Dame Vera Lynn

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 3 September 1989

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As part of Radio 4's commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War, the castaway in this week's Desert Island Discs will be Dame Vera Lynn.

She'll be talking to Sue Lawley about her own wartime experiences - as the now-legendary 'forces sweetheart' she performed in front of servicemen as far away as Burma, and as close to home as London's Regent's Park, and since then she has been constantly in demand all over the world for her singing and her songs, reviving as they do wartime memories both happy and sad.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Room 504 by Vera Lynn Book: A book of edible fruits and vegetables Luxury: Watercolour paints, brushes and paper

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 1989,
0:11.0	and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway on this 50th anniversary of the Declaration of War is a woman who was central to the
0:34.8	British war effort. Her missions were those most eagerly awaited by our troops and she
0:39.6	became a symbol of British determination, fortitude and optimism. No secret agent she, however, nor a soldier either. In those days they simply called her the Force's sweetheart. Today we welcome her more grandly but no less affectionately as Dame Vera Lynn.
0:56.0	Welcome on this anniversary day to Desert Island Discs. I presume it feels nothing like 50 years ago since you heard those fateful words on the
1:04.8	radio Britain is at war with Germany. Well it's such a long time ago you know and so much
1:11.2	has happened since then but I can clearly remember simply sitting in the
1:17.8	garden with my parents and Harry listening to the radio expecting whatever was to come because everyone was very much on edge.
1:29.0	And when we heard war had been declared.
1:32.0	And of course it was a war in which you were to become very important and as well as very famous.
1:37.0	You didn't really regard yourself as much as a sweetheart as a messenger, did you?
1:42.0	Well yes, I was the girl next door, really, because I wasn't a glamorous type and they didn't look
1:50.6	at me as a sort of a pin-up kind, but I did bring messages of love and hope and just brought the parted ones that little bit nearer together.
2:06.0	So the wives and the girlfriends weren't jealous.
2:08.0	They later to- Oh, not at all, no.
2:10.0	Would you go as far as to say that in many ways you personified what the boys were fighting for?
2:18.6	I suppose I reminded them of their sweethearts and their sisters or young wives that they'd left behind.
2:26.0	So it was quite a responsibility you carried really.
2:30.0	To me I was just doing what I thought my little bit of war work by entertaining and I never realized
2:38.1	not until after the war the extent of what the programs really meant to them.
	...

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