Marion Shakell was barely sweet 16 when she started work at Defense Industries Limited (D.I.L). She lived in one of the newly built staff houses in the village. Each staff house had a housemother who kept things in shape, and men and women were housed separately according to Marion.
“We had our own rooms, didn’t have to lift a finger and we were waited on in the dining room just like in a restaurant,” she said.
People came from across Canada, Marion recalled, and like so many others who flocked to Nobel during the 40s to find work, many of the friends she met while working there were young teenaged girls such as herself who had completed various levels of government-run commercial courses and learned skills that would enable them to enter the workforce.
“Working at D.I.L was one of the happiest periods in my life,” she said fondly. “We were a happy bunch, even though there was a war going on.”
Raised in Orillia, Marion moved to Nobel after a friend called and suggested that she could easily find a job there. Her office was located in one of the large administration buildings where 28 others also worked. Her days were spent typing and taking shorthand for her boss Mr. Stott, one of the plant’s safety engineers. For a short time, she worked in the plant’s communication office as a switchboard operator. She said it was after the day’s work when frivolity and social activities would prevail.
“During the summer months we’d change our clothes and head for the beach,” she reminisced. “There was no shortage of things you could get involved in. We had a bowling alley, concert hall, cinema and a glee club where you could sing and dance and put on performances; Rosie the Riveter being one.”
A fictional character, Rosie the Riveter was used on posters and ads during wartime to recruit more than two million women into the workforce and later became the nickname for women working in wartime industries.
“Every Saturday night there was a dance and the men would join the ladies in the women’s staff houses,” Marion said. It was during one of those dances when she met her husband, fresh out of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Marion and Roly McIsaac married in 1946. As it turns out, Roly’s father was commissioned by Queen’s Park to build some buses and provide transportation for the plant.
“The managers at D.I.L. were concerned with the amount of traffic that was growing within the plant boundaries and the condition of some of the vehicles that were being used,” Roly said. “So we built some buses and this is how folks got to and from work.”
Made with 1940 GMC tractors, the wartime utility buses ran steady between Parry Sound and Nobel and a bus ride from the village staff houses to the plant was five cents.
One particular bus ride brought young Alicia Ryder to the plant.
“I was told I would have a job forever if I stayed at the local dress shop where I sewed and altered dresses,” Alicia grinned.
But fate would have it a different way. After a September birthday when she turned 16 and before the snow fell, Alicia’s mother gave her a gift.
“My mother bought me a new fur coat from a local shop which I wore to work one day. But then I was fired because the coat hadn’t been purchased where I was working,” she smiled. As it turns out, Alicia secured employment at Gluckstein’s (where the coat was purchased). It was here that she got a call from family friend Gord Bround, who told her to get on a bus and go see a Mr. Tait in Nobel for an interview. When Alicia arrived at the plant, there was Gord, waiting for her at the bus stop with his bicycle.
“He told me to jump on, and I did,” laughed Alicia. “I sat on the cross bar and off we went to the office.”
Hired as a filing clerk, she found her job interesting with so many types of documents crossing her desk. She would also take applications from others looking for work.
“Sometimes the Mounties would come in looking for people,” she recalled. Still living at home while working in the office, she met a fellow who roomed at her mother’s.
“We became friends and he often asked me to accompany him when he went out,” Alicia recalled with a smile. When they married, husband Art Nesbitt was already working in cordite production. Wanting to work the same shifts as him, Alicia transferred to the cordite blending and packing area.
In the film entitled “And We Knew How to Dance,” produced by the National Film Board of Canada, three women – Beatrice Kaye, Willa Marshall and Elsie Orr – spoke of their experiences while working at D.I.L during World War I. They referred to cordite as “dope” and compared the look of it to brown sugar. They had to carry it up several steps to a press and when it came out, it looked like spaghetti. It was packed into wax-lined boxes that weighed 100 pounds when full, and the women had to pile them nine high. They made about $8 a week; more if they worked as a floor supervisor. Elsie mentioned that whenever there was a thunderstorm, workers were moved to another building for safety, but said how silly that was, since the building they moved to contained boxes of cordite at the other end.
Alicia said whenever she came up to the big fence that surrounded the plant she’d have to check her shoes to make sure she hadn’t picked up anything that might cause a spark.
“There were guards everywhere and they were very strict about whom they let into the plant. They really kept an eye on things and if you were ever caught with matches or anything like that, you’d be fired.” But then she giggled, as she suddenly remembered a time when she had walked into the plant in her new fur coat, carrying two metal lunch containers on each side, the metal rubbing against the fur producing static electricity. “Isn’t it strange that I would remember this now after all those years?”
“The smell of cordite was heavy and strong and it gave me a terrible headache and it made me feel ill,” Alicia said. She lasted one week in production, and then was offered another position as timekeeper. “After all the workers settled into their shifts, I had to walk around on the tracks to collect the time sheets from everyone. I was never afraid being alone out there in the dark.”
In the dark about what she could do to make a living, Mavis Irwin, a.k.a. “Chook” (nicknamed by her brother because she played in the chicken coop as a child) was encouraged by her parents to enroll in the commercial courses as well.
“I moved to Nobel from Waubashene with two other girls – Lucille Reid and Helen Plouffe – and we schooled together,” Mavis said. “We were taught by Miss Laird at a school house in Nobel and learned how to become a secretary.”
She echoed Marion’s feelings about the plant.
“We didn’t want for anything,” Mavis said. “We had good meals and plenty of things to do.”
But there was one incident that Mavis would never forget. She was having lunch at the staff house when it happened. There had been a fire in one of the cordite buildings and her boss wanted her to see the damage.
“As I stood inside the building, my eyes were drawn to a window. There were fingerprints on the glass and on the sill were pieces of skin from one of the men who had died,” Mavis said quietly. “I remember thinking how could something like this ever happen? I’ll never forget that as long as I live.”
For a short time Mavis worked in the cordite department, then was transferred to a sister company in Quebec where she stayed for about a year. On the day she returned to the Nobel plant, she noticed a fellow talking to a bunch of people just outside the door of her staff house.
“He noticed me too,” she grinned. For a time they both worked at the plant, and then in 1945, Dr. Roy S. Irwin and Mavis were married in Waubashene in the living room of her mother’s house.
And from her father’s house, 22-year-old Bernice Gates, came to work at D.I.L. Her father Victor Jobbins, worked in communications.
“I worked in what they called the work simplification office,” she said. “There were suggestion boxes throughout the plant where people could submit ideas on how to improve procedures and things like that. Five men would go and investigate these suggestions and I was responsible for typing these reports.”
Bernice transferred to general engineering in 1944, the same year she married Bill Gates (not to be confused with the one who has money, Bernice joked) complete with bridesmaids, Mavis and Marion. Bill and Bernice worked at the plant until the end of the war.
Friendships formed between the women during their time working at the D.I.L. plant in Nobel have surpassed 60 years, connected by threads woven from marriages, births and deaths. Even though the women were there because of military conflict, their stories speak of love, not war.
The Women of D.I.L., making the wartime rounds
Date: Feb 05, 2010
User Comments
