Monday 20 March 2017

Wet blanket time

I don't wish to disparage Ms Lynn's great - and occasionally brave - war effort, but she was not the only "forces' sweetheart"*. Anne Shelton and Gracie Fields also did their bit.

The great "British" flag-waver "The White Cliffs of Dover" originated in America from a poem by Alice Duer Miller and cribbing from Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg's "Over the Rainbow" by jobbing song-writers Nat Burton and Walter Kent when the US authorities wanted a song to encourage reluctant Americans to support Britain against Hitler - and months later to  boost the morale of a nation which was dragged into war by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

*actually, my ex-ATS mother used to refer to her as "adenoidy Vera".

[updated 2017-03-21]

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