7

It All Depends on Me

There is no argument GECO had a lethal product line, but the munitions plant’s real vim and vigour did not come from explosives. GECO’s true strength came from its employees, who faithfully showed up for their shifts, six days each week, with only a day’s pause for the Sabbath. With surnames ranging from Aneson to Zuber,1 patriotic men and women put their personal and family needs aside to produce ammunition, jeopardizing their own lives, and those of everyone working alongside. As the war progressed, the ratio of women to men in the plant rose to a staggering nine women for every man.2 These women — before the battle cry came — were content in their domestic duties, tending to husbands, house, and children, or they were single young women living out their carefree years as far away as Alberta and British Columbia in western Canada. These same women, who patriotically heeded the call, were thrust into wartime work by the hundreds of thousands throughout Canada and the United States.3 Many men and women who worked at GECO had loved ones in active service overseas. Some had not only husbands, but multiple brothers and sons, grandsons and granddaughters engaged in war work both on the front line and on the home front.4

Every wartime worker had a unique experience and story to tell. The stories contained here chronicle the lives of GECO fusiliers collected from several sources, including first-hand accounts, surviving family members, and stories shared in the plant newspaper. Children of mothers who worked for GECO are particularly proud, and rightly so.

This chapter is dedicated to those whose stories are told below, and to the countless others who lived out their lives in peacetime after the need for their services ended, and died with no recognition, no fanfare, without any medals to recognize their unique sacrifice and contribution in claiming victory over Nazi oppression.

GECO Gals

On the Dirty Side

Mum’s the Word: Dorothy Cheesman

Dorothy Cheesman, born in 1924, was hired in March 1941, very early in Project No. 24’s story. At just sixteen years of age, Dorothy was a high-school student at Eastern Commerce when the Hamilton brothers hired her as GECO’s first secretary. Her first assignment was to type up top-secret engineering notes at 1218 Danforth Avenue. She remembers getting fingerprinted, taking an oath of secrecy, and receiving wages of $15 to $17.50 per week.

Dorothy transferred to 1350 Danforth Avenue, then to the newly completed administration building at the GECO plant in Scarboro in May 1941. Dorothy worked for Mr. Duff, GECO’s production manager, and moved with him to the clean-side office housed in Building No. 153 after a stint in administration on the dirty side. Dorothy stayed with GECO until the end of the war.

The Operations (Time and Motion) Study Office was just across the way from Dorothy, and one of her very good chums, Molly Danniels, worked there. A twenty-eight-year-old gentleman, William McRae, worked in that office as well. Unable to serve his country overseas due to vision problems, Bill did his part at GECO. In 1945, when the war was won, Molly, Dorothy, and Bill moved on. Bill almost immediately saw an opportunity to woo the pretty lady in the clean-side office. Dorothy and Bill began dating and married two years later. They raised a happy, large family of seven. Dorothy continues to live in Scarborough today.

GECO hired Dorothy Cheesman at only sixteen years of age to type up top-secret engineering notes when construction for the munitions factory was just getting underway. GECO staff entrusted Dorothy to lock their safe each evening with classified engineering notes safely tucked inside. Dorothy, a steadfast employee, stayed with GECO until the end of the war. Courtesy of Dorothy McRae.

Too Young to Fill: Elizabeth Ellis

Elizabeth Ellis was born on May 23, 1927, in her grandmother’s home on Broadview Avenue at Pottery Road in Toronto. She was the oldest of four daughters born within four years to Harry and Isobel Ellis. The Depression hit the family hard and her dad, a bricklayer, could find little work. He turned to government relief to feed and clothe his young family during the 1930s.

Betty grew up overlooking the gorgeous Don River, and enjoyed swimming in its clear, fresh water with friends. During the war, a German POW camp was built in the Don Valley below her house. The men lived in wooden huts, hung their laundry out on clotheslines just like their Canadian neighbours, and were picked up each morning by bus to go to work on wartime projects. The simple, down-to-earth everydayness of their routine amazed Betty. The camp was not fenced in. The prisoners did not attempt an escape. Perhaps the fate that awaited them back in Germany was a lot worse than life as a POW in the Great White North.

Elizabeth struggled with math in high school, and after failing and being kept back, she left at the age of sixteen. Needing a job to help support her family, she discovered a wartime munitions plant’s employment office on “the Danforth.” She applied and started the commute via the Hollinger bus out to GECO in Scarboro at the end of May 1943. She remembers the bus would meander its way up Victoria Park Avenue to Eglinton Avenue. Scarboro seemed so far from where she lived on Broadview Avenue.

Because Betty was only sixteen, she was not old enough to fill munitions.5 This restriction did not bother her. “Office work would be more what I was used to,” she said. Elizabeth performed basic office duties such as filing and typing. Within her office was a large laboratory where a handful of men worked. Windows allowed the office staff to watch the men, but they were not allowed to enter the room. She remembers feeling out of place. “I was so young,” she said. “Everyone was older, they were married, had children.”

In fact, with the naiveté of youth, it never dawned on Betty that women were filling munitions. “I had no idea what they did in the workshops,” she said. She saw women who had yellow hair and hands from working with tetryl, but she did not know that that was the cause at the time. She was also completely unaware of GECO’s tunnel system.

As a healthy, athletic young woman, Betty took advantage of the extra-curricular activities offered at GECO. She played first base on one of GECO’s softball teams, and still remembers going to play an exhibition game for the troops at an army camp located at Niagara-on-the-Lake. “I leapt up to catch a ball,” she said, “and fell into a hole, spraining my ankle.” A military doctor taped up her injury onsite, but she was out of the game, and missed three days of work. When she returned, she visited GECO’s Medical Department, where the nurses were aghast at the state of the army doctor’s “quick fix.” On another occasion, Betty, wanting to do her part for the men fighting overseas, attended one of GECO’s blood donor clinics. Unfortunately, the nurses discovered she was anemic and instead of taking her blood, instructed her to take iron pills and eat lots of lettuce and liver.

By March 1945, talk of the war ending was already on the lips of hopeful Canadians. Betty knew she would soon be looking for work. She left GECO that spring to work at Queen’s Park, performing clerical duties.

Early in 1945, Elizabeth rekindled a fledging romance with a young, handsome sailor, Victor Warner, who, while serving in the Royal Canadian Navy as part of D.E.M.S. (Defensively Equipped Merchant Ships), had come home on a ten-day leave. When he shipped out, they promised to write to each other. Today, almost seven decades later, two of Victor’s dear letters can be found tucked in Betty’s wallet.

Victor was discharged in November 1945, returning to work at Canada Wire, where he had worked before he enlisted. Elizabeth left her job at Queen’s Park and moved to Canada Wire to be closer to Victor.

Elizabeth and Victor were married in the summer of 1948. The next morning, Victor slipped the receipt from their first breakfast as a married couple into his wallet. A treasured memento, he carried it with him until he died in his sleep in 2004.

Victor and Elizabeth had two children. Today, Elizabeth lives in south Scarborough, near the Golden Mile.

A Star Is Born: Helen Fraser

By the time Helen Fraser joined GECO, she had lived most every girl’s dream. Just a few years earlier, as a single young woman, Helen Gray lived in Medicine Hat enjoying a recent Alberta Beauty Contest win. Scouts from Paramount Studios in Hollywood arrived, searching for beauty as part of a North American contest. Unbeknownst to Helen, the town’s local theatre manager gave them a picture of the attractive young lady. Not long after, she received a wire, requesting she travel to California.

Suddenly, Helen, along with twenty-nine other starry-eyed young ladies, was a Hollywood hopeful. She signed a six-month contract with the film studio, earning $50 a week. She first appeared in Hollywood on Parade, a film starring a group of beauty contest winners who visited several Hollywood nightspots. The film featured big names, including Mae West, Gloria Swanson, Cecil B. DeMille, the Marx Brothers, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, and Canada’s Mary Pickford. Helen also starred in Search for Beauty, which came out a year later, but her contract ended and Hollywood did not ask her back. “I was there six months,” she said, and while “it was lots of fun,” she returned home, humility intact. She married, and soon after, the war broke out.

With seven brothers — all but the youngest fighting overseas, with one missing in action flying over Germany — she needed little urging to help the war effort. Even her husband was serving in the RCAF, as a flight sergeant. Helen moved east specifically to join the ranks at GECO. She was given a unique job — driving employees and special guests around the plant in a company taxi. She loved her job, but admits with a wistful smile she left a small bit of her heart in Hollywood and hoped to pursue her acting career when the war ended.

Of the thirty young women selected in Paramount’s Search for Beauty contest, Helen’s colleague, actress Ann Sheridan, was the only one to really make it in film.6

A Run-In with the Boss: Barbara Holmes

Barbara Mary Jarman grew up with a love for sports. Born in August 1915 in Edmonton, Alberta, Barbara was the daughter of international rugby star John Wallace Jarman, who played for Bristol, and who immigrated to Canada around the turn of the century. Barbara had an idyllic childhood, and after completing high school, attended the University of Alberta, where she earned a bachelor of science degree.

As a young, single woman, she moved to Toronto, hoping to find work as a dietician. She secured a job in Eaton’s iconic College Street store. A newcomer to the city, Barbara joined the Badminton and Racket Club, where she developed a life-long love for tennis. A dear friend, Ruby, played matchmaker, introducing Barbara to a handsome young man named Hartley Holmes. Hartley, a chartered accountant, lived with health issues, including diabetes, and was not able to enlist when Canada entered the Second World War. Barbara and Hartley were married in June 1940. Barbara quit her job for a brief time, but went back to work when GECO opened in Scarboro.

Barbara remembers the plant’s buildings “were in a U-shape where women were filling shells for the war.” Along with cafeteria manager Florence Ignatieff, Barbara helped set the meal plan for the massive munitions plant. “We did a lot of cooking,” she says proudly. “We had to have fruits and desserts all ready to go. It was the cleanest place to work at that time.”

Barbara recalls fondly a serendipitous “run-in” with GECO’s president, Bob Hamilton. Late one Saturday afternoon as Mr. Hamilton was leaving the plant, he spotted Barbara waiting for a bus. He stopped and offered her a ride home. To Barbara, this would have been quite extraordinary — getting a ride home from the president of the company. When Bob discovered through casual conversation that Hartley was away on business, he invited her home for dinner. Barbara balked — she couldn’t possibly impose on Mrs. Hamilton without proper invitation. Bob put her at ease when he simply replied, “Never mind, you’ll like her; besides, we’re having roast beef.” Barbara and Betty Hamilton became fast friends that Saturday evening. The spur-of-the-moment ride home and subsequent shared meal around the dinner table brought two families together who enjoyed a close life-long friendship. Barbara and her family spent many happy times at the Hamilton cottage on Bass Island. “It was the happiest part of my life,” Barbara, now ninety-seven, says. “It was a wonderful part of my life, knowing Betty and Bob Hamilton. Bob and Betty were very generous, remarkable people.”

Barbara left GECO when she became pregnant with her daughter and namesake, Barbara, born in 1944. As testament to the close friendships Barbara built while at GECO, Grace Hyndman, GECO’s personnel director, and Florence Ignatieff became her daughter’s godmothers. Betty Hamilton became godmother to Barbara’s son, who was born two years later.

Sadly, Hartley died from a heart attack in 1967. Barbara remarried in 1970. Her second husband, Basil Langfeldt, passed away in 1986. She smiles when she remembers them. “I was very happy with my two husbands.”

Barbara played tennis most of her life, proud to say she played in the “over ninety” category in tennis tournaments in Florida. She now lives in Toronto in the same retirement home where her treasured friend Betty Hamilton once resided.

Barbara Holmes Langfeldt with John McLean Parsons Hamilton, Toronto, 2013. Barbara, while at GECO, worked closely with Florence Ignatieff, the cafeteria manager. GECO’s main two-thousand-seat cafeteria served approximately three thousand meals per day, or sixty-five thousand meals per month, more than all of Toronto’s downtown hotels combined at that time. Courtesy Barbara Dickson.

Chief Dietitian and “Guiding Genius”: Florence Ignatieff

Florence Ignatieff, director of GECO’s massive cafeteria services, managed a staff of 120 employees. She brought an armload of impressive credentials to her new job, including an extensive academic background and successful record of managing food operations at the Georgian Room of the T. Eaton Company.

Born in 1902, Florence Hargreaves was the youngest of five. Mika, Florence’s daughter, said, “[my mother was raised] in a fairly Victorian family that seemed to be trying to keep her doing the ‘correct’ thing, and she wasn’t going to let them stop her.”7

As a determined young woman, Florence wanted to study science at university. Her father refused to enrol her, calling the pursuit not “lady-like enough.”8 Florence put a plan together. “She always found a way,” Mika said, “to do what she wanted to.”9 Not particularly fond of cooking, Florence discovered she could meet the undergraduate course requirements needed for biochemistry by taking a bachelor of arts in household economics, which her father liked. She then went on to earn her masters in biochemistry from the University of Toronto.

“She had an extraordinary group of friends at university,” her son Paul says from his home in France.10 “They were a very strong group of ladies; very moral, very principled, very influential.”11

“Her group of friends at university didn’t ask if they could or could not do something,” Mika adds, “they just went ahead and did whatever they wanted to. That pretty much sums up my mother’s approach to life.”12

After earning her master’s degree, Florence enrolled at the University of Toronto and completed her program, but before she defended her dissertation, her professor, Dr. Wasteneys, asked her to supervise a new biochemistry Ph.D. student, Count Vladimir “Jim” Ignatieff.

Vladimir Ignatieff was a man of renown in his own right. His father, Count Pavel Nikolayevich Ignatiev, was minister of education, as well as former governor of Kiev in Russia — at that time a part of the Russian Empire. Count Ignatiev was imprisoned by the Bolsheviks during the Great War. The count presumed he would be executed as the Romanov family had been. “However, his wife, Princess Natalya Meshcherskaya, alerted the local educational establishment,” Mika said, “who regarded Ignatiev as a positive reformer, and mounted a public demonstration, and negotiated his release.”13 Count Pavel and his family fled, first to France, then to England in 1919, and finally immigrated to Upper Melbourne, Quebec, in 1925, where Paul and Natasha built a home.

While Jim Ignatieff acknowledged Florence as his Ph.D. supervisor, it wasn’t until he asked her to attend the annual Russian ball in Toronto — resplendent with Russian nobility such as Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia, Nickolas II’s younger sister — and watched Florence walk into the room in a midnight-blue, low-cut velvet dress, that she captured his undivided attention. They were married a year later.

Jim completed his Ph.D. and the young couple moved to Edmonton, Alberta, where he took up a teaching position at the University of Alberta in 1935. Their children, Paul and Mika, were born in 1936 and 1939 respectively. Within days of Canada entering the Second World War, Jim enlisted, wanting to fight for his adopted country. He headed overseas that September with the Calgary Highlanders in their infantry division as a chemical war specialist. At six-feet six-inches tall, he was an imposing figure in his military-issued kilt.

With no family in Alberta, Florence moved back to Toronto early on in the war, with her little ones, to live near her brothers, sisters, and friends. While working at the Eaton store on College Street, she was approached to help plan and manage the cafeteria at a new fuse-filling plant in Scarboro.

“We hired people who knew their job, expertise,” Bob Hamilton explained.14 “We went seeking them; we didn’t wait for them to appear on the doorstep. Through inquiry of several restaurants [we learned Florence] had run the Eaton’s food service, so she knew her job and she got good staff.”15

The little family moved into one of six bungalows situated at the GECO site, where they lived for the duration of the war. As a working mother with long, demanding hours, Florence hired a live-in housekeeper, an older woman with whom she worked while at Eaton’s. “Lizzie” became “a second mother” to the children, Paul and Mika recall, and she stayed with the family for the rest of her life.16

Joyce Hibbert, in her book Fragments of War: Stories of Survival of World War II, offers a glimpse into the magnitude of Florence’s responsibility: “From 1941 until the war’s end, [Florence] worked as head dietician in a war supplies plant in Scarborough. During the most intensive production period at the fuse-filling plant, shifts worked around the clock seven days a week and Mrs. Ignatieff was responsible for 8,000 meals every twenty-four hours.”17 In a Toronto Daily Star newspaper article about GECO’s food quality, Florence was referred to as “Mrs. V.P. Ignatieff, Chief Dietitian, and ‘Guiding Genius.’”18

“Mom was very happy at GECO,” Paul remembers.19 “It was quite an amazing atmosphere at work, lots of effective, dedicated people. The leadership was very strong. The Hamiltons were very patriotic people. They didn’t make a lot of money on war business. They were very, very good employers, pioneers in engineering and feeding operations.”20

Paul recalls visiting the cafeteria with his mom and seeing the feeding stations where food was passed out. “I went into the kitchen to see large vats of soup,” he recalls.21 As a young boy, he was especially impressed watching butchers cut up large sides of beef. He did not get the opportunity to visit the clean side of the plant, or to learn about the tunnel system. A fond memory Paul has of his mom’s days at GECO is of the aftermath of the 1944 snowstorm. “GECO’s parking lots had to be plowed” he reminisces, “and there were snowbanks as tall as houses to toboggan down.”22

“She planned, developed nutritional menus,” Mika said, “and organized the preparation and serving of meals.”23

Toward the end of the war, automobile maker Henry Ford heard about the Hamiltons, who were managing an amazing war plant in Toronto. “He came up to see them,” Paul said.24 “The Hamilton brothers took him over to see food operations at GECO. He was quite impressed.”25 Henry offered Florence $40,000 to manage food operations for the Ford Empire worldwide. She didn’t take the job. “She deferred to Father,” Paul said, “out of respect. Socially, women didn’t excel above their husbands.”26

Major Ignatieff, like most of the men in Canada’s fighting forces, could not return home during the war to see Florence, Paul, and Mika. Florence and Lizzie nurtured the children during their formative years. Even when Jim demobilized late in 1945, he saw his family for only a short time before he got a call from a friend. “Mike Pearson called him after the war,” Paul said, “and he said, ‘you’re going to fly to Quebec City tomorrow in the belly of a Lancaster bomber for a conference on food and agriculture.’”27 The Food and Agriculture Organization — the FAO — for the United Nations was founded at the conference, and Jim, armed with his background in agriculture, was one of the first to be hired. He moved the family to Washington, D.C., to work for the fledgling organization.

A year later, Jim felt Paul and Mika were missing the benefits of living in Canada. He bought a four-hundred-acre farm with two hundred head of purebred Holstein and Guernsey cattle in Richmond, a small English/French town in Quebec, and although he continued his work in Washington, he moved his family north of the border. Florence managed the farm for about five years. Always an academic, Florence became interested in genetics, particularly in upgrading the quality of cattle through breeding.

She saw some success, but when the FAO moved its headquarters from Washington to Rome in the mid-1950s, Jim and Florence relocated to Italy, where they stayed until he retired. “I adored living in Rome,” Paul says.28 “[Mother] was very fond of music and ballet and taught us to appreciate the arts, galleries, museums. It was a real treat to be taken around Rome by her. She could have been a leading guide of Rome.”29

She no longer worked. “The Food and Agricultural Organization had a policy,” Mika explained, “as most large organizations [did, and] including universities frowned [upon] hiring wives of their professional staff.”30

“Mother suggested I should learn some French,” Paul said of his days in Rome.31 He attended the University of Lausanne, where he not only learned French, but also met his future wife, Katharine. They married in 1960.

Jim and Florence returned to Canada to live out their retirement in Quebec. Florence died in 1990, with Vladimir following four years later. They are buried in a family plot in Melbourne, Quebec, alongside Vladimir’s parents.

Paul Ignatieff enjoyed a long career in Canada and internationally with UNICEF, a children’s relief agency that brought food, clothing, and healthcare to children who faced famine and disease after the Second World War. Paul attributes his big break in securing his job at UNICEF to his mother’s university friends.

In 1975 he and Katharine were captured by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in Phnom Pen, the capital of Cambodia. “We were providing food and medical supplies to member organizations,” Paul said.32 They, along with members of other relief agencies, fled to the French embassy, where they hid as the city was besieged. Paul remained calm. “I was not afraid of losing my life.… In a stressful situation you made a decision whether you were going to survive or not; and you did it.”33 Thankfully, they survived and were evacuated to Bangkok.

Today, Professor Paul Ignatieff, having been endowed with the title of Professor of Social Science by the University of Glasgow, lives in the south of France with his son and grandchildren. Mika married an American attorney who became a human rights professor and university administrator, and the first American to be president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Mika focused her career on community development, helping economically challenged neighbourhoods to regenerate. She and her husband live in Colorado.

Paul says, “I’m immensely proud of my mother and full of admiration for her. She was a very stimulating woman.”34

Mika adds, “My mother never was a follower — she was an initiator and organizer. She had a good sense of humour and told us many funny tales about various people who had worked with her.”35

On the Clean Side

Don’t Drop That Det!: Molly Danniels

Molly Danniels joined GECO in 1942, at the age of twenty, after hearing about a job opportunity there through a friend. Her first memory of GECO dates from when she was hired. Security had trouble fingerprinting her because she had a wart on one of her fingers.

Molly’s duties included packing detonators the size of her small fingernail with explosives. Her supervisors cautioned her and her shop mates that if they punctured one it would blow up, causing severe injury, if not death. Molly admitted, in hindsight, and with the wisdom that comes with age, that her work was quite dangerous, and that she “wouldn’t do [it] today.” While she and the rest of the team were encouraged to be efficient in their work, safety always came first. The management worked tirelessly to meet production quotas to supply the armed forces, but the Hamiltons did not pass along those quotas to their workers for their own safety.

Even with adherence to myriad safety regulations, accidents did occur. Molly remembered one mishap that happened in her workshop. A tracer shell accidentally ignited, filling the entire shop with a large flare. Twenty-five women quit immediately. “There were other small incidents,” she said, but they were “hush-hush, like nursing home deaths.”36

Despite the dangerous nature of her work, Molly collected many fond memories of her time at GECO. She remembered men getting “fresh” with the women operators. The girls used to say light-heartedly, “Watch that fellow — he’s getting tricky.” She recalled the famous snowstorm of December 1944. Only three people made it to the bus stop with Molly to catch the GECO bus to work. They made it to the plant to find just six women in Molly’s shop.

Molly took advantage of the “Victory Gardens” at the plant and eagerly planted carrots in her vegetable plot. Unfortunately, “the Scarboro clay wouldn’t give anything up,” she said, not even with the use of a pick ax.37

Toward the end of the war, GECO management asked if any of the girls in her workshop knew how to type. Molly, having previous typing experience, offered her services and transferred from the Danger Zone to administration, where she worked as a teletypist for the remainder of the war. She completed her days at GECO late in the summer of 1945, after most employees had moved on.

After the war, Molly married her love, Fred, and raised a family in Scarborough, near Warden and Lawrence, not far from where she did her part for the war effort. Molly and Fred moved to the Bluffs area of Scarborough in 1990. Fred took ill in 2009 and they moved into a retirement home, where he passed away in February 2010. Molly was reunited with him in March 2014 at ninety-two years of age.

“Truckerette”: Hilda Keast

Hilda Eileen June Keast was born in 1927 in Toronto. Tragically, and all too often for the time, three of Hilda siblings died before they reached adulthood. Her sister Mary died as an infant, in what might be called “crib death” today; her brother Tommy, at six months, kicked away a blanket that had been wrapped around a hot water bottle, and was scalded to death; and Pearl, a twin to another sibling, died at six months due to an ear infection.

Hilda decided at a young age that gaining real world experience was what she wanted, more so than formal education. She left school armed with a Grade 7 education and entered the workforce as a house cleaner.

Hilda’s mom and dad received regular dairy deliveries from their local milkman, like most families in Toronto during the 1940s. Few girls, however, fell in love with their milkman. Hilda, at fifteen years of age, grew fond of Walter Harris, their Silverwoods dairy man, even though Walter was fourteen years older. “Dad would have killed me if he found out,” Hilda admitted when re-telling the story to her children.

When Canada went to war, Walter left Silverwoods to join the Royal Canadian Army Service Corps with the 86th Bridge Company. He fought as a despatch motorcycle rider and was wounded by mortar fire when, while under attack, he rescued a Polish soldier. He pulled the soldier to safety under a truck and Walter was hit. He spent six days in hospital then went right back to his unit to fight. Walter received a citation and was promoted to lance corporal.

Meanwhile, Hilda did her part for the war effort by joining GECO. Hilda lived on North Bonnington in the Birchmount and St. Clair area of Scarboro at the time, so she enjoyed the unique privilege of walking to work. At GECO, she worked as a “truckerette.” She was responsible for the delicate, precarious transportation of empties and filled munitions through the plant. It was strenuous work but Hilda and her workmates were more than ready for the challenge.

Hilda talked about her days at GECO long after the war ended. “She had a lot of fun at GECO,” her son John says.38 “‘There were all these girls,’ she said, ‘all around the same age. They built bombs and there were tunnels under there on Civic Road.’”39

After the war, Walter returned to Silverwoods. They were married in 1949 and had three children. Hilda died in 1990 from complications of Hodgkin’s disease. Walter predeceased Hilda, dying in 1977.

On the back of a faded photograph from her GECO days, Hilda carefully documented the names of all her “truck mates.” She wrote, “Taken at G.E.C.O. — General Engineering Company — sometime in 1944. We trucked skids of ammunition from X-ray Dept. to shop to be finished or from shop to shop.”40 Hilda noted four women accompanied each truck. She also documented her shifts: “7–3, 3–11, and 11–7.”41 A short note accompanied a shop photo that appeared in the company’s newspaper: “In the early days of Scarboro trucking on the ‘clean side’ was done by men, then the manpower shortage intervened and like so many other war jobs, the women stepped into the breach and took over.”42 The family also has a picture of Hilda with her “Ping Pones,” perhaps a Ping-Pong team to which she belonged. Hilda memorialized each team member by name on the reverse,43 including her sister who also worked at GECO.

Hilda Keast (back row, second from left) poses happily with her fellow “Truckerettes.” Courtesy of John Alan Harris.

Hilda’s written words carry her sentiment across the decades: “What fun we had.”44

Yellow Canary: Carol LeCappelain

Carol LeCappelain, born in November 1921, first learned about GECO from a newspaper advertisement in her local paper, the North Bay Nugget. She was earning $12 a month at that time. After reading GECO would pay her $22 per week, it did not take much to convince this nineteen-year-old to move to Toronto.

Carol’s first day at GECO was on October 27, 1941, and she completed her service on June 23, 1945. She earned three diamond badges, sewn on her uniform sleeve, to commemorate her dedicated service. Although proud of those, she was disappointed that she did not receive her fourth diamond because the war ended. She never missed a day of work.

Carol was hired by the Inspection Board of the United Kingdom and Canada. She was responsible for inspecting filled munitions in her workshop before they left the plant. She was part of quality assurance at GECO, specifically involved in the inspection of No. 33G fuses: fuses filled in Building No. 33, Shop G. She wore a navy turban to identify herself as a government employee, a “G.I.” — Government Inspector — and a red armband to identify her as an inspector of No. 33G fuses.

As a bench leader, her duties included ensuring the time fuses could be set easily, something that involved calibrating a series of numbered grooves etched into the base, including two rings that could be set to take a certain amount of time to go off so that a shell would explode at a certain distance from a gun. The bottom ring could be rotated to lengthen or reduce the time lapse before detonation. She also had to ensure that the layer of gunpowder was applied safely and correctly, and that the waterproof seal had been affixed properly. Carol would then escort the skid of ready fuses through the underground tunnel system to the Proof Yards at the south end of the plant, where they would be tested.45

Carol LeCappelain was a government inspector who inspected fuses at GECO through all stages of filling them. She took her job to heart, once rejecting an entire skid of filled ammunition (approximately two thousand fuses) because their timing rings didn’t turn easily enough. She completed almost four years of faithful service at GECO, with perfect attendance. Courtesy of Barbara Dickson.

Carol took her job very seriously. The fuses had to be perfect, without the slightest defect. “I didn’t want any soldiers killed due to a faulty fuse,” she said.46 She could sleep at night only if she knew that each fuse would do what the soldiers expected it to do — ignite and burn long enough to reach its target.

Carol recalled that women preferred to work on the “gunpowder” line of the plant, as opposed to the “high explosives” area, due to yellowing of their hands from working with tetryl.

While she did not receive a paycheque from GECO because she was a Canadian government employee, Carol viewed herself as part of GECO’s family.

Carol passed away on New Year’s Day, 2014.

For the Love of Her Country: Helen Leslie

Helen Gertrude Browes was born on the nineteenth of May, 1909, in West Hill, Ontario, a small community nestled on the eastern edge of Scarboro. In 1925, at sixteen years of age, Helen married Howard Leslie, a First World War veteran who had been only fifteen years old when he enlisted and fought for freedom. Helen and Howard started their family, bringing five little ones, including a daughter, Jacqueline, into the fold over the next decade. Life was good.

However, tragedy struck when their third child contracted polio at the age of six during the autumn of 1937. Her mom and dad took her to the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, where doctors put her in an iron lung, an early type of respirator, because she could not breathe on her own. To add to their angst, the entire family went into quarantine for six months; as a result, Helen and Howard were unable to see their little girl. Howard lost his job, too. Because Canada’s health care system was still evolving, free doctor and hospital care were not available, and their daughter’s illness took a steep toll on Helen and Howard’s finances. It would take two years, and a war, before Howard found another job. Helen needed to find a job too, to help pay for their little girl’s staggering medical bills. GECO offered a wonderful solution.

In addition to working full-time at GECO, Helen Leslie, along with her husband, raised five children, including caring for their daughter who, diagnosed with polio at the age of six, spent many months in the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Courtesy of Jackie Eden.

Life was busy. Howard and Helen worked full-time. Helen took the GECO bus to the plant and worked shifts, even overnight. Howard’s mom, Maggie, helped care for the little ones at home on Newmarket Avenue. Their daughter continued to convalesce in hospital.

“Mom was a very busy woman,” Jackie recalls. “She worked, cared for our sister when she could come home for a visit, and cared for us other kids. She was very thankful for our grandmother’s help.”47

Jackie remembers her mom speaking about her work at GECO. Helen recounted the story of a woman being injured by an explosion in the workshop next to hers. It made Helen skittish around explosives, yet she filled munitions out of economic necessity and for her love of her country. Jackie remembers with pride, “Mom always did say she did her part to support the war effort.”48

Helen Leslie’s connection to GECO did not stop with the war’s end. Harold and Helen and their younger children would become the first residents to live at GECO in its newly renovated postwar emergency housing.

A Woman of Sorrow: Peggy MacKay

Mrs. Peggy MacKay of Shop 35B filled primers. While being interviewed for an article in the plant newspaper, she was focused so intensely on filling fuses that she did not pause from her work during the questions.49 The article revealed a life of sadness and sorrow: her son, Sergeant William MacKay, had been reported missing;50 her husband, Private Peter MacKay, had been transferred recently to “parts unknown,” not knowing his son was missing;51 and her two little boys had drowned eight years earlier, at the tender ages of five and seven, back in Dundee, Scotland, her homeland.52 Only two little girls remained — Stella, nine, and Barbara, aged six.53 Peggy’s sister was killed in the London Blitz, and three uncles and ten cousins were lost aboard the ill-fated ship Benato.54

“I often think that every primer I help fill may be helping some other mother’s son,” she said in the newspaper interview. Although, “all I do seems so small beside what the folks over across there are going through.”55

Mrs. MacKay was such an exemplary employee that GECO hired fellow employee and prominent Canadian sculptor Howard Pfeiffer to construct a beautiful head-and-shoulders brass statuette of her in the spring of 1943 as “a tangible symbol … of the vital part that women are playing in the furnishing of ‘tools’ of war to fighting men of the United Nations.”56 Peggy spent more than three months sitting in her kitchen perfectly still, every weekend, with a piece of ammunition tucked in the crook of her arm, as Hal moulded and chiselled his masterpiece, titled War Worker.57

“To us at ‘Scarboro,’” the author of the employee newspaper story stated, “it has particular significance for it will form a permanent record of the patriotic devotion of the women of this Plant and will keep their memory green long after the peace bells have rung.”58

Management proudly displayed the attractive, heart-stirring sculpture in GECO’s cafeteria. Peggy dedicated every waking moment to the war effort. She helped raise funds to purchase a Salvation Army mobile canteen used overseas to serve tired troops.59 In addition, she gave blood regularly.

Sadly, not all was what it seemed. Peggy’s true-life story barely resembled the tragic version inked for newspaper stories, yet was still just as heartbreaking. Decades later, Peggy’s daughter Stella, one of the wee lasses mentioned in the GECO Fusilier’s initial account, shared her own recollections.

Stella’s mother, Margaret “Peggy” Ferguson Wallace was born in 1908 in Dundee, Scotland, to an impoverished family. Life was tough. At thirteen years of age, she worked in a jute mill to help feed her family. In 1923, at the age of fifteen, Peggy met her future husband, ten years her senior. He offered to take her away from her meagre existence, promising a more comfortable life. They married quickly. Their first son was born three years later in 1926. Perhaps Peggy felt secure for the first time in her life.

Any sense of stability was short-lived. Her husband left her and their infant son, and sailed for Canada in April 1927. His hope was to build a better life for his family and send for them when he got settled. Peggy, possibly feeling abandoned and needing security for both her and her little boy, immediately met another man who fathered two sons with her, and a daughter, Stella, born in 1933.

Eight years after leaving his homeland and his family, Peggy’s husband wired money to Peggy to join him in Canada. Inexplicably, Peggy sailed for Canada, leaving her two little boys behind with their father, with no note or explanation. She took her firstborn and little Stella, then three. “[He] fell to pieces when Peggy left with his little girl,” Stella said, then reasoned, “She must have been so poor in Scotland, so desperate for a new life, a new start.”60

The boys’ dad, unable to provide ongoing care, relinquished custody and moved them to an orphanage. Peggy reunited with her husband in Canada, who must have had quite a shock to see a little girl disembark from the ship Letitia with his wife and son.

GECOite Peggy MacKay, an exemplary employee, sat for fellow munitions worker and renowned sculptor Harold Pfeiffer while he moulded and chiselled his masterpiece, titled War Worker. Management proudly displayed the attractive sculpture in GECO’s cafeteria for the duration of the war. Courtesy of Archives of Ontario.

New immigrant Peggy, who was more than likely pregnant with Stella’s sister, had her story ready. If anyone should ask of the boys’ whereabouts — not that anyone in Canada would know of their existence — she would tell them the boys had drowned. About seven months after landing on Canadian soil, Peggy gave birth to her fifth child.

Life in Canada was not any better for Peggy or her children. The writer in GECO’s newspaper account reported that Peggy and the girls spent cozy “evenings making quilts in aid of the British War Victims Fund.” Stella doesn’t remember anything “cozy.” There were many nights Peggy didn’t come home at all. “My mother was like a chameleon,” Stella said, “changing her story to suit the situation she found herself in.”61

While Peggy worked at a fever pitch at GECO, her children back in Scotland enlisted and served their country heroically during the war. One joined the RAF and the other the Royal Navy.

After the war ended and GECO closed its doors, Peggy, with her husband no longer in her life, moved on, securing a position as a cook aboard the cruise ship the S.S. Noronic. During Peggy’s time in service, in the early morning hours of September 17, 1949, the Noronic caught fire while docked in Toronto.62 Of 524 passengers, close to 120 people lost their lives.63 While the cause of the fire remains a mystery, some say it started in a linen closet.64

When Stella was fourteen, she learned she had two older brothers when her mom inadvertently blurted out that she had left two sons in Dundee. Stella, shocked, sought out her newfound siblings and located them. In 1956, almost twenty years after deserting her children, Peggy returned to Scotland to reunite with her boys.

Peggy died in 1964, at fifty-six years of age, from pancreatic cancer.

Some may challenge this second account of Peggy MacKay’s life — it’s almost as extraordinary as her own tale told seventy years ago, so convincingly, to a wartime journalist. In the end, neither story’s merit matters. What matters is that Peggy MacKay, truly a “woman of sorrow,” and despite perhaps serious mental health issues, worked her fingers to the bone for the Allied forces. What matters is that her children, despite their mother’s alleged abuse and abandonment, were able to rally, marry, and have children of their own. “Peggy gave birth to five children, and we all suffered from the decisions she made,” Stella said, “but I’m so proud of my mother for the work she did for the war.”65

Today, Stella lives in Pefferlaw, Ontario, with her daughter and family.

A Breath of Fresh Ayr: Mary Plain

Mary “Maimie” Plain brings a distinctive perspective to women’s war work in Canada. Before she emigrated, she worked at the Stamping and Engineering Company in Ayr, Scotland.

Maimie was born in Ayr, a quaint fishing village about thirty miles south of Glasgow. Because Britain had instituted mandatory war service requirements for both men and women, she was called up in 1942 at twenty years of age. “If you volunteered, you got to choose what [war work] you did,” Mary recalls.66 “If not, you were conscripted and you did what they told you to.”67 Maimie was given three choices: work at “Naffi,” a canteen service for the military; work for the Land Army, which entailed working on a farm; or work at the stamping and engineering factory. Convinced she “would get ringworm and eaten alive by midges” doing farm work, Maimie opted to help manufacture tanks.68

Maimie worked on a Keller Die Sinking Machine cutting patterns out of a large piece of steel about the size of a dining room table, to be used for plane or tank parts. She cut two patterns, identical in size, and then placed them together to form a mould. The mould was transported to the forge, where one pattern was put into the top hammer, and the other into the bottom hammer. Workers poured molten steel into the hammers and pressed the steel into the mould. Men helped set up the steel. Cranes — operated by women — were used to move big pieces of steel. Girls sharpened the cutters and they also made rockers, a small piece needed for planes. “It took thirty-two hours to cut rockers,” Maimie recollects.69 “Sometimes a whole week to cut a mould.”70

Like her Canadian counterparts, she worked shifts, but the similarities end there. Her workweek totalled fifty-four hours over six days, either on days or nights. As the war progressed, labour laws slackened and the factory “could make you work any hours they wanted.”71 While she was used to hard work, she found it “miserable to work the night shift especially from midnight to six a.m.”72 Maimie earned about three pounds a week. However, “the faster you worked,” she says, “they paid bonuses.”73

She wore overalls, as GECO workers did, but there were few other stipulations since she did not work with explosives. She wore her brother’s two-piece coveralls. “Easier to use the washroom!” she quips.74 She donned a cap as well, with no hair showing. “If you leaned forward your hair could get caught.”75 At some point, she recalls upgrading to wooden-soled shoes to protect her feet from sharp steel shavings. There was no protection for her eyes or from the “deafening noise in the forge.”76

Men badgered the women — they did not think women could do the work. Instead of saying, “Give us the tools, and we’ll finish the job,” men would call out, “Give us the job and we’ll finish the tools.”77 She recalls a particularly bad accident when the top hammer in the forge dropped too fast, dislodging a support pole and impaling a man. Emergency personnel had a hard time getting the injured man into the ambulance. Remarkably, the pole did not puncture any organs and he survived.

As a young woman, Maimie appreciated the more subtle benefits to being at war in Scotland. Ayr was awash in troops, and Maimie loved to dance. “Loads of eager partners!” she says, smiling.78 She danced with Englishmen, Irishmen, Australians, New Zealanders, and Americans. She loved the Canadian boys, calling them “lovely boys with lovely manners.”79 John Shearer, in the Signal Corps during the war, attended a dance after demobilizing in 1946, where he met Maimie. They were married two years later, and welcomed their only child, a little girl, in 1949.

While Britain had returned to a time of peace, the debt to its allies kept the nation poor. “Housing was so bad you couldn’t find a place to live,” Maimie explains.80 “You put your name in for housing but there was close to a twenty-year wait. In fact, you couldn’t even put your name on the waiting list.”81 So, like countless others before them, John and Maimie left their homeland in 1954, looking for a better life in Canada. Today, Maimie, now ninety-two, lives in Toronto, enjoying her time with her family, especially her three grandsons.

“Fireball”: Edith Reay-Laidler

Eliza Head was a survivor. She entered the world December 30, 1896, born into the socio-economically depressed eastside of London, England. Two little brothers came along quickly, and tragically, after Eliza’s little sister was born when Eliza was four, her mother abandoned the family, leaving her dad to care for his four children on his own. Unable to provide for his family, and knowing the wretched future the girls faced if they stayed in London with him, he gave up Eliza and her sister to live in Dr. Barnardo’s Home for Orphans when Eliza was seven and her little sister was just three years old.

Thomas John Barnardo, while training to be a doctor in London, witnessed the abject poverty of homeless children sleeping in the streets and begging for food.82 Barnardo believed every child, regardless of their social or economic upbringing, was valued, and deserved a chance to reach their potential. In an effort to give these waifs a better life, he started his first “Home” in 1870, at the age of twenty-five.83 At the time of his death in 1905, Barnardo had affected the lives of more than a quarter of a million destitute children.84 About thirty thousand children immigrated to Canada between 1869 and 1939.85 Sadly, while some were able to better their lives, many suffered abuse at the hands of their “adoptive” families.

Victims of circumstance, Eliza and her sister lived in a home for orphans, run by Dr. Barnardo in England at the turn of the twentieth century. Dr. Barnardo shipped them to Canada when Eliza was fourteen, where she lived and toiled on three farms over four years. When Eliza turned eighteen she left the farm, changed her name to Edith, and headed to Toronto to work toward a better life. Courtesy Ronald Reay-Laidler.

Eliza was fourteen when she was sent across the ocean to Canada to live with “foster parents.” She, along with the more than four hundred other children aboard the ship, had to earn their way working on farms once they arrived. Eliza lived and toiled for four years on three different farms in Southern Ontario. When she turned eighteen, she turned her back on her sad life, changed her name to Edith, and headed for Toronto.

Edith thought that, as one of Canada’s biggest cities, Toronto offered the best chance for a bright future. The Toronto Carpet Company hired her as a weaver. At first, they told her she was too small, but she insisted she could do anything, despite her tiny frame. True to her word, she worked hard and became their head weaver. Each year during Canada’s National Exhibition, held at the end of August, Edith would demonstrate weaving to hundreds of thousands of passersby.

Edith met Hector Reay-Laidler while working at the carpet company and they were married in 1921. They raised two girls and a boy, their youngest, Roland, who was born in 1929. When war broke out, Edith, wanting to do her part for the war, started at GECO as it got underway in 1941. At about forty-four years of age, she sneaked in under GECO’s upper age limit by one year.

Roland, at the age of twelve, remembers that his mom worked shifts at GECO. She spoke about the tunnels, referring to them as the “underground,” but loyal to her oath of secrecy, she did not mention much more.

Times were tough during the war. Roland remembers his mom giving him a quarter to go stand in line at Woodgreen, a social agency nearby, to buy used clothes. Although there was much rationing, they never did without. Roland, even today, marvels at how well his mom managed food and material shortages. He jokingly suggests his mom, a “fireball,” probably traded ration coupons amongst her neighbours and GECO friends to take care of her children.

From their home on Main Street, Edith walked to Danforth Avenue, then over to Dawes Road to catch the GECO bus. Roland fondly recalls walking his mom to the bus stop sometimes. In 1942, the family moved to Wheeler Avenue, “down the beach,” close to Kew Beach off Queen Street. Committed to her job at GECO, the extra-long commute did little to deter Edith.

Edith’s petite stature was a source of fond stories. She was so small she wore a blue one-piece children’s snowsuit to work in the frosty winter months.

Edith and her husband Hector, both from England, were proud of their British heritage and instilled that pride in their family. Roland had a shirt he wore during the war that read, “There will always be an England.”

Edith’s sister had returned to England to settle down when she was still a young woman. Edith visited England as an adult, but Canada had become her home. The sisters shared a cordial but distant friendship. Hector passed away in October 1983; Edith died three days short of her ninety-sixth birthday, on December 27, 1992.

Widow with Five Children: Winifred Stewart

Winifred Dady never shied away from hard work or adventure. Born in 1901 in East Suffolk, England, she joined Britain’s Land Army during the Great War. When the war ended, the Women’s Branch of the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries awarded Winifred a “Certificate for Farm Work Efficiency,” having earned a grade of 95 percent for thatching.

Winifred, then eighteen, along with her sister, sailed to Canada looking for fun. They had a grand plan: see the sights, cross the country to see the Pacific Ocean, and then head home. Winifred got as far as Toronto, where she met a handsome Scottish immigrant, Lockhart Stewart, at a dance, and fell in love. Her sister continued the journey, travelling as far as Vancouver, where she met her future husband.

A milkman with Silverwoods Dairy, Lockhart made Winifred his blushing bride in 1923. They settled in the west end of the city and welcomed five children to their family, but the Depression years hit the family hard and they moved around a lot trying to make rent. Tragically, Lock developed stomach cancer and died in 1940, leaving Winifred a widow with five children to raise, their youngest only a toddler. With Lock’s life insurance, she bought a home, but she needed to find a job. Thankfully, there were many wartime positions available. Winifred worked at several wartime factories — Massey Harris, GECO, and D.I.L. in Ajax. Commuting to work was difficult; Winifred rode the Bloor streetcar across the city before meeting up with a bus to travel to GECO, and to D.I.L. in later war years.

Home life was a struggle. Lock’s mother moved in to help. Their daughter, Audrey, at fifteen, helped babysit her younger siblings so mom could do shiftwork at GECO. Winifred took in two boarders, Ellen and Zella, from Calgary. They too worked at GECO. Winifred packed powder into fuses at the plant. She was very proud of the work she did to help the war effort. “Mom was proper English,” Audrey remembers, “with a stiff upper lip. She did what she had to do.”86

Winifred’s oldest, Roy, joined the RCAF and flew as a mid-upper gunner during the war. He did two tours over Germany, surviving a narrow escape when enemy shrapnel narrowly missed his head. Roy returned home to his mother after the war, but in a tragic twist of fate, died from cancer six years later at the age of thirty-one.

With Canada now at peace, Winifred lost her job. As a single parent, she still needed a steady income; she found a job at Steadman’s, a department store. Tragically, cancer would enter Winifred’s life a third time, touching her personally when she developed cancer of the breast. While she lived another twelve years, the cancer returned and Winifred died in 1959.

D.I.L. Gal: Rena Sweetman

Rena Sweetman answered an advertisement for war work in 1941 at the age of nineteen, keen to earn money to help support her widowed mother and eleven siblings. Rena applied for work at the brand new shell-filling plant in Ajax, operated by D.I.L, a “sister” plant to GECO.

There were many similarities between work at GECO and D.I.L. Like GECO, D.I.L. used special buses to transport employees. A bus picked Rena up at Danforth and Coxwell Avenues — one of GECO’s bus stops — and transported her, along with her co-workers, out to Ajax. However, the buses dropped them off directly at their workshop. The building housed everything the women needed for their shift, from change rooms to a café. Rena remembers being warned not to tell anyone where she worked or what she did.

D.I.L. employees wore a uniform similar to the clothing supplied at GECO, but theirs were grey and one-piece with navy blue turbans. However, unlike GECO, Rena recalls women not being allowed to keep on their brassieres or underwear. She had to strip down to the nude and walk naked a fair distance before she could don her jumpsuit. This practice was particularly awkward and uncomfortable for Rena and her workmates.

Rena worked at long tables set up as an assembly line. As small shells passed by, she put a marking on them. In another position she held at the plant, she worked with white powder under a glass while sitting at an enclosed cubicle, very similar to work done at GECO. However, unlike GECO, she had to wear a mask that covered her nose and mouth completely. In her naïveté, she did not realize the powder she handled had the potential to blow up her and her shop mates.

D.I.L. supervisors were strict but nice, and came from England since there was no one with munitions expertise in Canada at the time. Women were not permitted to talk while they worked — no singing either. She remembers being paid well. “It was wonderful,” she said “I could go out and buy a new dress.”87

Rena married Ross O’Hagan on November 28, 1941, shortly after starting at the plant. Ross was in the service but he got sick with pneumonia and pleurisy, lost most of one lung, and was discharged. Shortly after they were married, Rena and Ross moved into the barracks at the Malton Airfield. Rena received a wonderful Christmas present that first year: within a month of her wedding day, Rena learned she was pregnant. Fortunately, babies and high explosives did not mix. When she informed her supervisor at D.I.L., she was dismissed the same day. Her firstborn, a son, Barry, was born September 27, 1942. Three more little ones would arrive in the ensuing years, two within two years of the war ending. Her youngest, “the only planned one,” Rena explains with a twinkle in her eye, was born almost a decade later in 1956.88 Barry recalls their days living at the Malton Airfield. “We ran around every day getting dirty like little street urchins,” he says with a wistful smile.89 Rena and Ross lived at Malton until after the birth of their third child, and then they bought a house in the Avenue Road and Lawrence Avenue area of Toronto in 1949.

Ross had a long career working with Rogers Radio, in his nursery/florist business, and in real estate brokerage businesses. He died in 1983 at the age of sixty-four.

Rena, loving grandmother to eighteen and great-grandmother to eight, passed away in June 2013 at the age of ninety-one. While Rena’s days at D.I.L. were short, she did her part in helping to get ammunition into the hands of fighting men overseas.

Bench Leader: Norma Turner

Norma McGregor was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1918, but immigrated to Canada in 1924 with her mom and dad after the Irish Rebellion. Despite the Great Depression setting in, her dad, George, was fiercely proud that as a relief streetcar driver, he could support his family without asking for a handout. Norma grew up around Danforth Avenue and Dawes Road. During her final year of high school, she found a retail job for the Christmas season, earning seven to eight dollars a week. Coming from humble roots, and enjoying the pleasure of a little money in her pocket, she did not return to school in the New Year.

Norma worked for a few years before Canada went to war. She met her first husband, getting married in 1940. In the fall of 1941, as a young, married woman, she learned of a wartime plant opening in Scarboro. The starting salary of thirty-two and a half cents an hour was double her current salary. Like so many others, she was eager to take the lucrative job at GECO, where starting pay was $16 per week.

Norma’s daughter, Victoria, remembers her mom telling her family she had to replace the metal clasps in her brassieres with buttons while at GECO to lessen the chance of causing a spark, and she had to touch a metal plate at the entrance to her filling workshop to remove all static electricity before going in.

During Norma’s tenure at GECO she was promoted to bench leader. She supervised six other women who packed tetryl powder into detonators — highly dangerous work. The operators filled the detonators through protective glass to shield them from tetryl dust wafting up into their nostrils and faces and to provide some protection should an explosion occur.

On a humorous note, Victoria recalls her mom complaining mildly to her family about a small but significant detail regarding the plant site. The sprawling factory was built on slightly rolling farmland gently rising from the shores of Lake Ontario. Every time she made the long walk to and from her shop, she felt as if she “was always walking uphill.”90

Norma also spoke about the adventures she had with her workmates catching the “rattling old bus” at Dawes Road and Danforth Avenue. It seems it broke down a lot. One night the women had to get out and help push the bus up the hill on Dawes Road, where the Walter Massey Farm was situated. In another more lucrative adventure, Norma was able to save enough money at GECO to buy her first car, a 1935 Ford, even though she did not have a driver’s licence. The car stayed up on blocks during the war years due to rationing of gas and rubber. In addition to a new car, Norma saved $500 to help her parents buy a house that would stay in the family to present day.

Norma worked at GECO from 1941 to 1943. Her family speculates she left after learning she was pregnant. Sadly, her firstborn, a baby boy, died at birth. A beautiful little girl came along a year later, but regrettably, Norma’s marriage failed. She moved back home to raise her little girl with her parents’ help.

Her brother, who served in the Royal Canadian Navy and was a bachelor about town, brought home a friend a few years later who had served in the North Africa British Army Royal Engineers during the war. Richard Drake had drilled drinking wells to provide water for troops as they made their way through North Africa. He immigrated to Canada after the war as part of the “Drew Plan” — devised by Ontario premier George Drew, this plan brought ten thousand British immigrants to Canada. Richard met Norma at her parents’ cottage on Wagner’s Lake north of Uxbridge, Ontario, which they fondly called “Glocca Morra.” Norma was on the dock when she was introduced to Richard, who promptly tossed her into the lake. She couldn’t swim. She was not pleased but her mom told her to “give the poor boy a chance.” Richard and Norma married in November 1953, settled in Port Credit, Ontario, and Richard went to work as a plumber. Life was good. They added two more lovely girls to the family.

Tragically, heartache would strike the family again, when, in 1960, at the age of forty-three, Richard suffered a brain aneurism. He survived risky surgery but became disabled and had to move into long-term care at Sunnybrook Hospital’s new Veterans’ unit. Norma returned to work and moved back home with her mom and dad to raise her three girls.

Maria, Norma’s mom, died in 1966. She left the home her daughter helped buy, located just north of Danforth Avenue, to Norma. Norma lived a long life and died in 2009. Victoria, her daughter, resides in the family home today.

In an interesting GECO connection, Norma’s brother, a pilot officer during the war, trained, before heading overseas, at both Malton and Fingal, two of GECO’s former wartime endeavours.

“I Want to Work with Munitions”: Anne Wilmot

Anne Wilmot was born in 1915 in Montreal, Quebec, shortly after her parents and two siblings moved from their homeland, Jamaica. As a pre-schooler, Anne and her family moved again, this time to Toronto, and settled in the Parkdale area, just west of the Dufferin Gates of the Canadian National Exhibition. She attended Queen Victoria School as a child and then took a four-year high-school course in secretarial studies at Western Technical and Commercial School near High Park, specializing in legal practices. When war broke out many of her friends and colleagues signed up for war work, either close to home at John Inglis, where guns were made, or in the far reaches of Scarboro, where a munitions plant was being built.

Anne had heard about people who worked at GECO, that they had been sworn to secrecy. “No one knew anything about GECO,” Anne said.91 “GECO was really looking for people, and out of curiosity, I applied as a war worker, not a secretary.”92 Given Anne’s excellent secretarial skills, management wanted Anne to work in administration. “They didn’t think I would want to work on the line,” she said, “but I wanted to work in war work, with the munitions.”93

A sense of pride still resonates when Anne, now ninety-seven, speaks about her time at GECO. “I worked for General Engineering, a well-known firm not just created for the war. I had to swear my allegiance,” she said.94 “You were sworn to silence because of secrecy during the war.”95

She remembers riding the GECO buses, being dropped off at the front door, showing her pass at the guardhouse, heading to the change house where they donned 100 percent white cotton two-piece uniforms with buttons along the shoulder and down one side. She recalls the turbans they wore, and the special shoes. “You couldn’t have any metal on you at all. They were smart uniforms,” she said.96 “We had to strip down to our underwear, which had to be cotton.”97 Thin cotton undergarments did not offer much warmth against Canada’s harsh winters. “But we stuck it out,” Anne said.98 “I remember the Timothy Eaton Company was the only place the girls could buy cotton brassieres.”99 She also recalls her wages: “I made forty-nine cents an hour,” she claimed proudly.100

Anne worked on the H.E. side of the plant, filling No. 119 fuses. She was aware of the strategy of the spacing between buildings. “There was enough space that if one shop blew up it wouldn’t affect other shops.”101 It was a sombre admission for a new employee. In fact, just two days after she started, during her one-week introduction period, there was an explosion in one of the shops. “No one was hurt,” Anne said, thankfully.102 Undeterred, Anne worked at GECO, faithfully filling 119s until the war ended, and only a skeleton staff remained at GECO.

Anne Parkin (née Wilmot) with nephew Brian Roberts in 2009. Although Anne had excellent secretarial skills and would have been an asset to GECO’s administration, she wanted to do her part for the Allied war effort and asked to work with munitions. She worked with tetryl, a dangerous high explosive that turned her skin orange. Courtesy of Brian Roberts.

Anne worked with tetryl powder. As a young black woman, the explosive powder turned her skin orange, not yellow, like those with fairer skin. “My fingernails turned orange,” she said, “and the bottoms of my feet and the palms of my hands. You had to be careful or you’d get a rash.”103 Anne did get tetryl rash once, but it cleared before long. Some women suffered more. “You could get a horrific rash.”104

To Anne, GECO was a big place, filled with dedicated people wanting to do their bit for the war. “There were nationalities of all kinds at GECO,” she said.105 She said she was accepted readily and felt no discrimination.

When asked, “Where do you work?” Anne answered simply, “I’m doing war work.”106

After the war, Anne moved to Vancouver and worked for a family friend in his burgeoning law practice. Anne met and married Al Parkin, and while she had no children of her own, she became stepmother to Al’s daughter. Today, Anne continues to reside in British Columbia.

Anne’s nephew Brian says of his aunt, “Anne is a selfless person caring more for another person instead of herself. If there is a place last in line Anne would be glad to take it. That is her nature. She is my favourite aunt.”107

“Shamed Be He Who Thinks Evil of It”: Roxaline Wood

When Canada went to war in 1939, Walter and Roxaline Wood and family lived in the back of the blacksmith’s shop situated on the northwest corner of Pharmacy and Lawrence Avenues in Scarboro. The Canadian government mandated that war workers take the bus to work. Since local bus service ended at Danforth Avenue in the early 1940s, the government apportioned gas tickets to Roxaline’s neighbour so he, another GECO employee, could drive her to and from the plant.

Roxaline, like GECOite Carol LeCappelain, worked as a government inspector at the munitions plant, ensuring top quality ammunition for the Allied forces. Her son, Bruce, “Bob” to family and friends, joined the Royal Canadian Air Force when he came of age, and flew over one hundred missions in the fight to end the war in Europe.

Roxaline’s son Ron remembers the big snowstorm in December 1944. When they woke the morning after the storm, he had to help dig out their ’42 Ford, which had been buried completely in huge snowdrifts, so that his dad, Walter, could get to work.

When the war ended, the Inspection Board of the United Kingdom and Canada issued a card recognizing Roxaline’s dedicated service. The card displayed a crest with the phrase, “HONI - SOIT - QUI - MAL - Y - PENSE” or “Shamed be he who thinks evil of it.” Controller General, Major General G.D. Howe, signed it.

The card read:

This is to Certify that Mrs. Roxiline [sic] Wood served as an employee of this Board from 11-7-42 to 8-6-45 and was engaged in duties directly connected with the Inspection of War Materials for the Armed Forces.108

Ron was too young to work at GECO filling munitions; however, as a firefighter for the Scarborough Fire Department in his adult years, he did “work” at GECO, battling a blaze that broke out in one of the old buildings off Sinnott Road. Ron also spent the latter half of his firefighting career in the Training Division. He enjoyed taking rookie firefighters down into the old GECO tunnels to teach them how to manage a fire “if ever one broke out.”109 Ron enjoyed a thirty-one-year career with Scarborough’s fire department, retiring prior to their amalgamation with Toronto.

Walter Wood, the youngest of twelve children, passed away in 1986 at the age of ninety-two. Roxaline, a sister to eleven siblings, lived to ninety-two years of age as well, and passed away in 2000.

Bomb Boys

On the Dirty Side

Someone’s Got to Pay the Bills: William Howe

Classified as “C1” due to vision problems, William “Bill” Howe thought he would not be recruited into active service. His father had fought in the trenches at Passchendaele during the Great War. Bill understood all too well the horrors of war. Nevertheless, as luck would have it, he received a call-up notice in 1942, at the age of nineteen, with his classification jumping from C1 to A3. He had a choice: enlist in the armed forces or work in a war plant. Not wanting to relive his father’s First World War experience, he chose GECO, joining Accounts Payable for nine dollars a week in the administration building.

Because Bill worked in administration, he did not see the clean side. “I saw nothing to do with the actual filling of fuses. I never got down to the bottom end of the plant,” he says.110 “It was a city unto itself.”111 He knew about the tunnel system but did not see it. He did see women with yellowed hands and “towels (turbans) around their heads.”112

Running a top-secret government-owned munitions plant came with its own set of headaches. Bill remembers the year he spent at GECO as “a real rat race. I sat down at a desk,” he recalls, “with bills to pay with a whole bunch of invoices. I had to sort through them. It was hit and miss with no real bookkeeping. We sometimes paid bills twice. There were boxes and boxes of material and receipts.”113 Around a half-dozen employees worked with Bill in A/P. “We couldn’t pay a bill unless you had an MRR (Material Received Report) attached to it. Then it was okayed for payment and went to Checks to be paid.”114 On the weekends, Bill, along with a colleague, worked on improving the A/P system at GECO.

Bill enjoyed GECO’s extra-curricular activities, playing softball with the “Operating Stores” team. “We had a really good time there. It was a picnic.”115 In fact, his interest in the finer things at GECO almost got the young accountant fired. He dated a fellow GECOite a few times, and when she needed a drive to the airport, Bill left work to help. “I got in trouble,” he says.116 “It got around that I might be fired.”117 So he hastily looked for another job, and found one at R.E.L. — Research Enterprises Limited — starting at $18 a week — double his GECO wages. “I quit before they could fire me.”118 Did his dedication to the young lady pay off? Apparently, Bill never heard from her again.

In March 1944, Bill was called up again, the need for fighting men now desperate. “No bloody way I’m going into the army,” Bill said at the time.119 The Canadian Army had other plans. He had no choice but to enlist and do basic training. He was sent to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to prepare to ship out. Getting out of fighting did not look good, but Bill had a friend who worked on the Draft Board and told him he “could go anywhere.” So Bill was assigned to HMCS Niobe in Greenock, Scotland, then to Portsmouth, and then to Northern Ireland. The most action Bill saw occurred when he and a pal were caught wearing their military uniforms — a treasonable offence — in Ireland, a neutral country during the war. The police swiftly shipped them back to Northern Ireland.

Bill was on leave in Canada when the war ended. In 1954, he married Marie, a family friend, and raised a family of four. He enjoyed a long, successful career with Canada Customs. Bill passed away in May 2013, in his ninetieth year, and is survived by his wife, Marie, children, and grandchildren.

“Piston Packin’ Moma”: Donald John “D.J.” MacDonald

Some personal stories of GECO employees tug at the heartstrings more than others. Donald John MacDonald’s story will tug a little harder than most.

“D.J.” was born April 7, 1911, in Hillside, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. At the tender age of just three, he was given up by his parents. Unable to care for him, they gave him to his grandparents, who took him in and raised him. Sadly, he never returned home. “His own brothers and sisters didn’t even know him,” D.J.’s son Phillip says.120

Despite dealing with a profound sense of loss and abandonment as a small child, D.J. managed to grow up, marry, and have a large family of his own. Tragically, his namesake, little Donald Francis, died from muscular dystrophy when he was just a toddler.

D.J. established himself in the construction industry on the East Coast in the 1930s. When Canada went to war, he heard about work in Ontario and moved west to help build a wartime munitions plant, situated in Scarboro. He asked his close friend, native Ontarian Joe Sullivan, to join him. After construction was completed, D.J. stayed on at GECO as manager for mechanical services and as master mechanic. “He was in charge,” his son Stanley writes in a letter about his dad, “of what might be referred to as ‘rolling stock.’”121 D.J. was also manager for transportation services. This once-rejected little boy had been given the honour of overseeing GECO’s massive fleet of vehicles. His friend Joe would become foreman for the Trucking Department.122

D.J. helped design and build GECO’s famous “Blue Goose,” a big blue twelve-passenger station wagon “He had the capacity to cut down cars that were no good,” Phillip recalls, “weld them together and put them on a frame, like a stretch limo.”123

GECO’s “Blue Goose.” Courtesy of Stanley MacDonald.

Stanley agrees. “It was lengthened by cutting it in two, and inserting the two rear-passenger car sections, between the two pieces, thus making it a twelve-passenger car.”124

In addition to the Blue Goose, D.J. and his team built munitions trucks, ambulances, fire trucks, and taxis at GECO, including Station Wagon No. 28, affectionately dubbed “Piston Packin’ Moma” by the mechanics. Decades later Phillip wonders aloud what became of his father’s fleet.

After the war ended, D.J. went to work for Standard Paving, taking “a bunch of GECOites with him,” Phillip says.125 Later on, he and some of his friends worked at his own company, MacDonald Construction, on Kennedy Road in Scarborough. His company constructed roads and other structures in Ontario, including most of Highway No. 7, north of the city.

Pictured here with his department staff, Donald John MacDonald (front row, middle), manager of Mechanical Services and master mechanic, oversaw GECO’s massive fleet of vehicles. Courtesy of Phillip MacDonald.

“He asked a lot from his guys, but if you put in a day’s work, you got paid for it. If the sun was shining, they were out working. They worked long hours in the summer time.”126 Was he a good father? “He was fair and patient,” Phillip says.127 “‘No’ meant ‘no’ but I don’t remember getting punished.” He recalls fondly, “Our backyard was a construction playground.”128

Donald John MacDonald passed away at the age of eighty-one on Remembrance Day 1992 while undergoing heart surgery.

Keep on Truckin’: Joe Sullivan

James Joseph Sullivan, familiarly known as Joe, entered the world on October 6, 1910, at the family’s two-hundred-acre farm in Dornoch, Ontario, a small town south of Owen Sound. Joe originally envisioned a career in ministry as a young adult, but after the early death of his father, he left the seminary and moved to Nova Scotia to try his hand at construction. He helped build Sydney Airport during the 1930s. His sweetheart, Grace Irene, followed him to Nova Scotia, where they were married in 1934. Kerry, their firstborn, arrived the next year. Two more children would follow in close succession. Family history suggests that during this time in Joe’s career, he met and established a close lifelong friendship with Nova Scotian Donald John (D.J.) MacDonald, who worked for the same construction company.

When Canada declared war on Germany, Joe was too old to go overseas. His friend D.J. headed to Ontario to help build a munitions plant in Scarboro. Joe soon followed, packing up his young family in their ’37 Chevrolet and moving back to his home province. “Dad’s way of helping [in the war] was working in the munitions plant,” Kerry, Joe’s eldest son, said.129 “Dad went from driving a field truck at Standard Paving to being in management at GECO,” Jim, Joe’s youngest son added.130 “It was quite a change going from equipment operator to running a staff.”131

Joe Sullivan managed GECO’s large fleet of more than thirty vehicles.132 As foreman and chief despatcher for the Trucking Department, he reported directly to his friend D.J. MacDonald. Joe’s responsibilities included managing his driving staff and keeping the fleet in good working order, not an easy task given the material shortages and rationing in place at the time. By 1944, G.E.C.O.’s trucks’ odomoters had registered 620,000 miles in total; the fleet had hauled more than seventeen hundred tons of product every month. Chief Dispatcher Joe Sullivan and his truckers brought a whole new meaning to the phrase pass the ammunition.

Joe and D.J.’s professional relationship extended after the war, and included management of an Imperial Oil gas station together. However, “Dad got out of the gas station business,” Kerry recalled, “because the lease went up each time they made a little money.”133 Joe and Grace expanded their family after the war, bringing James — “Jim” — into the fold in 1949.

Eventually both Joe and D.J. set out on their own, going back into construction. Joe started his own construction company, MacDonald-Sullivan Construction, with a colleague, coincidentally named MacDonald. “He did very well,” Jim said, “but then he took sick.”134 Joe Sullivan developed a heart condition and passed away tragically in 1956 at the age of forty-five. “The night before he died,” Jim recalled, “he said he’d play ball with me the next day.” He paused. “He was dead in the morning.”135

“We had a ‘Father Knows Best’ family,” Jim says.136 “We were four kids together; a happy, stable family.”137

A Name Couldn’t Sound Any Sweeter: Alex Licorice Waddell

Born in 1886 in Scotland, Alexander Licorice Waddell became a carpenter’s apprentice as a lad of twelve. After the tragic death of his older brother, Alex left Scotland and sailed to New York. He found work at Coney Island, and helped build John D. Rockefeller’s residence near New York City. He then moved to Schenectady, New York, to join a large population of Scottish kinfolk who had settled there during the First World War. Alex attended a baseball game where an errant baseball hit a spectator. He rushed to see if the woman was injured. Remarkably, the woman was Bessie, his dead brother’s girlfriend who had left Scotland years earlier.

A quick romance ensued and Alex and Bessie married. They immigrated to Canada and started their family, bringing three children into the world. Alex made his livelihood as a joiner carpenter, helping to build several prominent buildings in Toronto, including Maple Leaf Gardens, which opened in 1931. Unfortunately, construction of Maple Leaf Gardens was the last steady work Alex had during the Depression era, and he had to take odd jobs to support his family. At Christmas, he built homemade toys in his basement workshop. “He was just like Santa’s elves,” John, Alex’s son, recalls.138 “We always had a Christmas. We never went hungry.”139

Alex heard about a munitions plant under construction in the spring of 1941 and eagerly joined GECO’s ranks as a construction worker, always dressed in a crisp white shirt and bow tie. “My dad went to work each day with his lunch pail,” John remembers.140 “He always looked like he was going to the office even though he was just a carpenter.”141

Once construction of GECO was completed, seventy-five older men who boasted 2,300 years of combined construction experience, stayed on in GECO’s carpentry shops housed in Building Nos. 8 and 142.142 Under the direction of Mr. Bob Blair, these talented men built everything from wooden crates, in which ammunition would be stored, to fine desk furniture for GECO administration personnel.143

Mr. Waddell stayed on as a member of the sawdust brigade. His mandate was to ensure GECO ran smoothly. He did everything from installing and repairing complicated assembly line parts to assembling crude crates that would house filled fuses for shipment. Alex respected the oath of secrecy he took and did not talk about his work, although John remembers his dad commenting about building the wooden munitions boxes — perhaps a trivial, tedious task to the casual observer, but every job at GECO was critical to ultimate victory. Fuse crates, poorly constructed, had the potential to fall apart, destabilizing the filled fuses housed within, and triggering deadly explosions. Alex was so dedicated to war work that on weekends he and other men helped out at the D.I.L. plant in Ajax. “As far as I can remember,” John says, “Dad never took a day off.”144

Alex was among the first round of layoffs that occurred at the end of May 1945 after Germany capitulated. He received a personal letter of recommendation from GECO president Robert Hamilton. After Alex left GECO, he went on to help build Sunnybrook Hospital and the T. Eaton warehouse north of the city. He became a construction foreman and was never out of work again.

“He laid down his tools at seventy-six,” John says, over sixty-five years after his dad first became a young apprentice in Scotland. Six years later,145 Alex died at the age of eighty-two. His beloved Bessie died ten days later.

On the Clean Side

It’s a Bust: Harold Pfeiffer

Harold Pfeiffer, born in Quebec City in 1908, joined GECO late in 1941 to work in the I.G. X-ray Department.146 By the time “Hal” passed through GECO’s gates, he had made a name for himself as a sculptor in clay, metal ware, and in weaving; very different from his first carvings made in blackboard chalk in school.147 Harold had had a few public exhibitions of his work, including a large portrait bust of the late Canadian Arctic explorer Captain Bernier.148 When the war broke out, Harold enlisted but failed the medical exam.149 Wanting to do his bit, he worked at the munitions plant in Valcartier, Quebec, and then moved to Toronto to offer his services at GECO.150 “As our work was very dangerous,” wrote Harold in his autobiography, “handling amatol and tetryl and other extremely volatile explosives, everyone had to wear jump-suits with buttons down the sides to minimize the risk of friction and sparks. A spark could end it for all of us.”151

A retiring sort of fellow, Hal tried to keep his artistic accomplishments to himself, but an anonymous letter arrived at the editorial desk of Ross Davis, and when challenged, Hal was left with little choice but to admit modestly that he had done some modelling in clay.152 Management was so impressed with his talent, they asked Hal to sculpt a bust, capturing the epitome of “Woman War Worker.” He chose as his subject Mrs. Peggy MacKay of Shop 35B.153 “Among the employees, there were many terribly sad stories, but this was almost inconceivably tragic.”154

Harold started to exhibit troubling respiratory symptoms due to an allergic reaction to ragweed that grew in the countryside of Scarboro, and from exposure to tetryl.155 With GECO medical staff’s encouragement, he left his position. Harold went on to teach arts and crafts and interior design at several schools.156 In 1956, he became a cataloguer in Canada’s National Museum of Man.157 He made trips to the Arctic and sculpted portraits of prominent Aboriginal and Inuit people.158 He also travelled around the world, sculpting many famous subjects, including the Bishop Desmond Tutu.159 Harold’s memoir was published six months after his death in 1997, entitled The Man Who Makes Heads With His Hands: The Art and Life of Harold Pfeiffer, Sculptor.160

A Long Road to Peace: Ernest Herbert Pickles

Ernest Pickles, born in 1925, was thirteen when Canada entered the Second World War. His childhood was typical, he attended Eastern Commerce high school and kept two paper routes to earn some pocket money. All that changed in 1943, when, at the age of seventeen, Ernie spotted a GECO employment ad in the paper and discovered he could earn a lot more money handling explosives.

The trek to GECO was arduous. Living at Greenwood Avenue and Gerrard Street at the time, Ernie took the Gerrard streetcar to Coxwell Avenue where he boarded the streetcar to Danforth Avenue. From there, he got on the Danforth car to Dawes Road where he boarded the GECO bus. “I didn’t have the slightest idea where this plant was,” he recalls.161 “I got on a bus at Dawes Road and it took us out to the country and then the plant appeared. Anything north of Danforth was like farmland.”162

Ernie worked at GECO on the high explosives side of the plant during the summer that year. He wore soft shoes with leather soles. “They were more like a slipper than a shoe,” he says.163 Men “had to strip down to nothing in the change room.”164 Then they donned work overalls and moved to the clean side. Ernie worked at the end of the line in a workshop where women filled fuses used in anti-aircraft military hardware, such as fuse 251 used in 40-mm Bofors guns. “In the workshop were two production lines,” Ernie recalls, “consisting of eight stations. The first person on the line started the process by doing the initial work and placing the fuse in a slot in a tray of about fifty slots. Whe[n] the tray was filled she passed it to the next person in line. With the work tray on the right she would add her piece to the fuse and then transfer it to a[n] empty tray on her left until all slots were filled and she transferred it to the next station.”165

Ernie placed a fuse in a large iron box where he tightened its parts with a clamp to ensure they would not come loose. He then transferred the fuse to a second iron box specially designed with an etching device inside. Ernie scored three marks on each fuse to prevent loosening.166 He took his work seriously. “I didn’t want the guy on the front having his fuse falling apart.”167 Workers then placed the fuses in trays. Finished fuses were put on a dolly. “Older men would take them away.”168 Ernie’s workshop filled ten thousand fuses in an eight-hour shift. Dangerous working condition didn’t bother Ernie, although he was cognizant of the three-foot-high firewalls separating the building’s workshops for protection should an explosion occur.

During his two ten-minute breaks on shift, Ernie and his shop mates sat on the floor outside the workshop. “The women told the dirtiest stories to try to embarrass the boys,” he recalls, smiling.169 “My mother would never tell those stories.”170

“I had a good time there,” he says.171

In August 1944, Ernie enlisted. The air force and the navy were not accepting applications. Infantry was his only option. He trained and was prepared to ship out on December 13, but the infamous snowstorm hit Toronto and he left the next day, his nineteenth birthday. Ernie fought in Germany and Holland during the last desperate, brutal days of war. The mission was to reach Wilhelmshaven, a German naval port. “Towards the end we walked twenty or thirty miles a day,” Ernie recalls.172 The war ended while they were still outside Oldenburg, before they achieved their objective.

When the war ended, Ernie came home and enjoyed a thirty-five-year career with Gulf Oil. He met his wife, Gwyn, at a YMCA dance in 1952. They married in 1954, bought their first home a year later in the Brimley and Lawrence area of Scarborough, and raised two children.

All in the Family

Mother- and Daughter-in-Law: Hilda and Dorothy Clements

As the war progressed, management relaxed its age restrictions. Mrs. Hilda Clements, at fifty-one years of age, signed up to work at GECO. A mother to five children, Hilda’s four sons enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy during the war, her youngest signing up when he was just sixteen years of age. With four boys in active service, Hilda worked tirelessly at GECO, doing everything she could to help bring her boys safely home.

Hilda’s third son, Harold, born in 1918, married Dorothy Horler in May 1942, just before he went off to serve his country. Newlywed Dorothy Clements, twenty-one, went to work at GECO shortly after, joining her mother-in-law. Dorothy worked at GECO until she found out she was pregnant late in 1943. A pregnant woman could not work with high explosives, if for no other reason than for endangering the mother and her workmates to accommodate her growing girth.

Harold trained with the Naval Shore Patrol. Stationed at HMCS Shelburne on the eastern shore of Shelburne Harbour in Nova Scotia, he patrolled the Canadian coastline. His and Dorothy’s first child, a little girl, Sharon, arrived in May 1944. Dorothy had a difficult time finding a baby carriage due to a shortage of steel.

Hilda worked faithfully at GECO until the war ended. Thankfully, her four sons all returned home safely. Harold and Dorothy added a son to their family in 1946. In peacetime, Harold had a varied career, working for National Cash Register (NCR), as well as for a real estate firm, and as a personal chauffeur for a wealthy gentleman. Hilda passed away in 1979; Dorothy followed her mother-in-law ten years later. Harold died in 1999.

The Darnbrough Way: Walter and His Girls

Corporal Walter Darnbrough epitomized bravery, survival, and a true war hero. Born in 1894 in Leeds, England, Walter, the second youngest of seven children, was a victim of circumstance. Walter lost his father to consumption when he was only four. His mom died of dropsy (edema)and a tumour when he was twelve. His older sister was the only family member who earned an income — a meagre livelihood working as a domestic servant. Within a year of his mom’s death, Walter’s grandmother begged Dr. Barnardo’s Home for Orphans to take in Walter and his brothers. Like GECOite Edith Reay-Laidler, Walter became a Barnardo Child.

A year after entering the orphanage, he was shipped to Canada and made to earn his keep on a Saskatchewan farm. His brothers joined him the following year. The boys’ sponsoring family treated them like hired hands and made them live in a shack attached to the house. Harsh, bitter Canadian winters on the prairie were especially hard to bear. The boys, familiar with suffering, stayed only until they could get a plan together to run away. By 1914, Walter had found his way to Jones Avenue in Toronto.

War broke out and Walter joined Canada in the fight. Lance Corporal Walter Darnbrough was a Royal Canadian Dragoon and shipped overseas in October 1914. He was with the 7th Calvary Field Ambulance and was assigned as an outrider, someone who escorted ambulances carrying the wounded away from battle. During a brutal battle at Le Cateau, France, cannon fire hit an ambulance Walter was accompanying and the driver and horse were killed instantly. Walter, with shells bursting around him, unhooked the dead horse from the ambulance, fastened his own horse, collected the wounded, and led them safely off the battlefield. Walter received a Medal of Bravery for his heroism.

Walter met and married a young lady named Florence — ironically, with a very similar last name, Darnborough — while stationed in England during the war. Their firstborn, Mary, arrived in 1918. Walter stayed in England with his family until the spring of 1921, when with two little ones now part of their clan, and another on the way, they sailed for Canada under much happier circumstances from Walter’s first voyage to the New World. Florence Irene, nicknamed Rene, arrived in August 1921, shortly after their arrival in Toronto. Finally, Walter looked to his future with hope.

Tragically, his hope would be short-lived. While Florence eventually would give birth to thirteen children, five would be stillborn. On May 13, 1931, their eldest, Mary, at the age of thirteen, died from a ruptured appendix. The Depression years were unkind to the Darnbrough family. As a result of being gassed by the Germans during the First World War, Walter spent time at a sanatorium. His family, left to survive on government relief, struggled.

When Canada declared war for the second time, Walter enlisted again, but he was discharged only three months later in December 1939 due to fragile health sustained in the First World War. His granddaughter Sue said her grandfather believed in “King and Country and would have continued to fight had he not been medically discharged.”

The Allied forces lost a good man; GECO reaped the benefit of that loss. Walter joined the ranks of GECO and did various jobs there, including filling detonators. He quickly realized his co-workers were nervous because, should anyone accidentally drop a detonator onto the floor, they might, as Walter would say, “blow their legs off.”173 Walter recommended, through the plant’s suggestion program, that management supply the workshops with straw mats so that if a detonator should fall, it would bounce safely instead of potentially exploding. Walter received a $40 Victory Bond for his suggestion — more than two weeks’ wages. More importantly, workshops were outfitted with mats.

Irene Darnbrough and her shop mates filling detonators. Courtesy of Linda Petsinis.

For the Darnbrough family, GECO was a family affair. Two of Walter’s children, Rene and another daughter, also worked at GECO. Rene packed explosive powder into detonators. She likely was very happy when the straw mats were installed in her workshop thanks to her dad’s suggestion. Rene earned thirty-five cents an hour like her dad, and rode a bus to work, but as a twenty-year-old woman, Rene would meet up with her girlfriends regularly for a beer at the Danforth Hotel before they headed to work. Money was tight. “Mom and her friends often would walk through Pine Hills Cemetery on their way home from work,” her daughter Sue said.174 “Because no one had any money to buy extra things at that time, they would check the area where the caretakers would throw out the old flowers from the graves, and they would gather the ribbons from them for their hair.”175

After the war, Rene, like many women her age, got married and settled down to raise a family.

Walter ended his time at GECO as a janitor, helping to give the plant a reputation for being meticulously clean. After the war, he worked for the Scarboro Township as a sewer inspector. “He was a strict inspector who insisted that the work be done properly,” Sue said.176 “The workers used to say, ‘Better do it the Darnbrough way.’”177 After Walter retired, a street was named in his honour. Darnborough Way can be found off Birchmount Road, north of Finch Avenue, in Scarborough’s north end — a long-lasting tribute to a valiant man who was fiercely devoted to his country.

General Delivery: John Everest and Family

John Everest’s family emigrated from England in 1863, settling in the quaint farming village of Scarboro, Ontario. In 1896, prominent resident Bob Bell purchased a store on St. Clair Avenue, east of Kennedy Road, which would become Everest & Sons General Store. The Everest family’s store served the surrounding farms, and grew into a bustling business that made deliveries with three horses and wagons.

In 1939 Canada went to war, and eighteen months later excavation started on expropriated farmland located just northwest of their store for a sprawling munitions plant. The Everest family was given the unique opportunity to do their part for the war effort by delivering supplies and provisions to GECO. John remembers delivering sacks of potatoes to the military site. He still recalls one time when they arrived at GECO’s main gated entrance on Eglinton Avenue and he hopped out of the truck, expecting to unload the potatoes. “I would have been around twelve to fourteen at the time,” he said.178 “Security was very effective — I was ordered back to the truck.”179 John, no matter how curious, was prohibited from stepping through the barbed-wire gates.

By the time John joined the family business in 1948, his family owned four trucks and delivered everything from milk and bread to seed and basic hardware, making several hundred deliveries per week. Everest Grocers evolved post war, eventually turning into a Pro Hardware store, with John at the helm. John married and had two children, and his son helped in the store until John retired and closed the business in 2002. “I couldn’t keep up with the big box stores,” he said.180 Ironically, these big box stores were built next to the old GECO plant where he’d delivered potatoes sixty years earlier.

Today, John lives with his wife in south Scarborough and maintains a local archive in St. Paul’s United Church, commemorating the Scarboro Junction of which GECO was a part. As a lasting tribute, in September 2014 muralist Mitchell Lanecki painted a mural on St. Clair Ave. east of Warden Ave., to commemorate the Everest family store and the Junction.

Truck ’Em and Fill ’Em: Sidney Ledson and Family

Sidney Ledson worked at GECO for about nine months in 1942, before he was old enough to enlist. He joined as a “trucker,” responsible for the delicate transportation of skids of munitions around the plant, including empty and filled primers, timers, fuses, bomb components, and tracers. Sometimes his job included the precarious and potentially perilous undertaking of stacking trays of explosives one on top of another on a skid. Even the smallest misstep could have meant a deadly detonation. Sidney worked exclusively on the gunpowder side of the plant. “I got around quite a bit on the clean side,” he said.181

Sidney has many memories of his short time at GECO. He recalls taking the bus from Dawes Road and Danforth Avenue for the approximately fifteen-minute ride out to “the wilds of GECO out in the country.”182 To a seventeen-year-old like Sidney, GECO “felt like a huge place.”183

Sidney remembers the lockers and showers in the change house, and how they stripped down to their briefs and socks, leaving “smokes” and matches in their lockers, along with rings and watches. They were not allowed to chew gum. The men stepped over the barrier onto the clean side and donned their white GECO uniforms. Once on the clean side, Sidney took the main north/south gallery on the west or gunpowder side of the plant to the trucker’s office to check in and prepare for his shift. He recalls the galleries as being wide, windowless, and quiet, with little traffic except during shift changes. As all munitions and components were transported through the gallery system, he never saw GECO’s elaborate tunnel system.

Sidney recalls fondly impromptu wrestling matches breaking out among the young truckers when work was slow. Sidney also had a stint working in a fuse-filling workshop, made up predominantly of women, with only a few men working who were either unfit for service, too young, or too old to go to war. Women poured gunpowder into the metal ring of a fuse, secured within a framework, and placed a brass ring on top. They then handed the unit to Sidney. He placed the frame into a press and pumped a lever until the desired pressure — to, as Sidney says, “squash the gunpowder” down into the ring — was achieved.184 When he relieved the pressure, the gunpowder was evenly compressed within the ring, ready for the next operation in filling.

Like many other GECOites, working at GECO was a family affair for the Ledson family. Sidney’s mother, Lillian, and his sister also worked there, though they did not work the same shifts as Sidney and he does not recall what they did.

Sidney fondly remembers how on hot evenings during the summer months, the doors to the workshops would be opened and they would watch the dewfall.185

As the war dragged on, more and more men were called up, especially once conscription started, leaving more jobs for women to fill. Female “truckerettes” stepped into the breach and took over the transportation of munitions around the plant. This shipment was headed to D.I.L. in Pickering, Ontario, in 1943. Courtesy of Archives of Ontario.

When Sidney reached the age of eighteen, he left GECO and joined the RCAF. His training took him to Moose Jaw, Montreal, and then to Yarmouth, where he stayed for the duration of war. As the war dragged on, more and more men were called up, especially once conscription started, leaving more jobs for women to fill. Female “truckerettes” stepped into the breach and took over the transportation of munitions around the plant.

After the war, Sidney, always with a zest for life, attended the Ontario College of Art, becoming an accomplished artist. He has written nine books, and founded the Sidney Ledson Institute for Intellectual Advancement, where children as young as two years of age, are taught to read.

Modern Misses: The Neufeld Gals

Margaret Neufeld was born in 1921 at home on her family’s farm in Aberdeen, Saskatchewan. Her Mennonite father, Abraham, fell in love with her mother, Helen, a Hudderite, and married against their families’ wishes. Their families, church, and community shunned the young couple for their “scandalous union.”186 Abraham and Helen had fourteen children; only nine survived. Tragically, Helen died giving birth to Margaret’s little sister, leaving Abraham to raise nine children, one a newborn, alone. Margaret was only seven years old when her mom died. The family heartache did not end there. Abraham and the children lost everything when their farmhouse burned down.

Abraham raised his family with sheer grit and determination. Margaret and eight siblings grew up, Canada declared war, her five brothers went off to fight, and in 1943, at the age of twenty-two, Margaret saw an ad in the local paper offering employment at a wartime plant in Scarboro, Ontario, thousands of miles away. She was tired of the Saskatchewan wind and rural life. This was the perfect opportunity to leave the Prairies and head for the big city. Her sister, at sixteen, accompanied her to Toronto. GECO paid their expenses up front and then deducted a small portion each paycheque to repay the debt.

Margaret was glad to be off the Prairies. She embraced life at GECO, loving the food, the camaraderie, and the work. She filled bullets on the gunpowder side of the plant. She bowled in GECO’s league.

As an attractive young woman, she turned the heads of more than one GECO fellow. One would-be suitor made a maple leaf broach for her out of hammered steel. Another admirer made her a broach from a bullet casing. She was invited to enter the Miss War Worker Beauty Contest, but she politely declined. Margaret met the handsome William Hermann at a YWCA dance in Toronto in April 1945, just before the war ended. He was in the RCAF, stationed to Mountainview A.F.B. in Belleville, Ontario, during the war, repairing aircraft. William had brought another girl to the dance but took one look at Margaret and dumped his date. After William took Margaret home, he realized he only knew her name and that she worked for a place called “Gee-Ko.”187 He wrote GECO’s personnel manager asking about the lovely girl from the dance. The manager wrote back, “I have found your Margaret and your inquiry was met with a warm response.”188 A whirlwind romance ensued, with the couple marrying two months later.

Margaret’s sister headed home after the war and eventually settled in Alberta. All the Neufeld men made it home from the war safely.

GECOite and modern-miss Margaret Neufeld (on far right in a plaid skirt) enjoying an evening of bowling with her shop mates. Courtesy of Archives of Ontario.

Margaret’s husband, William, worked for a company called Columbia Products, and in his later years for the Scarborough Board of Education where Margaret worked as well. William and Margaret raised four children.

Margaret’s adventurous spirit sustained her throughout her life. Family and friends considered her a Suffragette. She had her own bank account, independent from her husband, in the 1960s. Tamara, Margaret’s daughter, summed up her mom nicely: “Mom was a modern miss.”189

Zaida’s GECO Becomes Son’s Wonderland

When the Simerson family moved to Scarboro in 1939, they settled in an old farmhouse located on Rosemount Drive, which they bought from a gentleman named John Hough. At the time, Mr. Hough owned a good-sized tract of land, including a large farm and a carriage shop located at Birchmount Road and Eglinton Avenue. Neither the Hough nor Simerson family could have predicted that, two years later, King George VI of Britain would expropriate Hough’s land, as well as other landowner’s holdings, to build GECO.190

The Simersons lived so close to the future site of the munitions plant, it was an easy decision for Mary “Zaida” Simerson, thirty-five, to apply for work at GECO when it started its massive hiring campaign in the fall of 1941. A dedicated employee, Zaida was the embodiment of the early working mother. She worked rotating shifts full-time, kept house, and raised seven children. In fact, GECO was a family affair in the Simerson household. Two of Zaida’s daughters also worked at GECO.

Greg Jr. remembers his mom and sisters’ days at GECO. He recalls the women talking about the uniform, how workers could not wear their hair down. They talked about the dirty and clean sides of the plant, and how they called, “All Clear!” when they stepped over the barrier to the clean side.

Although Greg was too young to work at GECO — not yet a teenager — he was a typical boy and always up for adventure. There are a couple of special GECO memories that remain fresh in his mind seventy years later. During the winter months, Greg chased a puck around a hockey rink set up on GECO’s premises. What made this time extra sweet was sharing the ice with men from the Royal Navy, and in particular, one fellow named Gaye Stewart, who, barely out of high school, had played with the National Hockey League’s Toronto Maple Leafs.191 Greg was too small to play offence — or defence for that matter — so he played goal. During one game, a flying puck hit him in the nose. “Kid, you’d better go home,” Gaye Stewart told him, but Greg was so thrilled to be part of the game he refused and kept playing, bloody nose and all.192

Greg’s brush with celebrity did not end with the war. When GECO was adapted into post war emergency housing, a sports field was set up across from Sinnott Road. Greg played touch football with GECO resident Don Getty, who not only went on to be a quarterback with the Edmonton Eskimos, winning two Grey Cup championships, but became the Honourable Donald R. Getty, eleventh premier of the province of Alberta, holding that office from 1985 until 1992.193

After the war, various businesses moved into the area, establishing the Golden Mile along Eglinton Avenue. Greg still recalls one plant erected on Warden Avenue where aerosol cans would explode from time to time. “They were like bombs landing,” Greg says, “coming all the way to Rosemount. We had to put out these lit missiles.”194

The Simerson family eventually built two new homes on Rosemount Drive. When Greg married in 1956, he and his bride, Fran, moved into his parents’ old house. Greg worked with the Scarborough Fire Department for thirty-two years.

“Hefty Work”: Peter Cranston

In 1944, Peter Cranston was a seventeen-year-old high-school student looking for a summer job. He headed to National Selective Service’s office on Spadina Avenue in downtown Toronto to be placed where most needed. GECO was at the top of the list. The thought of filling munitions did not bother Peter. He felt, along with his fellow Canadians, that at the time it was a just and necessary war, and that meant doing whatever it took to stop Hitler.

Peter recalls the strict rules associated with working for a munitions plant. In the men’s change house, he stripped down to his underclothes, stored his street clothes in a locker, then stepped over a barrier to the clean side and declared himself all clear; all under the watchful eye of a guard. “After donning a white coverall including shoes with no metal in them,” Peter recalls, “and a cap covering your hair, you walked to your work station.”195

Peter was trained with a team of several young men as a trucker, calling it “hefty work.”196 He trundled boxes of parts from the receiving area to fuse-filling workshops, or “assembly sheds” as Peter calls them.197 He remembers hauling trucks full of boxes along long corridors.

When Peter wasn’t trucking around the plant, he helped fill fuses. He doesn’t remember the women being young, like depicted in the Miss War Worker Contest. As a healthy seventeen-year-old, he definitely would have had potential young female friends on his mind.

By 1944, GECO had introduced assembly line production.198 Peter recalled working at a long table with a small trough in front of him. “Each component was in a special box,” he says.199 “The person at the front took a wooden box the size of a brick with a hole cut to hold a fuse and pushed it along the trough to the next person, who put in the first part and passed it to the next. The explosive parts were in special boxes allowing only one to be removed at a time.”200 He remembers the slight odour emitted by the fuses and explosive powders. He also remembers how these powders reacted with hair products that women used. “If the caps they wore allowed a few locks to show, they turned (the hair) orange. You recognized GECO employees anywhere in Toronto.”201

Peter enjoyed his time at GECO. He found the lack of loud noise from heavy machinery pleasant, and the work was undemanding. Everyone chatted on the assembly lines. He enjoyed working with people from other countries, his first real exposure to the international community. “Four of my new friends were from British Guyana. One was Chinese, one English, one black and one East Indian.”202

Peter worked at GECO during the summer of 1944, and then continued to work there on weekends during the school year. In April 1945 he enlisted and trained with the Sixth Division to fight against Japan. “It all ended with the sudden capitulation after the first atomic bomb,” he says.203

Positively Electrifying: Hartley “Tony” French

Hartley French, a university student, joined GECO’s construction team in May 1941 as an electrician’s apprentice. He spent his summer helping lay GECO’s electrical foundation, primarily housed underground in the rapidly evolving tunnel system. He recalls the summer of 1941 was very hot and he relished the time he spent in the emerging cool underground tunnel system.

Hartley worked six days every week and some Sundays as well. Although he cannot remember how much his wages were, he recalled they were very good — good enough that he had no student debt that fall. He received time and a half for Sundays and double time for holiday work. He was one of about twenty apprentices to work at GECO during its construction, and the only university student. Other apprentices originated from Danforth Technical School, a local vocational school that offered trade training.

Hartley lived near Yonge Street in Toronto, between Lawrence Avenue and York Mills Road. When he started at GECO he took the Yonge streetcar south to Danforth Avenue, where he picked up a streetcar heading eastbound. He then transferred to a GECO bus, most likely at Dawes Road, to the plant. As the spring and summer progressed, he shared a ride with a mentor as far as Danforth Avenue.

Hartley headed back to school in September, earned his degree, and went on to have a successful career. He married his love, Irene, and raised a family. Today, at ninety-three, Hartley and Irene enjoy life in Don Mills, Ontario.

Without a Name

The Fusilier shared poignant stories of GECOites, sometimes failing to mention the name of the worker. This by no means detracted from the employee’s distinctive contribution.

Man Lays Down His Life on the Home Front

A veteran of the First World War with a serious heart condition was living in Montreal when Canada called for skilled toolmakers and master artisans. The First World War had left its mark on the now elderly gentleman, but he stepped out of retirement to help out. Bob and Phil Hamilton needed him to train three bright young men in toolmaking, especially in creating intricate gauges. His doctor warned him the work might kill him. However, this extraordinary fellow felt the risk of defeat by Hitler was greater and more dangerous than the risk to his health. He would rather die than see Canada fall to the Germans. To stay alive, this dedicated man saw his doctor every night for an injection. When the doctor reprimanded him, he replied: “Doc, it’s up to you. You simply must keep my old heart going until these boys are ready to carry on.”204 His physician did his very best, and so did the man. He trained the engineers well — they were pall-bearers at his funeral a short time later.205

With Our Deepest Gratitude

While large families were more common during the 1940s, having seven siblings go off to war was not. Bill, Norman, Phil, Angus, Jack, Sandy, and Murray headed overseas, despite, or perhaps in spite of, hearing their dad’s war stories from the Great War. Bill, the oldest at thirty-two, volunteered and shipped out even before a uniform was ready for him. Bill, Phil, Jack, and Sandy fought the terrible battle at Dieppe; Bill and Phil never made it off the beach. Jack and Sandy were captured and became prisoners of war.

Their dear sister, grieving her brothers’ deaths, tried to join the women’s army, but with her husband also fighting overseas, she had to consider the well-being of her two babies. She joined GECO instead, to wage her own kind of war, ensuring her husband and surviving brothers, and other women’s brothers had all the ammunition they needed to get the job done.206

I Wish to Remain Anonymous

Born in 1914 in Nova Scotia, one young girl grew up in a traditional home, expecting to fulfill the traditional role of wife and mother as an adult. Newly married, she moved to Toronto in 1936. Her first baby, a son, was born two years later. She lived a settled life.

When Canada declared war, her husband, who was not eligible to fight, instead served his country by working in a converted plant building warplanes. Life as a mother and homemaker did not satisfy his young wife. “I got nothing to do,” she said to her neighbour.

“You should get a part-time job,” her neighbour offered. “Why not go to work in a war plant?”

The young woman applied and worked for GECO from 1942 through 1943. She remembers the uniform and the strictness of the change room supervisor. “A girl at the door was checking you for pins,” she remembers. “We couldn’t have nothing.”

The work was easy — dangerous, but easy. “Ten of us were at a table with chairs,” she recalls. “A tray held discs that the powder went in. Then a machine came down and put the powder in. The powder was put in by pressing a lever with your foot on the floor,” she continues. “I was good at it. Many girls had a problem to get the powder in the hole of the disc. One girl was the leader,” the GECOite further explains. “She had a red armband on her arm.”

This young woman had a great time working at GECO. “We sang war songs all the time,” she says, recalling one popular war tune sang by Vera Lynn “(There’ll Be Bluebirds) Over the White Cliffs of Dover.” “The boss came in all the time and we didn’t even notice,” she recounts. “We just sang away. Then he’d count the tray to see what we’d done, then he’d take the filled trays and take them away. We had a lot of fun sitting at the table.”

She remembers the hazards of working with tetryl powder. “The powder made your skin yellow. One girl got pregnant and she had to go to the doctor. The doctor asked where she worked when he saw (her) yellow hands. She told him ‘GECO.’ He told her get out of there right away.”

As the war progressed, working shiftwork six days a week wore the young mother down. She missed her baby. “My son was being cared for by a baby-sitter.” Worse, when her shift at work ended, her work at home began. “When you were done, you had to go home.” Housework, laundry, and childcare, had to be managed. She left GECO and settled into her domestic duties once again. In November 1943, her daughter was born.

In retrospect, the long-retired GECOite is quite clear about her war work and its ultimate purpose. “We used gunpowder to kill the Germans.” Now a centenarian, she lives in Scarborough, Ontario.207

The Dynamic Duo

Philip Dawson Prior and Robert McLean Prior Hamilton’s Story

The Hamilton brothers’ story is steeped in strong Scot-Irish roots and Canadian pride. Their grandfather, Robert Hamilton, born in 1825 in Ireland, immigrated to Canada in 1853. He settled in Montreal, Quebec, where he met and married Margaret McLean. They had twelve children; ten who survived to adulthood. Robert secured a job as groundskeeper at the prestigious McGill University, where he worked for thirty-nine years.208

Robert’s eldest, Edward Henry Hamilton, or “Harry,” was born in 1861. Years later, at the age of twenty-three, he graduated with an applied science, chemical option degree from McGill.209 Harry moved to New Jersey to work as a metallurgical chemist, where he met his future wife, Maud Prior.210 They married and moved to Pueblo, Colorado, where Philip Dawson Prior Hamilton — “Phil” to family and friends — was born in 1898.211 Tragically, Maud, suffering from tuberculosis, died from infection thirteen days after giving birth.212 Four years later, Harry and his little boy, Phil, moved to Anaconda, Montana, where he married Maud’s sister, Ethel.213 A year later, in 1903, their son Robert McLean Prior Hamilton — “Bob” to those close to him — was born.214 Phil and Bob as young tykes couldn’t imagine the many adventures that lay ahead.

The Bloody Red Baron

Years passed, the boys grew up, and with the First World War underway, the family returned to Canada. In a budding family tradition, Phil enrolled at McGill University. With his first year complete, and wanting to do his part for Canada, Phil abandoned school to enlist in the Royal Flying Corps.215 At nineteen he was two years too young to be a pilot … so he lied.216 He trained at Downsview AFB in Toronto, soloed after twelve hours, got his wings, and was shipped overseas.217 Phil successfully flew several sorties over France before he, along with Allied squadrons, took on the infamous Red Baron, notorious for ditching his German flying formation to pick off any plane that dared cross the German lines to hunt him down. A dogfight ensued, resulting not only in Phil’s aircraft getting torn up in a hail of machine gun fire, but also in Phil receiving a serious gunshot wound to his elbow.218 Miraculously, he was able to coax the crippled plane across German lines into No-Man’s Land close to the English defence, where the plane hit land and ground looped, leaving Phil hanging upside-down in the cockpit. British troops, who emerged from their trenches to rescue Phil, did so at their own peril.219

Phil’s flying days were over. He was taken to a mobile hospital behind British lines where doctors intended to amputate his arm … without anesthetic. Phil refused. Doctors removed the bullet, set his arm, and sent him back to England as a casualty of war. He was discharged in 1918 as a member of the newly formed RAF.220 Upon his return to Canada, he headed back to McGill with his arm still in a sling. His arm recovered well; all but for the hole left by the bullet.

The Roaring Twenties

Bob, when he finished high school, moved to Montreal to join his older brother and pursue a degree at McGill. Phil graduated with a bachelor of science degree in 1922; Bob graduated with a bachelor of science degree in geology two years later.221

The early 1920s were good to the Hamilton brothers. Phil met his future wife Evelyn Banfill while at McGill. In August of 1923 they married and moved to Tacoma, Washington, where Phil worked with the American Smelting and Refinery Company as a chemist.222 Bob was hired as a field engineer in Ontario and Quebec by the General Engineering Company.223 In 1927, Bob moved to GECO’s headquarters situated in Salt Lake City, Utah.224

Phil and Evelyn started their family, bringing Mary and Philip into the fold. Unfortunately, when the Great Depression hit the United States at the end of the 1920s, Phil lost his job. Bob found him a position with GECO in Salt Lake City.225 Needing to move, Phil tried to sell his house. He tried to find tenants to rent. He even invited tenants to live there rent-free. All attempts failed. Defeated, he packed up, and, leaving the house and most of their possessions, moved to Salt Lake City with his young family.

The Thirties: A Prelude to War

By 1932, the Pre-Cambrian Shield in Canada presented an exciting new mining opportunity. Bob suggested to GECO executives that an office should open in Toronto, the mining centre of Canada. GECO founder, Mr. Gayford, long-time mentor to Bob and Phil, agreed and named Bob as president and Phil vice president of GECO’s new Canadian office set up at 100 Adelaide Street West.226

Bob Hamilton, still a single young man in 1933, easily made the move to Toronto, establishing GECO’s Canadian operations. But his life was about to change. He met native Torontonian Betty Parsons at a party and was utterly besotted. Meanwhile, Phil, Evelyn, and their little ones packed up and headed for Canada to start a new life in Toronto, where two more children were eventually born.

Bob and Betty were married in 1935.227 They built their first home in the Lawrence Avenue and Avenue Road area of Toronto. Their first child, John, arrived in 1937, followed by their daughter Susan in 1940.228

Although North America struggled to recover from the Great Depression, Bob and Phil were able to get the Canadian arm of GECO on its feet. However, when Canada went to war, the need for wartime facilities took centre stage. The Canadian government, recognizing GECO’s expertise in building temporary buildings, hired Bob and Phil to build several wartime projects, including the munitions plant at Scarboro.

Thus began the story of Scarboro, and with it the opportunity, not only to plan and construct the massive wartime facility, but to oversee its day-to-day operations as well.

Like many of his employees, Phil Hamilton took the Second World War personally, especially because of his own war experience. His dear wife Evelyn’s brother was captured in the fall of Hong Kong on Christmas Day 1941.229 For many, many months he was presumed dead, but miraculously he survived and was repatriated in 1945.230 Despite a world at war, Bob and Phil enjoyed their days at Scarboro. They were approachable, compassionate, passionate, firm, and fair. They participated in employee events and grew their own “Victory Garden.” In an article, “A Ton of Books,” J.J. Carrick wrote, “R.M.P. Hamilton, President of GECO, seldom hears himself addressed as Mister. This demonstrates the friendly association existing in the great organization built by ‘Bob’ and his brother ‘Phil.’”231

Bob and Phil’s wives, Betty and Evelyn, did not engage in war work. As homemakers, they raised their little ones and supported their husbands by tending to domestic duties and fostering a nurturing home environment.

When the war ended, Scarboro closed. The Hamilton brothers invited their younger brother Edward to join GECO’s team and pursued what they knew best — mining. After investing their own money, and investigating a possible prospect in northern Ontario, Bob and Phil Hamilton backed three “weekend prospectors” living in Geraldton, Ontario, who discovered a massive mineral deposit of copper, silver, zinc, lead, and gold.232 They opened a profitable GECO mine in Manitouwadge, with a plan to mine 3,300 tons of ore per day.233 Ore reserves at the end of 1954 were estimated at almost fifteen million tons, with each ton containing 1.72 percent copper, 3.55 percent zinc, and 1.73 ounces of silver.234 In his book, Noranda, Leslie Roberts called GECO’s operation a first-rate mining undertaking.235 He suggested the burgeoning mine’s success was the product of Bob and Phil’s investment of exploration capital, mining giant Noranda’s investment, the rapid construction of Canadian National and Canadian Pacific rail lines, and the installation of hydro-electric power. “A new and great mine had been born,” wrote Roberts.236

The mine operated from 1957 to 1995, but unlike GECO’s other many endeavours, success didn’t come easily.237 Another gold mine company launched a lawsuit claiming they were entitled to a share in the success of the mine.238 Bob and Phil Hamilton eventually prevailed and won their case in October 1956.239

GECO’s mining and engineering success spread around the globe under Bob and Phil’s leadership. In 1955, they bought the rights to the U.S.-based counterpart, and expanded its scope into Ireland, Morocco, Scandinavia, Peru, and Chile.240 When the boys were ready to retire, GECO was sold to SNC (Surveyer Nenniger Chenevert), a Montreal engineering firm, later to join with Lavalin Inc. to become one of the world’s leading engineering and construction companies.241

In retirement, Bob Hamilton kept busy, taking up positions on several boards of directors, and, of course, enjoying cottage life.242

Philip Dawson Prior Hamilton died in 1982.243 Robert McLean Prior Hamilton died in 1996.244 In his eulogy to his father, John Hamilton said: “Can you remember being a high-school student in the early grades, wondering how the school would run after the exemplary leaders in sports and other activities graduated? I think that Dad is like one of those leaders, graduating from this school of life with us.”245

A Son’s Reflection

Philip Henry Banfill Hamilton

Philip Henry Banfill Hamilton, son to Philip Dawson Prior Hamilton, was born in Tacoma, Washington.246 He remembered the Depression and its devastating effects on his parents and their fledgling family. “We only took a fraction of our belongings,” Philip recalled, on having to leave the security and comfort of his home.247 “Our toys, furniture were abandoned. We truly were children of the Depression.”248 He moved with his family to Salt Lake City, Utah, where his Uncle Bob had been able to secure a job for his dad with General Engineering Company.249

Judy Patton Hamilton and Philip Henry Banfill Hamilton with Barbara Dickson, Lac des Seize Iles, Quebec, 2012. Courtesy of Barbara Dickson.

GECO served Phil well. By the mid-1930s, he was able to move his family back to Canada after GECO’s Canadian office opened.250

Philip joined his father and uncle at GECO in Scarboro while its operations wound down during the summer of 1945. He helped desensitize the shops by spraying a special solution on shop walls and floors, killing any explosive residue in the wood. He was paid fifty cents an hour and worked six days a week.

In keeping with a well-established family tradition, Philip pursued a degree in engineering from McGill University, graduating in 1954. On a skiing trip in the Canadian Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal, Philip met fellow McGill student Judy Patton, who graduated with a B.A. the same year as he did. They later married. After graduating, Philip found a job at Dominion Engineering Works in Lachine, Quebec, and went on to have a successful career.

Philip passed away on Remembrance Day 2013 at the age of eighty-five.251

John McLean Parsons Hamilton

Bob and Betty made two significant additions to their family in 1937: a brand new home and the safe arrival of their first child, John.252 Life was idyllic for the recently married couple, with John’s little sister Susan joining the Hamilton clan three years later. His mom, Betty, managed the home while his dad, president of GECO’s fledging Canadian office, worked tirelessly to establish GECO’s reputation as a paramount mining enterprise north of the border. John was only a toddler when Canada entered the Second World War and his father shifted his company’s focus to war work.

“I had mixed feelings about (my dad) growing up,” John says, reminiscing. “The job kept him away from home.”253 When the Second World War started, Bob was away more than usual. “I resented the war,” he says.254 “He was working at a fever pitch while at GECO. He worked long hours and brought work home.”255 Although Bob Hamilton provided well for his family, there wasn’t much time for parental bonding. John recognizes the unique challenges a world at war brought to business. “Women were suddenly in a man’s world; men suddenly were having to care for women in the workplace.”256 His dad and the team made the adjustment well. John fondly recalls accompanying his father to work. “I used to go with Dad to a lot of offices,” he says.257

Betty, doing her part for the war effort, took pride in her victory garden located in a vacant lot beside their home.258 There were three vacant lots, actually; lots of room, John says, to play hockey in wintertime. He enjoyed a privileged childhood, attending John Ross Robertson Public School, followed by UTS — a preparatory school leading to post-secondary education at the University of Toronto.

After high school, John earned an engineering degree from the University of Toronto. He did “the engineering thing” for his father, he says, then “went to England to study industrial psychology to try to get into the people side.”259 He obtained a master’s degree in guidance and counselling and an Ed.D. (Doctor of Education) in adult education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). John explains his doctorate as “examining the careers of teachers who had lost their jobs due to declining enrollment; the psychology of teachers’ resilience to job loss.”260

He speaks of the close friendship between his mom, Betty, and Florence Ignatieff and Barbara Holmes. “They were great pals. Florence and her children, Paul and Mika, would come for a visit often.”261 So close were the trio that Betty became godmother to Barbara’s son, and the Ignatieff family often stayed in a cottage alongside the Hamiltons’ rental cottage at Lumina Resort in Muskoka, creating happy summer memories that the family still recall fondly decades later.

John married, had children of his own, and went on to have a successful teaching and counselling career at several academic institutions at the secondary and post-secondary level.

“My father and his devotion to his work,” John says, “whether it was GECO at Scarboro in those days, or the work he did in the mining industry — he was devoted to his standards he set for himself, and GECO was the medium in which he expressed those standards. I’m proud of the work my father did there.”262

John grew closer to his dad as the years passed. In the early 1980s, he asked his father to accompany him “to the office” — a nostalgic trip to Manitouwadge in northern Ontario.263 In his eulogy for his father, John said, “(Dad’s) going to be hard to replace. He was a model to learn from for many of us among his family and friends.”264

Today John lives with his wife Barbara in Elora, Ontario.