Bomb Girls plaque, 2025.  

Plaque Text

The General Engineering Company (GECO) operated a top-secret munitions factory here during the Second World War. The giant manufacturing facility employed 21,000 people throughout the war, most of them women, nicknamed the Bomb Girls.

In the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of women joined the workforce in place of men serving in the military, often in industries that once excluded them.

GECO covered 346 acres between Eglinton Avenue, Warden Avenue, Sinnott Road, and Hymus Road. It consisted of 172 buildings linked by more than four kilometres of tunnels. Workers here risked their lives filling bomb fuses and bullets with gunpowder and other high explosives.

The site was split into a dirty side, where work unrelated to explosives was situated, and a clean side that made munitions. The clean side that made up most of the plant was divided into the “GP,” or gunpowder, group and the “HE” group, where workers handled high explosives such as tetryl, TNT, cordite, and magnesium oxide.

GECO filled over 256 million fuses from 1941 to 1945. The Bomb Girls’ work was vital to the Allied victory in the Second World War. Scarborough’s emblem — Sc/C, etched on every fuse — was a sign of quality on the battlefield.

After the war, several GECO buildings became emergency housing for about 2,000 veterans and their families. New factories opened on Eglinton from Birchmount Road to Victoria Park Avenue, becoming Scarborough’s “Golden Mile of Industry.”