Simon HEFFER
Dame Vera’s death pushes one of the most significant periods in our history out of reach, says Simon Heffer
The death of Dame Vera Lynn last Thursday led news bulletins and dominated the front pages of the papers. The reaction was no surprise. She was not merely an entertainer and a celebrity: she was for 80 years part of the public life of our nation and, more to the point, a powerful totem of our national identity. She embodied British resilience and optimism in a period when the country and its empire stood alone against a Nazi aggression that threatened their very existence.
This gave her enormous influence, the enduring nature of which was seen in April, when the Queen quoted one of Dame Vera’s songs in her broadcast about Covid-19. Then in May, VE Day street parties sang that song – We’ll Meet Again – the length and breadth of the country. In a time of trouble, the instinct for the British is to recall how our forebears overcame adversity in the war, and to articulate the feeling by singing songs by Vera Lynn.
Yet her death strikes another, more profound blow. No one who played so prominent a part in British life in the darkness of 1940-41 – when the Queen was still a schoolgirl – is now left; by then, Dame Vera was one of the most famous women in Britain, loved not just for her talent but for her obvious love of her country and tireless support for the Armed Forces. Her death removes almost the last great living symbol of the most perilous period in our history. A war that fundamentally altered Britain and shaped the world we live in has just been pushed that little bit further back into the past, out of human reach.
A massive part of Dame Vera’s appeal was that she appeared to her wartime audiences to be a cheerful young woman like so many others – she was a plumber’s daughter from Essex, albeit with a precocious ability to entertain and great natural charisma. In the vernacular of the time, she had no “side”: any Tommy, able seaman or aircraftman could imagine her being his girlfriend, any woman in a factory or in uniform could see in her someone just like herself. But she was also someone who by her values, her selflessness and her patriotism won universal respect, and in great old age came to embody what is now called “the greatest generation”.
The much overused cliché “national treasure” was insufficient to describe her: she was a landmark of English culture in its broadest sense. It was not just that two of her songs in particular – We’ll Meet Again and The White Cliffs
of Dover – became emblematic of the national psyche in the Second World War. It was that in an age when it was said that we were all in it together, she really was in it with all her fellow Britons. She lived through the Blitz with them, endured rationing with them, went to their camps and their factories, and for all her fame and success lived a life very much like theirs. The war was a great leveller.
Her sobriquet of “the Forces’ sweetheart” was not casually bestowed. During the war she did her bit by throwing herself into entertaining the troops in camps all over the country, but also took her share of the hardships in travelling to Burma, India and Egypt. Her value as a witness was that, in doing all these things, she saw perhaps a more varied slice of wartime life than almost anyone else. She began her war work by going to Tube stations in London, when they were used as air-raid shelters, and singing to the people who spent the nights of the Blitz in them.
She toured factories to entertain workers in their dinner-breaks; she had her own radio programme. She did everything she could to keep the public and the Armed Forces cheerful, and they never forgot it. But equally, she never forgot them. For the rest of her life, she maintained an indissoluble link with the Forces and the charities that sustain former service personnel, notably the British Legion. She had other charities for which she worked tirelessly, for children with cerebral palsy and for women with breast cancer. It was principally for her charity work that she became a Companion of Honour, at the age of 99: a less modest and unassuming woman would have had the award 30 or 40 years earlier.
Her death would have sparked an intense reaction whenever it came; but the way she was evoked during the pandemic makes it all the more poignant. Also, that reaction reveals much about our country and our values. Perhaps it shows we are a sentimental and nostalgic people, which one suspects we are; and we mourn her for her own sake but also because with her death she pushes a whole era out of reach, and an era engraved more deeply in our history than any other.
In great old age she became the incarnation of the greatest generation, the men and women whose youth was absorbed by the war, and who in their millions fought or served their country in countless other ways, to defeat the existentialist threat so we could live a safe, civilised life after the war.
It is when that generation can no longer bear witness, and give their account of those tumultuous years, that historians must take over: and so the era those men and women experienced moves finally from the flesh and blood of real life to the pages of books.
Doubtless it is because our country and our people have faced no threat comparable to the Nazi terror since 1945 that we feel such awe in remembering those who did, and show them unhesitating respect. The sheer scale of their endurance, their fortitude, their sacrifice and the dangers to which they were exposed is something few not alive at the time can even begin to comprehend. As she outlived almost all her contemporaries, Dame Vera had become the embodiment of all that, with the extra bonus that her war was one of the most valiant any Briton could have hoped to have.
Unless we are faced with such a trial again, we may never see another national figure such as her, who by singing and smiling kept a whole nation pulling in the same direction in its darkest hour. That unstinting service to her fellow Britons was the key to her greatness, and her example to us who survive her.
In an age when it was said we were all in it together, she really was with her fellow Britons