AJAX The town ammunition built

[gareez]

Just a rural part of Pickering Township in 1939 Ajax was built around the newly constructed Defense Industries Ltd Armaments plant.

If you happen to be on Hunt St. just west of Dowty Rd. and look north you will see a long line of yellow painted buildings, just sheds really.
This was the shell filling assembly line and it still stands today. East of Harwood Ave, behind the present City Hall are the old women's dormitories
and some Manager's homes. The streets are named Exeter and Admiral as the town was named after the HMS Ajax that helped defeat the German Pocket Battleship GRAFF SPEE off South America. Today new streets are still named from the crew list of the Ajax.

My Grandmother paid off the mortgage on their house on the filling line here.

 

[Grummpy]

Very cool pictures.

 

[purple]

Looks straight out of "Bomb Girls".

 

[Lt_Data]

In pic #3 there is a woman hammering something. Is that cordite being pushed into the case? Otherwise very nice pics and it seems everyone took pride in their work back then. Very classy.

 

[Magnum240]

Very cool. Thanks for sharing.

 

[Rod B]

Interesting pics. Thanks for sharing.

 

[yorgi]

Amazing pics, thanks for sharing!

The GECO armaments plant in Scarorough at Warden and Eglinton, at it's peak, stretched for almost 800,000 square feet (above and below ground facilities) and employed 6000 workers.

 

[Dark Alley Dan]

"Gently there, Mrs. Jones..."

Very cool bit of history, bud. Thanks very much for sharing.

It saddens me that we have limited indigenous ammunition manufacturing in Canada these days, and IVI won't sell cartridges onto "civvy street". What kind of nightmarishly Byzantine paperwork would one have to fill out to start producing .223, .308, 22 LR and .303 in Canada on an industrial scale? And would there be enough of a market to make any money at it?

 

[Rule 303]

Just a rural part of Pickering Township in 1939 Ajax was built around the newly constructed Defense Industries Ltd Armaments plant.

If you happen to be on Hunt St. just west of Dowty Rd. and look north you will see a long line of yellow painted buildings, just sheds really.
This was the shell filling assembly line and it still stands today. East of Harwood Ave, behind the present City Hall are the old women's dormitories
and some Manager's homes. The streets are named Exeter and Admiral as the town was named after the HMS Ajax that helped defeat the German Pocket Battleship GRAFF SPEE off South America. Today new streets are still named from the crew list of the Ajax.

My Grandmother paid off the mortgage on their house on the filling line here.

Girl with the hammer looks like Hattie Jacques from the British "Carry On" series.

 

[Staples57]

In fact, "Bomb Girls" is loosely based on D.I.L. Ajax during WW2.

One correction, Photo #1 is of the D.I.L. Montreal facility, not Ajax. It's a common misconception, however, D.I.L. Ajax did not fill such large munitions.
Photo #4 depicts some of the typical munitions filled at D.I.L. Ajax during WW2. An interesting point, the munitions in Photo #4 (and others) are on display in the town's "museum".

The tradition of naming the streets after Crewmen of the HMS Ajax began during WW2 when the town adopted the name Ajax.
In recent years, with the expansion of the town the streets have been named after the Crewmen of the HMS Exeter and HMS Achilles with one exception, Langsdorff.
In recent years and with much controversy, a street was named "Langsdorff Drive" to honor Hans Langsdorff the Captain of the Graf Spee.

The attached photo is a 1942 map of D.I.L. Ajax overlayed on a 1985 map of the Town of Ajax.

This photo is of the D.I.L. Ajax ceremony celebrating the production of the 25 Millionth shell (a 25 Pounder HE artillery round).

Artifacts and relics from D.I.L. Ajax are very rare, very few ever turn up.
...and I've been looking for them for the last 30+ years

For more photos, check out... "The Pickering/Ajax Digital Archives" (http://www.pada.ca/images/results/?topic=16&page=1)

The area around the Town of Ajax in overflowing with Military history.
The area is also know for "Camp X", a WW2 spy training school located in Whitby, Ontario, a WW2 German POW Camp in Bowmanville, Ontario and a WW1 CEF Training Camp & Rifle Range in Uxbridge, Ontario.

Cheer,
Brad

Looks straight out of "Bomb Girls".

 

[scott585]

Looks straight out of "Bomb Girls".

one of my main complaints about that show is the "25 pounders" in big, tall, bottlenecked cases like 17 pounders, how hard is it to get a couple racks of appropriate cases?

 

[yorgi]

one of my main complaints about that show is the "25 pounders" in big, tall, bottlenecked cases like 17 pounders, how hard is it to get a couple racks of appropriate cases?

You don't have to worry about that any longer, the show has been officially cancelled after 2 seasons.

 

[Hawkshadow]

Thanks for posting the pictures! Our home-front production is something that most are quick to forget around here these days. Without those on the lines, they couldn't have fought the war.

That's very unfortunate about Bomb Girls being cancelled. Although the show wasn't perfect, it was fairly groundbreaking concept which has never been done before to my knowledge. There are plenty of topics to explore from this time period. Hopefully (as referenced in the press release) they do manage to produce the planned movie. It is a nice tip of the hat to the remaining few.

In fact, "Bomb Girls" is loosely based on D.I.L. Ajax during WW2.

I remember in one episode they explicitly referenced Ajax as a separate plant when talking about production numbers.

 

[Magellann]

Very interesting pics, thanks for sharing.

 

[silverfoxdj]

You don't have to worry about that any longer, the show has been officially cancelled after 2 seasons.

What bomb girls ?

 

[Kernalvax]

Yup, they are going to wrap it up with a 2 hour special, unless some other network picks up the ball and runs with it, Global seems to only care about staged "reality" TV.

 

[Pblatzz]

some of the buildings are still thier, The steam plant is still used and some of the building for shell filing are used by a pallet manufacture.

 

[gareez]

Last night I had a public meeting for a new development we are doing in Ajax. It was held in the River Plate room at the Town Hall and they have the firing pedals from the GRAFF SPEE floatplane launcher mounted on the wall along with several other artifacts. My last development, two years ago, the town gave us a list of unused crew names from which to select the street names.
The Ajax legion branch also has quite a collection.

 

[Danimal247]

very cool!

 

[purple]

Pretty fascinating stuff about the town of Ajax. I don't know how many times I drove by it on the 401 with no idea of this history. I'm going to visit ON one more time to see some of the places where I was trained or stationed in the 1960s/1970s. I think I'll include Ajax on my list. I remember visiting the then new nuclear power station in Pickering in 1969 as part of a radiation hazard control course. Here's my big question; is there any way that I can fly in, rent a car and visit this area without having to go anywhere near the City of Toronto?