Tank girl Sylvia is still going strong at the age of 109
SHE went dancing and attended church until she was 106. Now, Sylvia Corfield, who built tanks during the Second World War, has just celebrated her 109th birthday and is Greater Manchester’s oldest resident.
Sylvia lived alone in her Rochdale bungalow until two years ago until she went into Highfield House Care Home in Heywood for respite care and decided that she liked it so much she would stay.
Fellow residents, friends and relatives were there to celebrate yesterday when she reached yet another milestone as congratulatory messages from the Queen have become increasingly commonplace.
She was born Sylvia Annie Cissie in the Staffordshire village of Shenstone on November 21, 1912 and had a brother and a sister.
Her family ran the village grocery store and bakery, and they would deliver their products to other local villages by horse and trap.
After Sylvia left school she would travel to Birmingham by train where she worked as a typist.
But when the Second World War broke out she went to work for the British Motor Company which by then had switched to building tanks.
Sylvia worked on the assembly line.
At the end of the war she worked for the telephone section of the Post Office until she retired in 1972 at the age of 60.
She had married Douglas Corfield - 10 years her junior – on September 20, 1947, at Shenstone Parish Church, and the couple enjoyed dancing. Douglas died in 2008.
The couple had no children and when they finished their working lives they decided to move nearer to their extended family in Rochdale.
Sylvia’s second cousin once removed Malcolm Bywater, 72, who lives in Heywood, said: “Longevity must run in the family because my grandmother, one of her close relatives, until she was 104.
“She has been fiercely independent well past her 100th birthday. lived
“She was attending St Aidan’s Church until just a couple of years ago.
“And she was a regular attendee at the Rochdale and District Blind Welfare Society Dances where men would fight over who would dance with her.
“I don’t know what the secret of her long life is.
“She’s never smoked, but she does enjoy a glass of sherry.”