We'll Meet Again

The story

"We'll Meet Again" was written in 1939 by the English songwriters Ross Parker and Hughie Charles and published by Michael Ross Limited, whose directors included Parker; the pianist Norman Keen collaborated with them on it. Vera Lynn first recorded it on 28 September 1939, accompanied by Arthur Young on the Hammond Novachord, an early electronic keyboard; the song is credited as one of the first to use that instrument, the first polyphonic synthesizer. It became one of the best-known songs of the war, speaking to servicemen going off to fight and to the families they left. It gave its name to a 1943 film in which Lynn starred in a loose version of her own life as the "forces' sweetheart".

Lynn recorded it again in 1953, with fuller accompaniment and a chorus of British armed forces personnel. During the Cold War her recording was among the music held in the twenty underground radio stations of the BBC's Wartime Broadcasting Service, which were to broadcast public information and keep up morale for a hundred days after a nuclear attack. Stanley Kubrick set the 1953 recording to the final scene of Dr. Strangelove (1964), where it accompanies a nuclear war that ends humanity.

The song kept its place in the remembrance of the war. Lynn sang it in London on the 60th anniversary of VE Day in 2005, with Petula Clark and Bruce Forsyth, and in the Netherlands it traditionally closes the Liberation Day Concert in Amsterdam on 5 May. On 5 April 2020, in a televised address during the COVID-19 pandemic, Queen Elizabeth II echoed it, and Lynn's recording and a charity duet with Katherine Jenkins returned to the British charts that spring, with proceeds for National Health Service charities.

What it says

A song of parting in wartime that holds on to the hope of reunion; tender, calm and consoling.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so they are not printed here. “What it says” above gives their theme in our own words, and the performance below lets you hear them.