Sheffield woman's Christmas tea set survived the Blitz - but the shop it was bought from did not

Joyce Strerland was just nine-years-old when the Nazis launched the Blitz on Sheffield on December 12, 1940.

She was close to no longer believing in Father Christmas.

“In those days we still believed in Father Christmas, we thought we knew there was no Father Christmas but at the same time we believed.

“They were the good old days,when we got a skipping rope and an apple or an orange,” said Joyce, who grew up in Daresbury Road, Arbourthorne with parents, George and Sarah and sisters, Mary and Anne.

Joyce, now aged 90, was very lucky to receive a beautiful dolls tea set for Christmas that year, made all the more fortuitous by the fact that the shop it was bought from – Marks and Spencer which was then based on The Moor – was bombed just one week after her parents’ festive purchase.

She has cherished the tea set ever since, and still has it some 80 years later.

It featured the poem: ‘Who killed cock robin” on the side.

“I killed cock robin, and the birds of the air came a sighing and a sobbing,” recited Joyce.

Following the Blitz, Marks and Spencer moved from The Moor, into the Lansdowne Cinema site on London Road.

Joyce was a pupil at Arbourthorne Infants for much of the Second World War, and remembers going to air raid shelters there.

And in spite of the destruction taking place around her, and across the country, Joyce says she does not remember feeling frightened.

She said: “I don't think we knew what fear was. It was just a case of the sirens going off.

"We had to get our siren suits on, which I think today, they call onesies. We would get our gas masks and get down to the shelter

“We were more frightened on Sunday night because we knew we weren't far from the ack-ack guns on Manor Top.”

Joyce also recalls seeing British soldiers at Edmund Road Drill Hall.

“They had walk from there to their base at Manor Top with all their bags. The soldiers marched up East Bank Road

“When the soldiers marched up East Bank Road all the neighbours collected Woodbines for the soldiers who used to sit in the fields half way up East Bank Road.

“Mothers would run out with flasks of coffee and tea. We looked after them.”

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