Vernons Girls

You won't find the Vernons Girls listed in most girl group registers, mostly because they were British, and weren't so much a group as a corporate-sponsored entity that happened to do girl group-type songs later in their history and chart a few records in the process.

But the Vernons Girls are worthy of mention due to their longevity across nearly a decade of the most extraordinary changes in British popular music, coupled with their eventual embrace of girl group sounds.

Their origins go back well before the advent of rock & roll, to early-'50s England, which was then very much an economic backwater -- it's easy to forget today that rationing, as a consequence of the Second World War and its aftermath, didn't come to an end in England until 1953, eight years after the end of the war and, ironically, well after it had ended in Germany and Japan.