Canberran BARRY YORK recalls the day his dad, Loreto, stood in a London recording studio among a crowd of servicemen singing beside The Forces’ Sweetheart Vera Lynn.

The autographed photograph was sent by Dame Vera Lynn in 2009 during the final months of my father’s life. 

I had written to her in the hope that a personal message connected to one of his happiest post-wartime memories might lift his spirits as he faced terminal cancer.

My dad, Loreto York, once stood in a London recording studio among a crowd of servicemen singing beside Vera Lynn.

They were not professional performers, just Royal Air Force airmen and soldiers gathered to provide the warm, cheerful chorus for a song called Auf Wiederseh’n, Sweetheart.

The session took place at Decca Records’ studios in Broadhurst Gardens, London, in 1952. The song was released that year and became a major international hit. It reached No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard chart in July 1952, making Vera Lynn the first British artist to top the US charts.

The song itself was originally a German composition by Eberhard Storch, first recorded in German in 1950. Vera Lynn heard the tune while holidaying in Switzerland, liked it, and arranged for English lyrics to be written before recording her version.

Dad always remembered the experience with amusement. Before recording, the men received some brief coaching from the vocal group Johnny Johnston Singers and sang so well on the first take that the producers stopped them. 

The performance sounded too polished. What they wanted was something rougher and more spontaneous – the sound of servicemen singing around a piano after a few drinks.

“They had to make us sound worse,” dad laughed years later.

The record’s B-side was From the Time You Say Goodbye (The Parting Song). Dad enjoyed telling me that while Auf Wiederseh’n, Sweetheart became famous throughout much of the world, including Australia, American listeners were particularly fond of From the Time You Say Goodbye (The Parting Song). 

The record proved such a success that the servicemen were invited back for another recording session. One of the songs recorded was When Swallows Say Goodbye, though dad recalled that it never achieved much success.

For several hours of recording, the men received a cup of tea, two biscuits and one pound each. There were no contracts, no royalties and no thought that they were contributing to a recording that would still be remembered generations later.

Dad spoke warmly of Vera Lynn. He remembered her moving easily among the servicemen, chatting, smiling and asking where they had served during the war. Having spent much of the conflict entertaining troops while her husband served overseas, she seemed genuinely at ease in their company.

Whenever I hear Auf Wiederseh’n, Sweetheart today, I think not only of the courage and endurance of those who fought against fascism, but also of my father and his small place in that history. Somewhere among those backing voices is the unmistakable sound of ordinary servicemen who had lived through extraordinary times – and among them is dad’s voice. 

Loreto was born Loreto Meilak in Sliema, Malta, in 1918, to a family whose roots were in Gozo. He volunteered for the RAF in Malta in 1940 and served in Malta, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Libya, Palestine and France before later being posted to Scotland and London.

In 1947 he anglicised his surname to York while living in England. In 1954 he migrated to Melbourne with his wife Olive and young son Barry (yours truly), settling in Brunswick.

He would become mayor of Brunswick in 1972 and again in 1976. In the early 1990s he moved to Canberra, where I was living and working.

However, by mid-2009, the energetic man I had always known was fading rapidly.

Pancreatic cancer had brought him to a nursing home in Garran, and each week his world grew smaller.

Hoping to reconnect him with a cherished memory from his youth, I wrote to Dame Vera Lynn, telling her about his wartime service and his recollection of singing on that famous recording.

She responded with characteristic kindness and sent the signed photograph.

But it arrived too late.

My father died on October 5 2009 before it reached him.

When the photograph arrived a few weeks later, I wrote again to thank her and explain what had happened. She replied with a letter expressing her condolences.

I often wish dad had lived long enough to hold that photograph in his hands. Yet there is something fitting about it, too. 

Vera Lynn represented memory, resilience and hope for a generation shaped by war. Her gesture, though delayed, was a final acknowledgement of a young Maltese airman who had once joined a group of servicemen in a London studio and unknowingly left a small trace of himself in musical history.

Dame Vera herself died in 2020, at the ripe old age of 103.

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