Bomb Girls

by Barbara Dickson

  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 Walte
r’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.