Wartime Effort
Tilley's popularity reached its all-time high point during World War I, when she and her husband ran a military recruitment drive, as did a number of other music-hall stars. In the guise of characters like 'Tommy in the Trench' and 'Jack Tar Home from Sea', Tilley performed songs like "The army of today's all right" and 'Jolly Good Luck to the Girl who Loves a Soldier'. This is how she got the nickname Britain's best recruiting sergeant - young men were sometimes asked to join the army on stage during her show. She was prepared to be a little controversial. Famously, for example, she sang a song "I've Got a Bit of a Blighty One", about a soldier who was delighted to have been wounded because it allowed him to go back to England and get away from extremely deadly battlefields.
- "When I think about my dugout / Where I dare not stick my mug out / I'm glad I've got a bit of a blighty one!"
Tilley performed in hospitals and sold War Bonds. Her husband was knighted in 1919 for his own services to the war effort, with Tilley becoming Lady de Frece. He was elected Conservative MP for Ashton-under-Lyne in the 1920s and then for Blackpool.
Read more about this topic: Vesta Tilley
Famous quotes containing the words wartime and/or effort:
“The man who gets drunk in peacetime is a coward. The man who gets drunk in wartime goes on being a coward.”
—José Bergamín (1895–1983)
“Certainly the effort to remain unchanged, young, when the body gives so impressive a signal of change as the menopause, is gallant; but it is a stupid, self-sacrificial gallantry, better befitting a boy of twenty than a woman of forty-five or fifty. Let the athletes die young and laurel-crowned. Let the soldiers earn the Purple Hearts. Let women die old, white-crowned, with human hearts.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)