'Sickly', 'sentimental', and still powerful: the story behind Vera Lynn's We'll Meet Again

“Does anybody here remember Vera Lynn?” sang Roger Waters, on Pink Floyd’s The Wall. “Remember how she said that we would meet again?”

We do indeed. As Sheridan Smith proved this week with a moving rendition to mark the 75th anniversary of D-Day, that promise of a reunion remains as powerful as ever.

Written at the outset of the Second World War by popular composer Ross Parker and songwriter cum musical theatre impresario Hughie Charles, the lyrics aimed to comfort all those who feared they may never see their loved ones again.

Lynn was the first singer to record it. She had been singing since the age of seven, and had already released a couple of albums, but in 1939 We'll Meet Again brought her worldwide fame: that year, members of the military named her their favourite singer in a Daily Express poll.

It wasn’t only through her music that Lynn shared a message of hope. In late 1941, more than 20 per cent of the British public tuned in to her Sunday Night radio show Sincerely Yours, in which Lynn would sing and read out letters from people separated by the war. "When I sing for the boys I feel as though I'm the sort of in-between," she once said. "I mean that I sing to her from him and tell one what the other wants to say."

Vera Lynn's music became a way for parted lovers to feel they were still together, while her radio-show was an invaluable communication-line: women in Britain would write to Vera to announce the safe birth of a child to their husbands overseas. We'll Meet Again closed every episode. “Keep smiling through, / Just like you always do,” her signature song told listeners. But not everyone was smiling.

Since the Thirties, a small but vocal campaign had been building against “radio crooners” (a loosely defined category into which Lynn was often lumped). In 1935, The Telegraph ran an article headed “CROONING HARMS CHILDREN”, warning against the “pernicious effect” of this sentimental style of music. One doctor claimed that any parent who allows their child to listen to crooning “might just as well hang their walls with indelicate pictures, [or] line their bookshelves with pornographic literature.”

Soft-voiced "crooners" such as Lynn were a staple of BBC radio’s Forces Programme, where her show was popular around the world – earning her the nickname "the Forces' sweetheart" – but there were complaints back home that this “effeminate” music would soften up the troops. By 1942, the debate was filling the Telegraph letters page. “If our armed forces really like this sort of thing, it should be the duty of the BBC to hide the fact from the world,” wrote a reader from Bath. Rather than “spineless crooners” and “sentimental organists”, he thought they should listen to “something more virile”.

One retired soldier agreed. Attacking the “crooners and the other sloppy sentimental rubbish inflicted by the BBC on its listeners,” he wrote that these “sickly and maudlin programmes are largely responsible for the half-hearted attitude of so many people towards the war”.

But one letter struck a more thoughtful note: "Petulant criticism of the Forces Programme is easy, [but] listening in the forces is very different from listening at home." These broadcasts were made for "communal listening" under difficult circumstances. If a show brings soldiers together in song in the trenches, surely it doesn't also need to impress the armchair cynics back in London.

Sadly, the BBC buckled under the pressure from a few loud voices. Sincerely Yours was cancelled (or as the broadcaster put it, "rested") in the spring of 1942, after just 12 episodes. "The Sincerely Yours programmes dripped with sentiment," wrote Variety's critic. "After a bit they apparently dripped so much that they were dropped." In July that year, the BBC announced a universal “crooner ban”, tasking its new Dance Music Policy Committee with keeping slush off the airwaves.

But Lynn's popularity endured. We'll Meet Again inspired a popular 1943 musical film of the same name, in which Lynn played a fictional version of herself – a beautiful young singer who turns her talents to entertaining the British army in Europe. In 1944 the BBC brought back Sincerely Yours, bowing to the tide of popular opinion.

Meanwhile, Lynn continued to travel the world, performing to “the boys”. Waking up one morning in 1944 in the jungles of Burma, she saw four Japanese fighters just outside her hut. But she wasn’t afraid, as she would later recall: “I always knew I was being very well looked after – the boys never left my side.”

We’ll Meet Again remains Lynn’s defining anthem, more so than even The White Cliffs of Dover or A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square. Although hers is the best known version, the song is universal: it’s as resonant coming from the London-born Lynn as from the wartime African American doo-wop group The Ink Spots.

Listening back to those early recordings, it’s the sense of melancholy around it that chimes most clearly. It is a hopeful song for a hopeless time, and has never been too far from tragedy, even after the Second World War was over.

It could easily have been the soundtrack to the end of the world. And not just in Stanley Kubrick’s nuclear farce Dr Strangelove – although it is – but in real life, too. During the Cold War, the song was taken up by the the BBC’s Wartime Broadcasting Service; in the event of nuclear Armageddon, it would have been one of several popular hits played to comfort and reassure the bunker-dwelling survivors. “We’ll meet again…” Don’t know when? Presumably when all that plutonium comes to the end of its 24,000-year half-life.

Four decades on from Dr Strangelove, filmmakers still acknowledge its unique power: it appears near the end of Kong: Skull Island, currently out in cinemas, to summon a similar end-of-days feel. This darker, apocalyptic reading of the song has been used for comic effect on The Simpsons and Futurama. Take a trip to Disneyland, and you’ll hear it played on their The Twilight Zone: Tower of Terror ride.

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Its place in our pop culture is unshakeable: for the final episode of his talk-show The Colbert Report in 2014, comedian Steven Colbert managed to convince dozens of celebrities to join him in a rousing rendition. In the impressive skit, everyone from Barry Manilow to Kevin Spacey to Henry Kissinger to The Cookie Monster promises that the "blue skies" will "chase those dark clouds far away".

But even away from the context of war, that bittersweet tune still carries a sense of personal sadness. One study based on over 30,000 ceremonies revealed that We’ll Meet Again is the sixth most popular song played at funerals, just behind The Lord’s My Shepherd.

It was the last song on the last album Johnny Cash released before he died. Unlike his heart-rendingly sombre cover of Trent Reznor’s Hurt, here the 71-year-old’s voice is rich with warmth and humour. For the second verse, he doesn’t sing. He speaks. The words become a quiet, intimate message, not lyrical but down-to-earth. “Yeah, we’ll meet again… So, honey, keep on smilin’ through.” It’s like being transported back to an episode of Sincerely Yours, listening in to the last letter of a long dead soldier. The voice outlives the speaker.

This touch of the tragic is what makes the song so haunting. “I know we’ll meet again” is a promise no-one can keep. Bombs fall, houses crumble, people disappear. The words may look ahead to a brighter future, but the tune behind them is laced with doubt. That brave smile could crack into tears, but it never does. Despite it all, with only the most imperfect, hesitant hope – “don’t know where, don’t know when” – she keeps singing. The world and the record continue to spin.

It’s a fragile song, uncertain, and yet it endures in one piece – like fine bone china passed from hand to hand across the years.  In this age of post-production, it’s remarkable to think that it was recorded straight onto wax in a single take. As Lynn told The Telegraph in 2014, “If the trumpeter cracked on the last note, you had to do it all over again. You had to make sure your take was perfect.” It was. It is.