![]() ‘She painted all the time, in every house we lived in,’ says Lewis-Jones, who is 75, and who often sat for her mother. There is plenty to discover about Lynn in the exhibition, but it is likely that her paintings that will be most surprising to viewers. A very down-to-earth sort of person, who wouldn’t stand any nonsense, in her own quiet way.’ She performed it to better serve her country.’ ‘She accepted that she was public property, and she saw her public role as her duty, right from the start. ‘I think people will come away with a more rounded view,’ says Lynn’s daughter, Virginia Lewis-Jones, who looks after her mother’s archive. Together, they narrate her nine decades in the spotlight, though arguably it is the objects chosen to denote her life ‘off camera’, as it were, that tell the more extraordinary story. ![]() Its 100-odd objects include her dresses and shoes, a cosmetic case, photographs, posters advertising her many performances, the medals she was awarded and a diary she kept during an 11-week tour of Egypt, India and Burma in 1944. Lynn, who died in 2020 at the age of 103, kept both of these letters, as indeed she saved every other postcard or telegram or scribble that she received from the men and women whose lives she had touched.Ī handful of them feature in a new exhibition that opens at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, East Sussex, next weekend – the first ever dedicated to the British singer known as ‘the Forces’ Sweetheart’. ‘I’m hoping you would sing a song that once meant a lot to me.’ ‘She left me for someone else,’ lamented a very forlorn young marine, while home on leave. ‘It sure is nerve-soothing to hear your golden voice,’ confessed one weary-sounding officer on board the SS Mortimer. Throughout the Second World War, her simple, wholesome and soft-hearted ballads – We’ll Meet Again, (There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover – instilled in anyone who heard them little flares of fortitude, even hope. To the Navy men on night watch over a cold glittering sea, or soldiers chasing sleep in some bomb-blasted church, the sound of Vera Lynn’s clear and bright voice stealing over the radio waves meant everything.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |