Vera Lynn - Hidden Treasures (The Very Best Of) Vera Lynn

When Dame Vera Lynn’s daughter, Virginia Lewis-Jones, recently moved out of the family home – the house in Ditchling, East Sussex, where Dame Vera Lynn had lived with her husband, the saxophonist and clarinettist Harry Lewis, for nearly 40 years – she donated the entire collection of her mother’s records to The British Library. Archivists have been sorting through the extensive collection of discs and tapes with a fine-tooth comb ever since. Amongst these records, a set of three silver-coloured aluminium master discs were discovered. Two of the discs are labelled by hand with the song titles, 'What a Difference a Day Makes' and 'Spring Don't Mean a Thing to Me' and the other is unlabelled. Using specialist equipment, musicology experts at the British Library were able to listen to these masters and identify them as audition tapes, confirming that these are the first recordings in existence of a voice that went on to become one of the most recognisable, reassuring and beloved voices in the history of music.