‘It is odd to reflect’, opined music journalist Spike Hughes, ‘in the middle of a war being fought for the rights of the Common Man, that there was never a time in the history of music when the divisions between various types of music were so marked as they are today.’Footnote 1 It was the mid-1940s and, contrary to the more pessimistic predictions made at the start of the war, Britain's artistic culture had flourished throughout the conflict. But for all the wartime talk of national unity and ‘the people’, cultural divisions had remained strongly entrenched in musical life, as Hughes was at pains to demonstrate.
Harking back to a fictitious past when a benevolent aristocracy governed under a ‘semi-feudal system’, the writer imagined a time when such divisions supposedly did not exist: when art and life blended seamlessly; when ‘Kunstmusik’ was the preserve of the everyman; when ‘[t]here was no such thing as “light”, “popular” or “classical” music. [. . .] Handel was not a “highbrow” composer, any more than Mozart was.’Footnote 2 While the terminology with which Hughes mapped out the cultural terrain was, as he suggested, relatively new to Britain, his sweeping characterization of music-making before the nineteenth century leaves much to be desired. Nevertheless, his assessment is revealing. The problem, it seemed, was not so much the divisions per se, but rather the situation to which they had given rise, whereby the ‘common people’ were predominantly interested in second-rate popular music.
To be precise, Hughes's critique was directed not at ‘the cult of “Jazz”’, or ‘its modern development, “Swing”’. On the contrary, since the early 1930s, when he established his reputation as a composer and performer of jazz music, he had played a significant role in promoting both movements in Britain, not least through his advocacy of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.Footnote 3 His objection was rather to ‘the kind of music known in Charing Cross Road [i.e., the home of Britain's popular music industry] as “commercial”’ and epitomized by dance bands and their crooning vocalists. Far from respecting the public's apparent preference for this type of music, he charged the elite with failing to realize their duty of cultural care: through their ‘high-falutin’ rhetoric and ‘unbearable’ superiority, they had overlooked the ‘rights of the Common Man’.Footnote 4 The result was a disjuncture between rhetoric and reality – the paradox of a ‘people's war’ that had supposedly unified the nation, but which had, to Hughes's mind at least, failed to produce a common, people's culture.
By the time that Hughes was writing, what the public listened to – and whether such music was of sufficient merit to form the basis of a national culture – were the subjects of long-running debate. In brief, since the mid-nineteenth century, sweeping social changes wrought by urbanization, educational reforms, and technological advances had combined to transform Britain's cultural landscape. On the one hand, the literature, art, and music that had once been the preserve of the bourgeoisie became available to an ever more diverse audience. On the other hand, a burgeoning mass culture industry created a rival for public attention;Footnote 5 its increasingly hegemonic presence inspired an array of concerns among advocates of elite culture. Perhaps the most fundamental stemmed from the impression that the popular music industry was premised on a value system that seemed fundamentally to be at odds with that of the art world. As historian D. L. LeMahieu has explained, while elite culture was judged on the nebulous grounds of artistic merit, the emerging popular music industry more often seemed to measure success in terms of sales.Footnote 6
As cultural critics struggled to navigate these changes, they developed a new set of categories to distinguish, or defend, the various genres and styles from one another. Frequently drawing distinctions in binary terms, they constructed what literary scholar Andreas Huyssen termed ‘the great divide’, pitting high against low, modernism against mass culture, art against entertainment.Footnote 7 Among those who articulated this dualism was C. S. Lewis. Sketching the two supposed extremes, he explained that art usually connoted values such as ‘literary, classical, serious, or artistic’, whereas entertainment implied ‘popular, common, commercial’ and more passive forms of consumption.Footnote 8 Whether such traits were positive or negative was, of course, a matter of opinion: once the terminology of highbrow and lowbrow entered the vernacular (which did not take long), both labels were invoked critically by detractors and affirmatively by advocates.Footnote 9
As Genevieve Abravanel, among others, has recently observed, the distinction between high and low was more an ideological than a material reality.Footnote 10 It was perhaps because of this that champions of both sides of the cultural divide remained so deeply invested in rehearsing the grounds for distinction. But the Hughes article suggests another reason for the apparent preoccupation with marking cultural boundaries. Framing his argument in relation to the conflict, Hughes suggested that the war had put a new perspective on the issue of ‘popular taste in music’: as ‘the rights of the Common Man’ became a hot political topic for 1940s Britain, the question of how to ‘elevate’ public taste acquired a new urgency. To put his point more broadly, the recent changes in mid-century Britain's political and social climate shifted the stakes of the debate over highbrow and lowbrow culture.
Taking a cue from Hughes, this article explores how the urgent need to survive and win the Second World War confounded established value systems. While highbrow and lowbrow were equally implicated in the debate about music's possible role in the conflict, my primary concern here is the latter (i.e., the lowbrow or popular), as I consider how the value of entertainment was re-negotiated in the context of war. Entertainment is obviously a broad term that encompassed a range of media and musical styles, from swing and jazz to light music or ‘pops’, and from music hall to cinema; during the war, the label ‘entertainment’ was even on occasion appropriated by the artistic elite to boost the cause of high culture.Footnote 11 To be more specific, then, my focus is on how this debate played out in relation to perhaps the most iconic entertainer of Britain's war years, a singer who, in her own words, remains a ‘symbol of the era’ to this day: Vera Lynn.Footnote 12 The decision to explore this debate through the lens of an individual performer is inspired by film scholar Richard Dyer's suggestion that one of the primary functions of stars is to mediate – or in his terms, ‘“manage” or resolve’ – the ‘contradictions within and between ideologies’.Footnote 13 As we will see, the strategies for promoting Lynn's star persona also sent messages about the value of popular music to wartime Britain.
Lynn's formation as a national icon was an ongoing, contested process throughout the war. But if her unique association with this period has a beginning, it was surely in April 1940, when she came top in a survey conducted by BBC employee Leslie Perowne to identify the British Expeditionary Force's (BEF) favourite singer.Footnote 14 The victory won her the timely accolade ‘the Forces’ Sweetheart’, a title that she consolidated through her high-profile contributions to the war effort. Alongside her continuing appearances on the music hall circuit, she toured with the Entertainment National Services Association, providing concerts for the troops, most famously in Burma. She gave a personal touch to her war work: she replied to thousands of letters from fans serving in the forces overseas and visited hospital wards to show solidarity with both invalids and new mothers.Footnote 15 However, her greatest impact surely came through her radio show, Sincerely Yours, and her three film vehicles, We'll Meet Again (1943), Rhythm Serenade (1943), and One Exciting Night (1944), through which she reached huge audiences.Footnote 16 (The first of the films, We'll Meet Again, provides a case study for this article.) Through both her own actions and the public discourse that developed around her, Lynn's identity as an entertainer became enmeshed in the prevalent discourses of wartime Britain, and it is on account of this that her performances became significant – and controversial – reference points in the debate about the role of entertainment in wartime Britain.
However, if Lynn became an advocate for popular music, to what extent she shaped this mediating role is harder to pin down. For one thing, unlike female singers such as Billie Holiday and Dusty Springfield, whose defiance of social norms has invited characterizations of ‘independency and agency both professionally and personally’, Lynn represented a more compliant womanhood – in her own words, that of ‘the girl next door, big-sister, universal fiancée’.Footnote 17 If such conformity has traditionally – and, as recent scholarship has argued, mistakenly – been taken as evidence of passivity, this image is further complicated by the collaborative nature of both film and popular song, and Lynn's own position within this.Footnote 18 For instance, while Lynn was usually responsible for choosing her repertoire, there is no evidence that this extended to the songs for her film vehicles.Footnote 19 Furthermore, any autonomy she did exert was necessarily circumscribed by the choice of songs available (she never composed her own music) and the need for commercial success. The veneer of sincerity in which she was covered adds yet another layer of complexity: central to her image as a straight-up member of the working class, this characteristic was also invoked in such a way as to neutralize any sense of political agency. An example is her claim that her wartime performances ‘showed the boys what they were really fighting for, the precious personal connections rather than the ideologies and theories’.Footnote 20 While Lynn certainly aided the rhetoric tying her music to the war, whether she recognized her role in wider debates about cultural hierarchies is less clear.
In what follows, I begin by briefly sketching how Britain's Second World War came to be characterized as the ‘people's war’, considering the broad impact of this rhetoric on popular culture. A biographical overview documenting Lynn's rise to fame during the first years of the conflict then provides the contextual backdrop for a reading of her first film vehicle, We'll Meet Again. A backstage musical set in wartime Britain, We'll Meet Again was produced in the aftermath of a heated controversy over Lynn's vocal style (of which more later). The controversy provides a telling backdrop against which to interpret the film narrative's attempts to project positive values onto Lynn's music by emphasizing its exceptional contribution to the war effort. Beyond simply throwing light on how the film negotiates Lynn's own cultural standing, this backdrop also suggests how her star persona was mobilized in the broader cultural debates of the moment. By exploring how Lynn's critics and advocates negotiated the contention between highbrow and lowbrow, I seek not only to inspire a fuller understanding of the political and cultural work carried out by her star persona in Britain during the early 1940s, but also to reveal how her performances contributed to a wider debate about the value of entertainment for a country at war.
Entertainment in wartime Britain
One of the most enduring axioms of the Second World War is that it was ‘the people's war’ – a war, that is, in which the civilian public of the home front played as vital a role as the soldiers serving abroad. Although this phrase predates the 1940s, it acquired a particular significance in this era on several counts. For one thing, the Blitz brought the battlefield closer to home than any recent hostilities. For another, this was the first conflict in which the general public had ready access to radio. A novel weapon in the age of ‘media wars’, domestic radio provided a means to connect instantly with the nation.Footnote 21 Fearing a widespread lack of enthusiasm for another conflict, the government used this medium to promote the idea of a people's war for their own ends. Drawing on utopian ideals such as ‘egalitarianism, community and participation’, they employed language that would encourage the British public to believe that they were all in the war together.Footnote 22 The idea of a people's war became so pervasive that it ‘shaped the rhetoric of five years of official and unofficial propaganda’.Footnote 23
The entertainment industry – sometimes officially, at other times less so – played a part in propagating this rhetoric. As Christina Baade has suggested, ‘entertainment [. . .] structured which needs were recognized’ by foregrounding ‘morale and unity, rather than problems, say, of social inequality’. Footnote 24 In so doing, it reflected the wider processes of restructuring necessitated by the conflict. With Britain moving rapidly towards total war, securing victory went to the top of the political agenda; this demanded that more and more of the nation's resources, both material and ideological, be mobilized. If cultural organizations were to survive, they would have to make clear their contribution to the war effort.
At the BBC, this meant a new maxim: ‘to maintain national unity and to secure the nation's morale’.Footnote 25 It began by reorganizing its services – first streamlining them into a single programme to limit the chances of the transmitters being tapped by the enemy; then launching a second programme in January 1940 specifically aimed at the BEF (although it quickly became as popular with civilians as with soldiers).Footnote 26 At the same time, recognizing that popular music had a positive impact on public morale, the corporation softened its attitude towards broadcasting popular artists. Despite ever-present anxieties about the supposedly mind-numbing impact of mass culture, it increased the amount of airtime given to dance bands and popular vocalists, especially on the Forces’ Programme; it also began to pay greater attention to the quality of their offerings. Such concessions were in part an attempt to prevent dissatisfied popular music fans from tuning into enemy radio stations to hear their preferred music. They also reflected an awareness that the extended working hours necessitated by war would inevitably lead to more background listening, for which popular music was supposedly better suited.Footnote 27
The film industry broadly conceived of its contribution to the conflict in similar terms: cinema could serve both as a means of raising morale and as a vehicle for propaganda. Facing the hardships of home front life – the rationing, long working hours, distant loved ones, blackouts, and bombs – the general public increasingly looked to film for light relief: average weekly cinema attendance rose by around half between 1939 and 1945.Footnote 28 From the industry's point of view, there was a careful balance to be struck here. While producers and entrepreneurs recognized that indulging the public's preferences helped revenue flow, the Ministry of Information (MoI) Film Division remained committed to combining entertainment with propaganda, cultural uplift, and high-quality productions.Footnote 29 Pursuing a policy of co-operation rather than coercion with regard to commercial cinema, the MoI sought the role of overseer, advising ‘on the suitability of subjects’ and helping to monitor the distribution of film-making resources. To offer just one example of the sorts of negotiations that resulted, in 1942 the British Film Producers Association, sensing the public's waning interest in war films, asked for more support in securing resources for non-war-themed productions. The MoI agreed, but with the proviso that preference would be given to ‘realistic films about every day life dealing with matters not directly about the war but featuring events in various phases of life in the factory, the mines and on the land’.Footnote 30
If the cultural elite admitted entertainment's capacity to raise morale and promote the participatory and egalitarian ideals of a ‘people's war’, they remained anxious to continue their long-standing mission to elevate public taste. Meanwhile, as cultural entrepreneurs sought to defend a place for entertainment within wartime Britain, they often found themselves balancing commercial interests against the heightened political demands of the moment. Navigating these various, oft-conflicting cultural agendas posed a challenge for even the most high-profile performers of the era.
An icon for a ‘people's war’
In many respects, Lynn was well positioned to become representative of a ‘people's war’. A ‘plumber's daughter’ from the East End, who had started her career at the age of seven touring the local working men's club circuit, she had an obvious link to ‘the people’.Footnote 31 What is more, she had already started to make a name for herself through radio during the late 1930s: she had her first big break in 1935 when publisher and friend Walter Ridley arranged an informal audition that won her three broadcasts with Joe Loss's band; the same week, she also sang for Charlie Kunz and was signed a second time. Two years later, she made her first hit recordings, ‘The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot’ and ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’. Another significant event of 1937 was her debut with Bert Ambrose, whose dance band was, by her own account, ‘generally recognized to be the best [. . .] in Britain’.Footnote 32 By the outbreak of war, then, her star persona was already enmeshed in a medium – popular music – that would prove vital to the British war effort.Footnote 33
It was only a matter of months before her appropriation as a national icon was confirmed with her aforementioned designation as the ‘Forces’ Sweetheart’. This new status roughly coincided with – and was surely reinforced by – her decision that the time had come to pursue a career as a solo artist. Having worked as a vocalist with Britain's foremost bandleader for several years, Lynn felt this was the only way to progress her career.Footnote 34 With variety impresarios proving eager to facilitate the move, she made her first appearance as a ‘fully fledged solo act’ on 1 July 1940 in Coventry.
By August of the same year, her growing popularity was reflected in a bout of fan mail requesting that she be given more airtime on the BBC's Forces’ Programme.Footnote 35 It was in response to these pleas that producer Howard Thomas made plans for Lynn to have her own radio show, Sincerely Yours. Thomas's vision was for a weekly half-hour show that would combine popular songs (sung by Lynn), instrumental numbers (performed by Fred Hartley and his orchestra), and brief accounts (read by Lynn) of home front activities. Taking advantage of radio's unprecedented powers of dissemination, the show was styled as a site of community gathering – a space in which Lynn could use a modern medium to traverse limitations of time and place, to mediate between battlefield and home front.Footnote 36 As her publicity put it, it was a ‘sort of rendez-vous, where husbands and wives torn apart by war [could] be brought together by music’.Footnote 37 At the same time, and despite having an audience of millions, Sincerely Yours sought to create an intimate, homely atmosphere. Described as a ‘personal letter in words and music’, and with touches such as the announcement of the arrival of a baby to a man in the Forces, the tone was unashamedly sentimental.Footnote 38 The initial six-week run began on 9 November 1941 with a prime broadcasting spot: 9.30pm on Sunday evening, that is, after the News, which invariably attracted large numbers of listeners.Footnote 39 Within three weeks, Sincerely Yours had ‘soared into the exclusive top rank of radio shows with an audience of more than 20% of the radio public’.Footnote 40 Since Lynn's busy performance schedule prohibited an extension of the initial run, plans were quickly made for another series in February and March the following year.Footnote 41 Before the second run of Sincerely Yours had come to an end, a variety show opened at the Palace Theatre using the same name.
It was during the radio series’ second run that a fierce debate erupted over the BBC's programming of popular music, a controversy that has been documented at length by Christina Baade and in which Lynn took centre stage.Footnote 42 In brief, following a series of British military defeats in Northern Africa, detractors claimed that the extensive airtime given to ‘crooners and sloppy sentimental rubbish’ was having an adverse affect on the Forces’ conduct.Footnote 43 Of the numerous culprits, Lynn's vocal performances seemed to epitomize more than any other the effeminate sentimentality that was supposedly undermining soldiers’ virility.Footnote 44 Such objections put the BBC in a difficult position: ‘There is no doubt whatever, of course, that the programme is solidly popular with the ordinary rank and file of the Forces’, Basil Nicolls explained; but nevertheless, the BBC did not want ‘a reputation for “flabby amusement”’ – something ‘constructive’ had to be done about Lynn's appearances.Footnote 45
In an attempt to resolve matters, a Dance Music Policy Committee, known colloquially as the ‘anti-slush’ committee, was set up to review the popular music programming policy. The verdict was announced in July – dance band programmes would henceforth ‘provide “more virile and robust music”’: ‘“Anaemic or debilitated” vocal performances by male singers, “insincere and over-sentimental” performances by women singers, and songs “slushy in sentiment” are to be prohibited.’Footnote 46 Such music, the committee concluded, was unsuitable for a nation at war.Footnote 47 But as critics observed, the marching genre of war song that the BBC now sought to promote had already proved unpopular. At the start of the war, Charing Cross Road had produced ‘a spate of war songs, each advertised as the “Tipperary” of World War II’; the Forces had ‘ignored them’. This might have reflected a continuation of the interwar trend, described by Alison Light, to reject ‘formerly heroic and officially masculine public rhetorics of national destiny’ in favour of a Britishness ‘at once less imperial and more inward-looking, more domestic and more private – and, in terms of pre-war standards, more “feminine”’.Footnote 48 When war broke out, this recently re-imagined Britishness converged with the popular music of the day to project a new type of sentimental soldier. Indeed, the popularity of Lynn's music challenges the assumption that, during the Second World War ‘patriotism, manhood, and virility became virtually indistinguishable’.Footnote 49
However, the explanation usually offered by contemporary critics for the failure of bellicose songs focused instead on the changing nature of warfare. Reginald Jacques, for example, argued that it was ‘no wonder’ that the Second World War had not had its own ‘Tipperary’: ‘it [Tipperary] was born in a war of marching tunes [but] you can't sing in a tank’.Footnote 50 Hughes similarly observed that ‘Today's tunes, being sickly sentimental, are unsingable at any but funeral march tempo and the modern army does comparatively little marching of any kind.’Footnote 51 These critics implied that the popularity of sentimental songs reflected the mechanized nature of modern warfare, while at the same time condemning such music as over-emotional, soporific ‘slush’.Footnote 52 If Lynn's music seemed to resonate with contemporary soldiers’ experiences, this did not alter the fact that it was ‘too sedative for seriousness’.Footnote 53
In other words, although this discussion was couched in terms of masculine and feminine popular musical styles, the gendered language rehearsed an issue that resonated more broadly: a pervasive discomfort among intellectuals about the effect of music's emotional appeal on listeners’ capacity for intelligent engagement.Footnote 54 This was a central concern in the debate about the relative merits and limitations of entertainment and art. For many highbrow critics, ‘sentimentality’ seemed to be incompatible with art; it described cultural products that had been ‘reduced to decoration’ on account of their visceral appeal. One such was Michael Tippett, who argued that sentimentality was a product of the eighteenth-century division of the world into ‘technical’ and ‘imaginative’ – a division whose negative outcomes were epitomized by the culture industry. It was only, he argued, ‘once the values of a spiritual order are re-admitted as valid in their own right for the full life natural to human beings’ that culture ‘ceases to be mere decoration, sentimentality and “dope” and comes to be the creation and enjoyment of the products of the spiritual imagination’.Footnote 55 At the same time, this word also evoked a lack of good judgement or, as Eric Blom explained, ‘an indulgence of feeling over a book, a picture or a play, in complete disregard of its qualities as a work of art’ (or lack of them).Footnote 56 To counterbalance these undesirable tendencies, elite culture had developed a high regard for objectivity and abstraction, often expressed through a focus on ‘a composer's purely aesthetic preoccupations’. Or, as Wilfrid Mellers put it, ‘“serious” art’ was measured not just by its ‘technical competence’, but also by its ‘emotional cleanliness’.Footnote 57
The difficulty, however, was that even the highest of highbrow critics were reluctant to do away with emotion altogether. Bemoaning the absence of ‘really moving musical expressions of emotion’ in contemporary music, Blom asserted that ‘if we do not want sentimentality, we can, goodness knows, do with sentiment to leaven the depressionist art of to-day’.Footnote 58 But quite where sentiment ended and sentimentality began was hard to say. Furthermore, art music lovers would have been hard pressed to maintain that their much-loved repertoire always fell on the right side of the line. Part of the problem was that critics often inferred a link between sentimentality and mass culture, which they saw as mass-producing emotions that amounted to little more than superficial, sensualist escapism; but gramophone and radio had already begun to generate a mass market for ‘classical’ music, which was increasingly consumed by the general public alongside more popular genres. Remarking on the hypocrisy of the BBC's position, a letter signed by a group of popular music aficionados noted: ‘I suppose that some modern dance tunes are melancholy, but then you will have to admit that this is also the case in some “highbrow” music, but you would never think of banning that because it is considered “good” music.’Footnote 59
Despite such astute observations, Lynn's detractors maintained that her music exhibited the most negative traits of a sentimental, pacifying mass culture. From the visceral appeal of her repertory, to her apparent absence of vocal technique and growing commercial success, advocates of elite culture found ample grounds for critique. To their minds, she was entertainment at its worst. When the second series of Sincerely Yours came to an end on 22 March 1942, the BBC decided to ‘rest’ Lynn until the autumn.
We'll Meet Again
The BBC was undoubtedly a powerful player in the British music scene, both as an employer of musicians and as a distributor of music. But when it came to popular music in particular, the corporation had a major rival in the film industry. From the early 1900s onwards, motion picture companies had realized that building links with the popular music industry promised lucrative returns. Put simply, featuring hit songs or celebrity vocalists drew in audiences.Footnote 60 Maximizing this potential source of publicity was especially necessary for the British film industry. Whereas Hollywood soon had the money to create stars from scratch, British companies were poorer and more often had to source their stars from other media.Footnote 61 British producers’ reliance on established theatre, music hall and radio celebrities was arguably reflected in the general public's penchant for the film musical, a genre that became popular during the 1930s, especially through the vehicles for Gracie Fields, Jack Buchanan, and George Formby.Footnote 62 By the end of 1941, on the heels of the huge success of her radio series Sincerely Yours, Lynn was well positioned to make her debut as a star of the film musicals.
It would not be her first time on the big screen: in 1936 she had sung in a number of musical shorts with the Joe Loss Orchestra; the year before, she had also made a less auspicious appearance as an extra in Flanagan and Allen's film A Fire has Been Arranged. Unlike on these previous occasions, however, Lynn now held huge commercial promise – an opportunity that was spotted by Columbia Pictures, who offered her a contract to ‘star in six films for an astronomic figure’.Footnote 63 Columbia was unabashed in its efforts to capitalize on her reputation as a vocal performer: as the poster advertising We'll Meet Again proclaimed, ‘the wonder voice of the air’ would become ‘triumphant on the screen!’Footnote 64 Having lined up Ben Henry as producer (the man responsible for George Formby's numerous films), they planned for shooting to begin in early summer.Footnote 65
Of Lynn's film vehicles, We'll Meet Again is of particular interest here because it engaged most explicitly with the preoccupations of 1940s musical culture: the high/low conflict is central to the narrative of the film, which is set in wartime Britain.Footnote 66 This might, at first, seem unremarkable: Jane Feuer has persuasively argued that this subject was a recurrent theme in film musicals of the period and reflected a pervasive concern about the potential impact that mass media might have on traditional cultural practices and the associated uncertainty about the value of popular music to society.Footnote 67 But the timing of We'll Meet Again, which was produced in the aftermath of the controversy over the BBC's programming of popular music, and its contemporaneous setting suggest the topical nature of its subject. Indeed, it was not unusual for films to respond to incidents in a star's extra-filmic life, particularly when an issue arose that threatened his/her established star identity.Footnote 68 Although little information has survived about the film's production process, the narrative could certainly have been adapted in response to recent events: Melody Maker announced the signing of Lynn's ‘big film contract’ in February 1942, just weeks before the controversy broke out, but filming did not begin until the early summer.Footnote 69
In We'll Meet Again, Lynn plays a young music hall dancer called Peggy Brown, who unexpectedly rises to fame after the chance discovery by the BBC of her exceptional singing voice. Peggy's best friend Frank (Ronald Ward), a highbrow composer and pianist, is desperate for her to make use of her singing talent rather than wasting time dancing; Peggy is determined that Frank can and will write popular music and coerces him into composing a song that they record and take to the BBC for consideration. On receiving the record, a hapless secretary promptly loses it under a pile of paperwork, before accidentally handing it over to a broadcasting assistant, who puts it on air. The song is, of course, an instant hit – although thanks to the singer rather than the composer. The BBC tracks down Peggy and she agrees to a broadcasting contract on condition that Frank can continue to compose songs for her. Eventually, she becomes a star with her own radio show; meanwhile Frank, having been liberated from the constraints of art music, finds a better way of contributing to the war effort: as the pianist in Peggy's band.
Besides dramatizing the high/low conflict through Peggy and Frank's friendship (a theme to which we will return shortly), the film also suggested a connection to Lynn's personal predicament through the semi-biographical nature of its plot. While Lynn does not actually play herself in We'll Meet Again (unlike the band leader Geraldo, who appears as ‘Gerry’ in the film), there are numerous references that align Peggy with Lynn. Both start out as ‘normal people’, originating from humble backgrounds yet standing out because of their unique voices;Footnote 70 both have lucky breaks that bring them into the world of the stars; both have a radio show that involves a presentation of songs and letters to the Forces; both give concerts to the troops. To enmesh matters further, several real-life characters also make brief appearances as themselves in the film: besides Geraldo and vocalist Len Camber, three well-known BBC employees feature – Alvar Liddell, John Watt, and John Sharman.
The film score also complicates the relationship between Peggy and Lynn, combining numbers that were new to Lynn – including four songs that were composed for the film, ‘Be Like the Kettle and Sing’ (by Tommie Connor, Walter Ridley, and Desmond O'Connor), ‘After the Rain’ (by Jack Popplewell and Bert Reisfeld), ‘All the World Sings a Lullaby’ (lyrics by Barbara Gordon and Basil Thomas; music by Harry Parr Davies), and ‘I'm Yours Sincerely’ (by Tommie O'Connor and Walter Ridley), as well as Schubert's ‘Ave Maria’, which Peggy sings during her friend's wedding – with one of her established hits, ‘We'll Meet Again’, a Ross Parker and Hughie Charles song that she made famous in 1939 and that was subsequently used as a signature tune on her radio show.Footnote 71 Once we enter the imaginary world of the film, this last song features only in the orchestral sound track, that is, Peggy does not sing it, or at least not until the very end of the film. Nevertheless, in an earlier scene that charts Peggy's rise to fame across a number of months in a montage sequence, ‘We'll Meet Again’ is mixed in a medley with those already sung by Peggy in the film; the visual display includes shots of Peggy broadcasting and her appreciative audience listening.
In placing such parallels between the ‘real-life’ Lynn and her filmic representation into the narrative, the scriptwriters – knowingly or otherwise – played on a problematic dualism that underpins star personas. On the one hand, stars exist outside the films they make as people in the real world, where their star personas are constructed by other media, such as magazines and newspapers. As Dyer points out, however, this ‘real side’ of the stars is fictive, based on the images constructed by the mass media through the selective coverage of their lives.Footnote 72 On the other hand, stars are also fictional characters in films, and while these characters are distinct from the real people, they nonetheless contribute to a star's persona. Edgar Morin describes this symbiotic relationship as the ‘dialectic of the actor and the role’, and argues that it is out of such a dialectic that the star is born: ‘Once the film is over, the actor becomes an actor again, the character remains a character, but from their union is born a composite creature who participates in both, envelops them both: the star.’Footnote 73 The actor and the role are thus neither identical nor completely distinct, but two entities bound in a dynamic exchange. The star persona emerges from this double mediation of two identities. In other words, films are one of the sites through which stars negotiate their broader position within society – a process that is particularly important if, as in Lynn's case, their status is contested. If in We'll Meet Again Peggy's obvious identification with Lynn further muddles the intersection between the two aspects of a star persona, it is precisely through this blurring of fact and fiction that the film seeks to do its cultural and patriotic work.
Despite being typical of the backstage musical genre, the narrative of We'll Meet Again held a particular significance for Lynn in the light of her contemporary critical reception. But it was not simply through fortunate timing that the film promoted her star persona. As an examination of how the narrative and generic conventions of the musical were tinged with contemporary concerns in three scenes from the film suggests, the political demands of the moment also put the old high/low debate in a different perspective – one that was distinctly to Lynn's advantage.Footnote 74
First, let us consider a scene from near the start of the film that marks the beginning of Frank's journey of self-discovery, away from the confines of high art and towards the freedom of popular music. The sequence opens with a close-up of a hand scribbling notes onto a piece of manuscript. The camera then pans round to reveal Frank, who – pencil now in mouth – tests out his composition on the grand piano. The music is virtuosic: a rising chromatic sequence gives way to large leaps and a thick chordal texture reminiscent of Rachmaninov. As Frank ends his play-through, traversing the length of the keyboard with an elaborate, arpeggiated flourish, Peggy enters to compliment his work. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that her initial enthusiasm masks an alternative agenda. Rehearsing a standard criticism of highbrow music, she asks: ‘What's the point of making your music so dignified that only stuffy old critics can understand it?’ Not one to ignore a challenge, Frank begins to experiment.
First, he extracts the melody from the dense chordal passage and gives it a rippling, high-pitch arpeggio accompaniment. Peggy immediately picks up on the tune: ‘that melody, you've got something there’. Sitting down on the piano stool next to Frank, she then demonstrates – with one hand and a comparative lack of technical ability – what Frank's melody could sound like if he ‘took a holiday from being so deadly serious’. Evidently provoked by Peggy's accusations, Frank then comes up with a jazzy version with chromatic harmonies; finally, experimenting a third time, he plays a more diatonic phrase that will become the introduction to the popular song that subsequently makes Peggy famous – ‘After the Rain’.
If Frank's musical transformation seems to pit low against high in an all-too blatant manner, Peggy's labelling of Frank's music as ‘highbrow’ nonetheless requires further explanation. In this scene, both his visual framing at the grand piano, and the style of the music he initially plays, recall a broader cultural tradition for romanticizing the virtuoso pianist-composer. This iconic figure had its roots in the nineteenth century, when celebrity piano recitals were made popular by the likes of Franz Liszt and Anton Rubinstein.Footnote 75 Once sound film was viable, cinema quickly became implicated in this trend, in particular through ‘concerto films’, which often featured virtuoso pianists as characters in the narrative and via the use of piano concertos on the soundtrack – either newly composed in a late Romantic idiom, or compiled from the emerging repertoire of ‘popular classics’, in which Rachmaninov, Chopin, and Beethoven, among others, featured prominently.Footnote 76 Such music's appropriation by the film industry at once undermined and consolidated its highbrow pretensions. For certain elite-minded critics, the combination of mass medium and diverse audience degraded the music, reducing it to ‘mere anodyne entertainment’.Footnote 77 But for the public at large, this repertoire soon became something close to the lingua franca of classical music. In spite of its broad dissemination, such music was marketed to the majority for its elite vestige – or, in the derogatory words of Peggy, its ‘stuffy’, ‘highbrow’ pretensions. What is more, for the popular music industry this branch of the art music world posed the greatest commercial threat on account of its heightened popularity. Labelling it as highbrow, then, was a means of asserting difference. If the contrast between the first and last versions of Frank's composition was arguably less pronounced than the dialogue suggests, the former represented an alternative cultural tradition against which the merits of Peggy's music could be affirmed.
In case Peggy's satisfaction with the transformed composition was not enough to confirm the new music's appeal, as Frank reaches a perfect cadence the camera cuts to show other characters from the household in which they lodge, who have gathered around the piano to express their approval:
Mrs Crump: Really Frank, I'd no idea you made up nice music like that.
Boy: Well, I never knew you could play. I always thought you were just tuning it. But I like that. Let's have some more.
Frank: That's all there is.
Professor Drake: Well, when it's finished I'd like to hear it. [. . .] Music like that with heart in it keeps people going, eases nervous tension; psychologically, of course, it's invaluable in these days.
These three characters – housekeeper Mrs Crump, a young boy, and an elderly Professor – cover a wide social spectrum, thus making their appreciation of Frank's playing reinforce the broad appeal of popular music and its ability to draw diverse groups together. By dramatizing its cross-class appeal, this scene suggests that popular music could contribute to the erosion of long-standing social divisions that was supposedly a by-product of the Blitz – and one that chimed conveniently with the rhetoric of the people's war.Footnote 78 The presence of the professor is especially telling. In the scene immediately prior to this, his credentials as a publicly minded highbrow have been established: his life's work has been to collect artworks for the local museum, a venue that allows him to ‘share his happiness with others’. He thus provides a bar against which the elitism of Frank's outlook can be measured. Similarly, while the professor's affirmation offers an intellectual seal of approval, the boy's comments emphasize the musicality of this new style – something that was not a given.Footnote 79 It was no secret that the tendency to classify popular music as ‘entertainment’ was something of a sore point for certain band leaders. As Hughes explained, this attitude had fostered a widespread ‘musical inferiority complex’ among popular artists.Footnote 80 The boy's claim that he previously mistook Frank's playing for piano-tuning might be read as a challenge, albeit a naive one, to the highbrow attitude that the designation ‘music’ was the preserve of elite culture.
The complete song is not heard until a few scenes later, when Peggy performs it in Geraldo's nightclub, backed by a big band-style orchestration that was becoming typical of the bandleader's style.Footnote 81 Against the closely scored wind and sliding chromatic harmonies, Lynn's delivery is characteristically straightforward: she deviates little from the melody, clearly enunciates the lyrics, and, while fairly free in her use of rubato, is comparatively sparing with portamenti. The title of the song (‘After the Rain’), we have learnt in the meantime, was inspired by Frank's memory of the sun coming out over England after a storm, while he was returning from an air force mission in Germany. His recollection establishes the patriotic overtones of the song, whose sentimental words promise England blue skies, an obvious metaphor for peace, when the war against Germany is over.
Performed as a solo number in the film, ‘After the Rain’ is used to emphasize Peggy's individual contribution to the war effort, as she offers the war-weary public a soothing reassurance of future peace. Elsewhere – most notably in its opening and closing scenes – We'll Meet Again dramatizes an alternative ground on which popular music was co-opted to the people's war: as a means of fostering a democratic musical culture in which the wartime public could actively participate.
The film begins with a brief (barely 20 seconds long) montage of images and sound effects evoking the Blitz: firing canons are superimposed onto footage of the Houses of Parliament and St Paul's; the sound of gun shots collides with that of the famous chimes of Big Ben. Having quickly but unequivocally established the context as wartime London, the camera cuts to a theatre, where the evening's official performance is coming to an end. The close-up of a poster, which advertises it as ‘The only musical running in London’, immediately suggests that there is something special about this event. Since the Blitz continues, performers volunteer (as had become customary) to provide further entertainment until the all-clear; Peggy, a dancer in the chorus line, is among those who stay behind to perform their civic duty. The show's host tries to engage the audience in a communal rendition of ‘Be Like the Kettle and Sing’; but when the band begins to play, no one joins in. Suddenly a voice pipes up from the wings, as Peggy starts singing in an attempt to help the struggling host. With visible relief, he rushes to the wings and drags her onstage. Her singing instantly regains the waning attention of the audience, as is suggested by a rather crude clip in which those present shuffle around and sit up in their seats. By the second chorus, the audience have joined in with the song, while Peggy's colleagues watch proudly from the wings; on the final chord she receives a standing ovation. The film's final scene similarly features a sing-along, although this time at a barracks, where the soldiers, seemingly less reticent than the theatre audience, join in with a gutsy rendition of Lynn's signature tune, ‘We'll Meet Again’.
A common feature of backstage musicals, such scenes demonstrate the participatory potential of popular music – a process that Jane Feuer has suggested constitutes an attempt to compensate for the shortcomings of an ‘alienating’, urbanized mass cultural form by fostering positive associations with an idealized rural ‘folk’ art tradition.Footnote 82 In this particular instance, popular music's ability to draw people together takes on added significance, as a means by which entertainment might contribute to the people's war. I have already noted how the opening montage invites the narrative, albeit fictional, to be read as a representation of life on the home front. The theatre scene that follows depicts a scenario that would equally have been familiar to wartime audiences, whether through first-hand experience or indirectly through media coverage. Seemingly heightening the sense of (temporary) community within the theatre, the air raid inspires a spontaneous performance by an amateur singer (notably, by the time Peggy is thrust onto the stage, she has changed out of her theatrical attire into her home clothes, emphasizing that she is just like any other member of the audience); and the distinction between stage and auditorium is undermined, as the performers watch from the wings while the audience joins in with the song. The topical lyrics, which advise those facing adversity to ‘Be Like the Kettle and Sing’, further reinforce the relevance of Peggy's music to the conflict. As the entertainment transforms a potentially alienating silence into a communal sing-along, Peggy becomes the author of community.Footnote 83
The biographical overtones of this scene also heighten its appeal to values associated with folk traditions. For one thing, it rehearses Lynn's lack of formal training: as she explains in her biography, she was never taught how to sing; nor could she read music.Footnote 84 Her advocates argued that this enabled her to remain true to her working-class roots: she continued to perform the songs she sang aged seven, just to bigger audiences, in better venues, and ‘with the true feeling the lyricists intended’.Footnote 85 (Lynn managed to retain this image even after success brought her a large salary and a house in Barking.) Presenting Lynn as a natural, uncultivated British talent, commentators drew attention to her accessibility. From rank and file soldier to factory girl or housewife, anyone – this narrative implied – might have what it takes to become a ‘Forces’ Sweetheart’. Or, as one of her detractors put it, while ranting about ‘crooning’ (a derogatory term used of singers like Lynn):
The capital outlay needed for success was nil; one needed neither instrument nor training; the microphone not only carried one's voice to an audience of millions over an entire continent, but enabled one to project that voice without effort to oneself or any of the tedious business of having to learn to sing. [. . .] She makes the kind of noise that the average working girl would like to make, and nearly can.Footnote 86
Lynn's claim to ordinariness was also strengthened by her stage manner, which allegedly lacked the theatrical pretence of other stars: one critic described her as ‘the least stagy performer of her kind’; another reported that ‘audiences frighten her [. . .] She is quite unsophisticated’.Footnote 87 Meanwhile, a third claimed that, on first meeting Lynn, he failed to recognize her even as a singer because of her unglamorous appearance – ‘a girl in flat brown shoes with a two-inch crepe sole, and a great brown teddy bear coat. She had rather big, white teeth, and dull brown hair, and no mascara.’Footnote 88 The opening scene of We'll Meet Again taps into this image: Peggy is dragged into the centre of an empty stage, from where she delivers the entire song, with little movement other than the occasional arm gesture. If Peggy was able to facilitate the audience's musical participation – a value with which the folk tradition was strongly associated – it was because she, like them, was an amateur, albeit an exceptional one.Footnote 89
One admirer even went so far as to claim that Lynn's performances evoked a folk past. ‘The words of her songs’, he wrote in the Radio Times, ‘may have been so much sentimental twaddle. But she treated them with as much tenderness as though they were precious old folk songs’ whose ‘peculiar delights’ had ‘only just [been] discovered’.Footnote 90 While the music's style was that of contemporary popular culture, the way Lynn sang nonetheless provoked nostalgia that conjured up images of an idealized ‘folk’ way of life, in which music-making was a natural out-growth of local community. Elsewhere, popular music advocates also presented such music's folk heritage as a precedent for its importance to war. In a Melody Maker article published shortly after the conflict broke out, for example, journalist Dan Ingman argued that: ‘Hundreds of years ago the only music was that of the wandering bands of minstrels. They sang the current folk songs and made up new ones to commemorate great local events’ – music that, he continued, ‘served its purpose of cheering the troops before, during and after the fighting’.Footnote 91 Contemporary popular music, he implied, had its roots in the age-old music of war.
While the scenes that bookend the film do not feature such blatant critiques of art music as occur elsewhere in the film, the perceived shortcomings of elite expression are not completely absent. In the opening scene, the camera shows Frank arriving at Peggy's theatre, having left his own highbrow concert as soon as the official performance finished in spite of the air raid. His alterity is emphasized by the doorman's greeting: ‘I'll look after your symphonies for you, Mr Beethoven’, he says, as Frank leaves his briefcase at the cloakroom; Frank replies, ‘Thanks maestro! Remind me to play them to you some time.’ This short exchange none-too-subtly implies that art musicians’ reliance on a written score made them less adaptable to wartime performance conditions than popular musicians, who were more used to improvising. The contrast between the film's opening and closing scenes is also important here: by the end of the film, Frank, in supposedly discovering his true musical voice, has also found his means of contributing to the war effort, and now joins the band.Footnote 92 If his change of heart helps promote Peggy's music, it does so by undermining more highbrow cultural forms. Only popular music, the narrative implies, can truly foster community.
For Lynn's detractors, on the other hand, the very things that helped her music to foster a sense of community were precisely a cause for concern. Its accessibility, simplicity and emotionality exemplified the ‘levelling down’ that they perceived as a by-product of American mass culture.Footnote 93 More uncomfortable still was the way that the musical style represented by Lynn seemed to be encroaching on elite territory. In July 1943, Edwin Evans wrote an article for The Musical Times arguing that ‘the art of singing’ was ‘in decline’. Although crooning was a phenomenon of ‘another world than that of music’, it had begun to impact singers more broadly: ‘The lachrymose tone and sentimental slither are spreading’, he warned:
One hears them nowadays in the most unlikely music – in the virile light music of the past century when it is revived, in popular drawing-room ballads of the same period, but also in modern songs if their sentiment offers the slightest excuse for it, and occasionally even in a classic. This again appears to be a habit which, once acquired, is difficult to cure.Footnote 94
It was one thing for critics to belittle the standards that popular music set for itself, but when popular tastes started to impact on the performance of art music, the power balance threatened to shift. Public opinion, it seemed, was beginning to pose a real challenge to elitist criticism's claim to being the bar by which taste was measured.Footnote 95
In moments like the opening and closing scenes of We'll Meet Again, then, the mediation of Lynn's star persona becomes intertwined with a larger narrative about the value of entertainment for wartime society. Implicitly revoking the charges of crassness and crudeness often levied at entertainers, the film presents their industry in a positive light: not only are their performances seen as making a direct contribution to the war effort by raising morale, they also appear to dissolve class boundaries on account of their accessibility and ubiquitous appeal. What is more, they allow audience participation in a way that was inconceivable in a concert of art music. As the film re-enacts the sites of communal performance that, by all accounts, were a regular occurrence during the Blitz, it reveals how Lynn's alignment with the values and ethos of the people's war gave her a heightened momentary significance.
In the end, Lynn's film career was not as long-lived as anticipated: after We'll Meet Again, she only made two more films (Rhythm Serenade and One Exciting Night), rather than the six originally announced by Melody Maker. Why the remaining three films were dropped is unclear. The few reviews suggest that critical reception was mixed. On the one hand, praise for Lynn's vocal performances was near unanimous: comments such as ‘Lynn is certainly at her best in the film’, or ‘her voice and personality are even more delightful on the screen than on the air!’ were typical.Footnote 96 On the other hand, however, reviewers seemed less convinced by the storyline, which is surprising given a plot so clearly based on Lynn's life. In an extreme case, one critic appeared to miss altogether the semi-biographical inspiration behind the film. Running with the headline ‘Vera Lynn Swell in Film – But Film Itself Not So Hot’, he complained that the narrative was ‘a trite, improbable story, that creaks its way along in a jerky and thoroughly unconvincing manner’.Footnote 97 There were also murmurs of discontent about her acting ability: in her autobiography, she admitted that – despite the producers’ best efforts – she struggled to play any part other than herself.Footnote 98 John Mundy's assessment suggests that the problem was more fundamental: she simply lacked ‘screen charisma’.Footnote 99 Her decision to take an extended break from performing following the birth of her daughter in March 1946 perhaps brought her film career to its inevitable end.
But the change of plan might also have reflected broader shifts in the political and cultural climate, as, with the end of war in sight, Britain began to plan for peace. High on the authorities’ agenda was the need to elevate the musical preferences of the general public, which remained a cause for concern among the elite. As Observer critic Tom Harrisson had explained in 1942: ‘The stream of almost undiluted light entertainment each day on the Forces programme is an ever-with-us reminder that there are a lot of people in this country who are still living at a slightly retarded level of cultural awareness. This is an uncomfortable thought for the more comfortable sections of the community.’Footnote 100 Perhaps surprisingly given its connotations as a mass medium, cinema was increasingly appropriated in the mission to improve public taste – a trend that was reflected in what Kevin Donnelly describes as a new ‘impetus to produce “high art musicals”’.Footnote 101 The industry's waning interest in the popular film musical genre probably also reflected the financial constraints that prevented British firms from keeping pace with the increasingly elaborate productions coming out of Hollywood.Footnote 102
As peace approached, it was also unclear how Lynn's star persona, which to date had been closely entwined with the Second World War, might be adapted for the post-war world. Perhaps because she had not previously established a name for herself in America, the transition to peacetime proved easier there: she had her all-time biggest hit when her recording of ‘Auf wiederseh'n Sweetheart’ topped the US charts in 1952. But in Britain, her association with the war continued to influence her reception. When, for example, in December 1950 an altercation between the BBC and Lynn's agent broke out after the corporation billed young upstart Petula Clark as the ‘Sweetheart of the Forces’, the BBC's Michael Standing retorted: ‘I do not think that by any stretch of the imagination any artist can lay an exclusive claim to this sort of title, more particularly as I should point out that this, alas, is a different war.’Footnote 103 (Despite Standing's strong words, the BBC appears to have stopped using this title in reference to Clark shortly after this dispute.) At the same time, the music hall tradition was struggling to keep pace. Already by 1949, a BBC producer predicted that Lynn's ‘kind of music was finished’. His conviction drastically curtailed her BBC appearances once again, this time for nearly a decade.Footnote 104
If Lynn's iconic status was closely bound-up in wartime Britain, her prominent position in the cultural controversies of her day illuminates more than just her shifting fortunes as a star. The tensions surrounding her representation and reception in this period also raise bigger questions about the role of popular music in the war – or, to be more specific, how its cultural value was negotiated in response to the political concerns of the period. Put simply, popular music's perceived capacity to distract listeners became newly valuable at a time when morale needed sustaining against the odds. The fall-out from the First World War surely contributed to the military's apparent lack of interest in marching songs: blind patriotism was no longer an option.Footnote 105 Lynn's music, on the other hand, provided a vehicle for men to express the challenges of life in the Forces, as an ‘appreciative middle-aged listener’ explained to the Radio Times:
if twenty-five years ago that young soldier of an earlier generation could have switched on the radio and heard a Vera Lynn singing to him [. . .] simply and sincerely, all the silly, insincere songs about home and the little steeple pointing to a star and the brighter world over the hill, that old war would have been made so much the less unhappy for him.Footnote 106
That her music was ‘not [. . .] great art’ was irrelevant: ‘who cares?’ asked the writer. Lynn's singing promised to alleviate the ‘stress of war and of waiting’ and that was what mattered. Indeed, for Lynn's fans, the grounds on which her performances were often denigrated – its accessibility, its emotive appeal, its simple, memorable tunes – were precisely the things that justified her importance to the conflict: these qualities enabled her music to address the needs of the moment in a direct way. So while the elite harped on about the perceived negative impact of sentimental mass culture, for many more people, Lynn's music provided not only a vital morale boost but also a sense of solidarity rooted in an image of Britishness to which they could easily relate.
In other words, the demands of war added a new layer to the long-running debate over highbrow and lowbrow, elite and popular. As critics sought to redefine the importance of musical culture in terms that were meaningful for a nation at war, the arguments for continuing to invest in art and entertainment often proved to be contradictory. On the one hand, presenting art as emblematic of the higher values for which Britain was fighting, critics argued that it should be preserved for the future. As ballet commentator Arnold Haskell explained, for example, ‘Art is the highest form of self-expression, art implies the triumph of the individual. These are the things for which we and our cultured allies are fighting.’Footnote 107 In contrast, popular music's contribution to the war effort was more often framed in terms of its ability to engage with the concerns of the moment: to ‘stir [mankind] up’, to ‘cheer the troops before, during and after the fighting’, as Ingman put it.Footnote 108 This writer even went so far as to quantify the value of popular music in relation to weapons: ‘2 mouthorgans = one rifle, 2 pianos = one machine gun, 2 concert parties = one big gun, and so on’.Footnote 109 And while both art and entertainment were promoted as pleasant distractions from the conflict, the rhetoric was markedly different. Popular music – an ‘essential anodyne’ – offered narcotized escapism, whereas high art held the promise of sublime transcendence.Footnote 110 For those musicians who classed their work as ‘entertainment’, accepting their role as ‘the main prop of any country's morale’ required only a small ideological step; but for those who viewed themselves as artists, seemingly more was at stake.Footnote 111
If war created a new polemical space in which the merits of popular and art music could be contested and redefined, then, the socio-political concerns of the moment reconfigured the debate in ways that often seemed more favourable for the former than the latter. So as soldiers and civilians fought for survival, a concurrent battle played out over which of the various musical styles might best represent a nation at war. Contrary to the image of an undivided nation that was promoted by the rhetoric of the people's war, musical culture in Britain during the 1940s was less a site of national unity than of contradiction – perhaps more so than ever before.
