Caroll Levis's film Discoveries, made in the summer of 1939 as a spin-off from his radio talent-show of the same name, while not destined to enter the canon of memorable British cinema, did contain one moment of cultural resonance. With war looming, the film rose to the occasion in a grand finale featuring Master Glyn Davies, the Welsh boy soprano, in midshipman's uniform, surrounded by a huge chorus of bell-bottomed sailors, and warbling a new song by Ross Parker and Hughie Charles called There'll Always Be An England.

The film was soon forgotten, but the song lived on: when war came it went straight to the top of the best-sellers list, and within two months 200,000 copies of the sheet music had been sold. It was the first great hit song of the war. More than this, along with Parker and Charles's other big hit We'll Meet Again, it is one of the handful of wartime songs still remembered 50 years after the event. But while the longevity of We'll Meet Again owes a great deal to that of Dame Vera Lynn, There'll Always Be An England has lived on in a different cultural category: it is a national song – despite its Tin Pan Alley provenance, up there with Land of Hope and Gloryand Rule Britannia, and deemed suitable to be taught to primary school children at the time of the Coronation in 1953, which is where the present author first encountered it.

With its marching rhythm and simple harmonies – no syncopation or other twentieth-century influences, and utterly uncroonable – There'll Always Be An England could have been written for the Boer War music hall: certainly, it bypasses everything that had happened musically since about 1910. The lyrics also aspire to a timeless and high-minded sense of nationhood: England (for which we may perhaps read ‘Britain’) will survive, and be free, as long as ‘England means as much to you as England means to me.’ But what does‘England mean to me’? The song is hardly explicit.