2009: Dame Vera Lynn
If anyone embodies the fighting spirit, it has to be Dame Vera Lynn, one time forces’ sweetheart, who last month outsold the Beatles to top the charts – and earned herself a place in the Guiness Book of Records as the oldest living
person to have a number 1 hit.

It feels, she admits, rather strange after all those years, particularly as, at the age of 92, music is no longer part of her life. With typical modesty, she says that she isn’t very musical, she ‘just happened’ to sing those songs.

In fact, she began her professional life at the age of seven, singing in working men’s clubs. She also joined a dance troupe but left at the age of 15 to pursue her singing career and was soon performing with household names like Billy Cotton, Charlie Kunz and Bert Ambrose. Her first radio broadcast came in 1935 when she sang with the Joe Loss orchestra.

Vera was already well-established as a singer by the time World War II broke out and within a year was hosting her own radio programme, Sincerely Yours, sending messages to British troops posted abroad and singing the songs they requested. Her recordings of We’ll Meet Again (1939) and The White Cliffs of Dover (1940) catapulted her to stardom and she became the most popular female entertainer in the UK. She also travelled to Egypt and Asia to entertain the troops.

Vera remained popular throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s. She was the first British singer to top the charts in the US with Auf Wiederseh’n Sweetheart and when the UK launched its own music charts, three of the top 15 records were hers. In 2005, she made a surprise appearance at the Trafalgar Square concert to celebrate the VE Day Diamond Jubilee. Recalling the sacrifices that were made during the war, she said: ‘We should never forget and we should teach the children to remember.’