A former Bradford club singer who once replaced Forces sweetheart Anne Shelton to entertain troops has died from cancer, aged 88.

Evelyn Hindle, known as Eve-Lynn on stage, came to the rescue of a Christmas benefit concert for soldiers while serving as a Wren in Portsmouth. Her daughter Lynne said it was one of her mother’s biggest claims to fame after Anne Shelton’s performance was cancelled at the eleventh hour.

The Bradford songbird, who had been chosen at the age of 10 to sing a solo in front of the King and Queen when they visited her home city in 1935 , had a passion for music which she kept up while serving as a gunnery wren. She used to sing and play the piano loudly to help Wrens take their minds off the bombs falling round them.

Lynne said: “That was mum all over. She wasn’t frightened of a thing. She was a feisty lady. She was the youngest in the family with six brothers and had to stick up for herself.”

Evelyn was de-mobbed in 1944 and went on to have four daughters while living in Newcastle, but returned to Bradford with her children when her marriage broke up.

She trained as a nurse, going on to work as a district nurse and then as an industrial nurse in the mills, but to make ends meet she knitted mittens to earn dinner money for the children, cleaned the Hope and Anchor pub in Allerton and sang at working men’s clubs.

In her earlier years she won first prize in the Tommy Dorsey singing competition at the Gaiety Ballroom and was part of Bradford’s entry for the televised Top Town talent contest in the 1950s.

Widowed, she remarried in 1974 and worked at a canteen at the former Provident in Sunbridge Road where she would write poems for workmates’ birthdays. On her retirement her boss wrote one for her.

Mrs Hindle spent her last 20 years living at Flower Bank, Kings Road, in Bolton Woods and died in May at Manorlands Hospice, Oxenhope.

Her three eldest grandchildren are linked to the Armed Forces – Debbie Lightowler is a sergeant in the Territorial Army, Stephen Lightowler was a regular in the Parachute Regiment and is now a sergeant in 4 Para at Thornbury now in Canada, and David Lightowler was a Petty Officer in the Navy.