Some Sunny Day

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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 (#ulink_6b6e921f-fee6-5fb5-9c7f-8ff6f09529c0)

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. HowardBaker Bands supplied. Also leading agents for outsidecombinations. We also supply first-class cabaret and concertartistes 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.