And could it be not just a serialized drama, but a serialized period piece? The answer to that is frustratingly inconclusive. It was also cancelled. That bit of closure airs Thursday night. Jodi Balfour, who plays Gladys, the rich-girl-turned-bombmaker-turned-spy, said during an interview on set that the process this time around was strangely bittersweet. No one said goodbye last year, it felt really, really positive. So, yeah, it was a blow. Only the executives at Global know what they expected of Bomb Girls when it was first given a six-episode run — even U.
Bomb Girls , a show that was at its heart a story about the empowerment of women at a time when they still lived sheltered lives, was never going to attract the broad audience of Global imports like Hawaii Five-O or Elementary.
Victory Munitions has added a top-secret assembly line in the basement that purportedly makes TNT but is actually producing sonar devices that protect Allied ships from German subs in the Atlantic.
When intelligence officers suspect a saboteur in the program, Gladys is, surprise, sent back to the factory as an undercover agent. The whole war effort, Gladys is told, could hinge on the ability of Allies forces to reopen shipping channels. So, no pressure. The main plot moves quickly, which it must since there are so many other threads in an ensemble drama that need to be tied off.
But the show, as would be expected of Bomb Girls , is not without its strong moments. There are some surprises, and Bomb Girls does tragedy very well. It does tender pretty well, too. He tells her he will wait for her, and she looks back, in uniform, from a departing cab — a role reversal that is entirely fitting given the themes that Bomb Girls explored.
More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. Set in the s, Bomb Girls tells the remarkable stories of the women who risked their lives in a munitions factory building bombs for the Allied forces fighting on the European front. The series delves into the lives of these exceptional women from all walks of life - peers, friends and rivals - who find themselves thrust into new worlds and changed profoundly as they are liberated from their home and social restrictions.
Same war. Different battles. Did you know Edit. Connections Featured in Revealed: Meg Tilly User reviews 32 Review. Top review. A pleasant surprise. I picked this up, thinking it was another British production in the vein of Foyle's war, which I thought was excellent. Initially, I was quite confused and couldn't understand the lack of accents. Of course, I quickly clued in that it was a Canadian show. It feels pretty authentic and has lots of great details.
The stories are quite compelling and the acting top notch. Cinematography is good too, and the photography looks movie quality to me and doesn't have the "cheap" look of so many Canadian productions. On the downside, there is just a little too little exterior photography. Obviously this would be expensive, but the show suffers for it and feels a little "sitcom-ish" and confined in the way it tends to cut from interior to interior with very little outdoor footage, especially city scenes.
I understand why, but still miss them. Maybe Season 2 will have a bigger budget. A town called Ajax arose on the site of the former munitions complex and today it is a flourishing suburban community with a population exceeding , And Louise Johnson was there to witness it all.
She married Russel Johnson, a fellow DIL worker, made her home in Ajax and has shared her wartime memories with many people over the years, including local historians and the creators of the Bomb Girls series. No one missed a shift unless they absolutely had to. Several munitions plants were established on Canadian soil, including the General Engineering Company of Canada, which was just beyond the northern limits of Toronto, and served as the template for the Bomb Girls series.
The DIL plant was the biggest complex in this country and, for that matter, the entire British Commonwealth. Shortly after the start of the war, the federal government expropriated almost 12 square kilometres of farmland extending from the shore of Lake Ontario north to the Canadian National Railway main line.
Its freight trains delivered raw materials and picked up finished munitions to start the journey to embattled England. Government surveyors arrived on the property in February Construction crews went to work in early and the entire complex was complete by the end of that year—and it was a monumental undertaking. There were nearly 50 kilo metres of railway spur lines on the site and 50 kilometres of roadways. There were four shell-filling lines and a pellet and tracer line, all located in separate buildings, as well as warehouses for storing shell casings and explosives.
Ammunition magazines, covered on three sides with mounds of earth, were located on the south end of the property along the lakeshore. A water treatment plant capable of processing almost four million litres a day and a sewage treatment plant were built at the waterfront. Administration buildings were located in the northeast corner, adjacent to the CN line. Twenty-one dormitories with semi-private rooms were erected to accommodate the women and a smaller number for men, since there were usually twice as many female as male employees on site.
There was also a large cafeteria, a commissary, a recreation centre, a social centre that served as a place of worship on Sundays and a bed hospital staffed by five doctors and 15 nurses.
To eliminate the possibility of sabotage, a 2. After all that, one problem remained—how to accommodate the married workers who lived or boarded in nearby communities and found transportation difficult since automobile ownership was a wartime luxury and public transit was non-existent. The government resolved the issue by building two-bedroom, basement-less bungalows between the CN line and Highway 2, then the main road between Toronto and Kingston.
Employees worked three shifts a day, six days a week and earned 50 to 80 cents an hour, which was better than the typical wages at the time. Safety was a top priority. All the food in the cafeteria was steamed rather than grilled, fried or baked to reduce the risk of a fire that could trigger explosions. Anyone caught with cigarettes, lighters or matches could be fined, fired or even jailed. You had to change from your street clothes and put on uniforms and you had to wear special-issue shoes before going into a designated clean area.
The soles of the shoes were leather, stitched rather than stapled since staples might cause sparks and an explosion. The women had to take off wedding rings, or cover them with tape and they had to remove bobby pins and fasten their hair with bandanas.
Nevertheless, accidents were inevitable. Three workers died in explosions, says Brenda Kriz, archivist for the town of Ajax, and many women lost fingers or fingertips to explosions. There were Tuesday evening square dances and Friday night dances with big bands and young men from Whitby, Oshawa and other nearby communities which more than compensated for the shortage of males on site. There were movie nights and a library and the athletically inclined could play baseball, basketball, badminton or tennis.
Letters to and from loved ones—either soldiers fighting overseas or families back home—were indispensable wartime morale boosters and the volume of DIL mail quickly overwhelmed the tiny post office in Pickering Village. In the summer of , says Kriz, the administration concluded that the complex needed its own postal station and asked employees to submit names.
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