gave me complete freedom of choice over what I sang. By that I mean he never pressed songs on me or insisted that I sang any particular number, which really was a lot of rope to give a girl of eighteen. Obviously he had to approve my choices, but that was the only control he imposed. I would go round the Denmark Street publishers, as I had been doing for years, and make my own selection from what was offered me. Then, no matter what publisher it had come from, Wally Ridley, in his helpful encouraging way, would find the key for me and rehearse me in it. Since, as I said before, for radio work and even for some work in front of live audiences, it was the done thing to have the song sheet in front of you, I had none of the old nightmare of learning new songs, and could concentrate on presenting them properly. It also meant that we didn’t have to prepare too far ahead, and very often one week’s find would be in the following week’s broadcast. Once Charlie had approved my choice, it would be given to one of his music arrangers, usually Art Strauss, and that would be it. If you could assure the publishers in advance that you would be able to sing the song over the air not fewer than three times, they would often undertake to pay for the arrangement themselves.

That was perfectly fair and above board. But this was also the golden age of ‘plug money’, the undisguised backhander from a publisher’s plugger to a bandleader or a singer in exchange for an undertaking to perform a given song over the air. Some bandleaders made a lot of money in this way, and some vocalists, too, did quite well out of it. But apart from the ethics of the thing, it always struck me as a very dangerous game to play. The risk of being stuck with an unsuitable number appeared to me to far outweigh the short-term benefit of a tax-free fiver. A singer should be grateful for the occasional right song when it comes along, for it’ll do her more good than any amount of under-the-counter subsidy. I was the target of this sort of approach, of course, because as soon as anyone started broadcasting they’d be sent stacks of music, and one or two people left you in no doubt that there’d be a little something for you in an envelope if you just happened to choose the piece they were working on. But it quickly became obvious that I had very clear ideas of what lay within my emotional and technical range, and wouldn’t be diverted from them, and after that I was left alone.

It was at this period—on the edge of big things, as it were—that I realized that the entertainment business could bring conflicting emotions. One day, going up to the West End on the bus on the way to do a broadcast, with my cloth coat over my long dress and my song copies rolled up under my arm, I’d be assailed by two contradictory feelings at once. I’d be so nervous that I would find myself wishing that something—anything—would happen to the bus to hold it up so that I wouldn’t have to go. Why have I let myself in for all this? I’d ask myself as we rattled down the East India Dock Road. At the same time I used to get a little smug glow out of looking at the other passengers and thinking, Wouldn’t all you lot be surprised to know that this young lady sitting so quietly in the middle of you was on her way to do a broadcast?

Within a few weeks of starting to broadcast with Charlie Kunz I was also making records with the Casani Club Band. The first one was ‘I’m in the Mood for Love’, a very pretty Jimmy McHugh-Dorothy Fields song from a 1935 film called Every Night at Eight. It’s extremely satisfying to know that not only was it popular at that time, but it went on being popular and became a standard. It wasn’t a hit for me particularly, but at least it meant I could rely on my nose for a good song. That wasn’t my first record, though. Right at the start of 1935 I’d gone into a private studio with Howard Baker’s band and recorded a song called ‘Home’. It was on the label of Teledisk, a firm which specialized in making records for individuals—a bandleader might have one of his own broadcasts recorded, for example—and it was never issued commercially. In the spring of 1935 I also began to record anonymously for the Crown label; they made those eight-inch records that were sold in Woolworth’s. Strangely enough I sold over a million records on the Crown label long before I was known as the Forces’ sweetheart. They also produced all sorts of people no one will remember now: Al Jolson, Al Bowlly, Mrs Jack Hylton and the unlikely star Sir Henry Cooper (who sang ‘I’m Enery the Eighth, I Am’). They would have a popular song on one side of the record and a song nobody knew on the other.

I feel sad in a way that I never walked into a branch of Woolworth’s and saw one of my records—or at least I don’t remember ever doing that. Years later in 2008 when Wool-worth’s shut down, nostalgic news reports made much of the fact that I made my first record with them. I knew people bought the records—otherwise they wouldn’t have kept on making them—but I never saw a copy of one of my records in someone else’s house. I was on ever so many Crown records after that, though sometimes with Rossini’s Accordion Band and all sorts of strange little groups. The name of the firm that actually made them was Chrystallate, and their musical director was a well-known bandleader from what you might call the second division of British dance orchestras of the day, Jay Wilbur. Chrystallate had studios in Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead, which became the Decca studios when Decca took over the firm in 1938. Crown’s policy was to put a popular song—a published copyright song—on one side of the record, and a song nobody knew, an unpublished number which they bought outright from the composer, on the other. They snapped up hundreds of such songs at ten pounds a batch and they’d go through them every so often to see what would suit any given artist.

For Crown, although at first I appeared completely anonymously, as time went on and my name began to have a little value I was billed on the label, in small letters: ‘With Vocal Refrain by Vera Lynn’. I didn’t get any more money for that, but it was assumed that it helped the record a little. I never, incidentally, recorded under another name. It was Vera Lynn or nothing.

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