It was like she knew we needed to hear the words afresh, to be reminded to keep smiling through, that a rainbow follows the rain.
As Katherine Jenkins’ voice soared high into the arches of Westminster Abbey yesterday, her rendition of We’ll Meet Again was a beautiful tribute to its original singer, Dame Vera Lynn, at a Service of Thanksgiving for the Forces’ Sweetheart.
But it was also perfectly timed for a Europe enduring the shadow of conflict once more.
This was a long-awaited memorial service, held in a sunny capital yesterday 22 months after Dame Vera died on June 18, 2020, aged 103.
Alongside her family, including her daughter Virginia Lewis-Jones, serving armed forces personnel joined Chelsea Pensioners, the speaker of the House of Commons Sir Lindsay Hoyle and stars of showbiz.
Dame Esther Rantzen, Baroness Floella Benjamin and Sir Tim Rice were among the guests who had gathered to remember the working class girl from London’s East Ham who became an embodiment of hope during the Second World War, singing for “her boys”, the British troops.
An icon who went on to dedicate her life to entertainment and charitable causes, become the first centenarian to score a top ten hit, and who even counted the Queen among her biggest fans.
We were told one of her greatest gifts was always to know instinctively what people needed to hear – her words even quoted by the Queen in her address to the nation at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Back in the Second World War, many labelled her sentimental ballads “slush” – but she knew they were the comfort Brits craved.
And once again, yesterday, through the mouths of Jenkins and Kate Ashby & The D-Day Darlings, she hit the right notes.
Addressing the 1,500-strong audience, the Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, gave thanks to the woman who “gave voice to the hopes and fears of a generation that lived through the trauma of war”.
Poignantly, he added: “Hers was an instinctive grasp that we are better together. How very fitting we will always remember her singing of reunion, restoration and belonging.
“We give thanks to one who, in times of fear and suspicion, always believed we might come together.”
Born on March 20, 1917, to a plumber and dressmaker, little Vera was singing in working men’s clubs aged seven.
When war came she assumed her fledgling big band career was over. Instead, her songs chimed with the nation.
Her BBC radio programme Sincerely Yours attracted some 2,000 letters a week, she insisted on entertaining as bombs fell, and by 1944 volunteered for a tough five-month tour with troops fighting to recapture Burma from the Japanese.
She slept on a stretcher in grass shacks with mud floors and performed in the blazing heat.
Speaking in the Abbey, broadcaster and fan Alan Titchmarsh revealed how even the Queen became devoted, asking Dame Vera to sing at her 16th birthday party at Windsor. In 1975 the Queen made her a Dame, and a Companion of Honour in 2016 - an honour delivered to her home.
Broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby reflected on “why Vera Lynn mattered so much to so many people.”
“You see the photos of young men sitting at her feet entranced listening as she promised that tomorrow bluebirds would fly over the white cliffs of Dover,” he described.
“And it mattered not a jot that Sir David Attenborough would doubtless tell us that there had yet to be any bluebirds flying,” he added to loud laughs.
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“What mattered was the sentiment, and when she sang We’ll Meet Again it went to the hearts of those young men precisely because none of them knew where or when that might be.
“The boys were so young, she herself was still in her twenties. She gave them comfort, that was her great gift.”
Dame Vera herself, whose charitable work encompassed organisations including the Royal British Legion, Breast Cancer UK and the Dame Vera Lynn Children’s Charity, would no doubt have been embarrassed.
She was just, she once said “an ordinary girl from an ordinary family with a voice that you could recognise. It was that simple.”
Outside the Abbey, her niece Chris Beaumont, echoed her modesty.
“She never talked about her time in the war. She was proud but she wasn’t someone to boast.
“She was just Auntie Vera. She struck a chord because she was normal, a normal person.”
But as the central band of the Royal British Legion boomed wartime classics down the nave and the Abbey bells rang out, it was clear her legacy remains as powerful today as 80 years ago.
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