Better known as ‘Keep the home fires burning’, this song was the first big success of Cardiff-born future matinée idol and composer of hugely popular romantic musicals, Ivor Novello. It proved a rallying song for troops sent abroad to the battlefields of World War I. Poignantly, the words were by American journalist and poetess Lena Guilbert Ford, who lost her life in March 1918 when a Zeppelin airship dropped a bomb on her home in Maida Vale, London.
from notes by Andrew Lamb © 2002
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