Beaverbrook’s railcar combine

Canadian Car and Foundry was put together in Montreal in 1909, one of three industrial combinations formed by Lord Beaverbrook. It merged Rhodes Curry of Amherst, Canada Car of Turcot and Dominion Car and Foundry, and for most of its life it built freight cars, streetcars, buses and forestry equipment. In the First World War it assembled shells, losing its Kingsland plant in a vast explosion in January 1917, and built minesweepers for France at Fort William.

Goblins for Spain

Its first steps into aviation in the 1930s were murky. CC&F licence-built 52 Grumman G-23s, an improved FF-1 fighter, partly from US-built parts. Thirty-four were bought by the Spanish Republic in 1937 using forged Turkish credentials, to get round the American embargo; the rest became the Goblin in RCAF service. Its own design, Michael Gregor’s FDB-1 biplane fighter, flew on 17 December 1938 but arrived just as biplanes became obsolete, and only one was built.

Elsie MacGill’s Hurricanes

War made the Fort William plant famous. Under chief engineer Elsie MacGill, who added skis and de-icing gear, CC&F built Hawker Hurricane Marks X, XI and XII. By 1943 its 4,500 workers, half of them women, had produced more than 1,400 Hurricanes, about 10 percent of the total. It went on to build 834 Curtiss Helldivers as the SBW, Harvards, and two Burnelli CBY-3 lifting-fuselage transports. After the war it returned to rail and buses, joined Hawker Siddeley through A.V. Roe Canada in 1957, and survives as Alstom’s Thunder Bay railcar plant.

Factories

• Fort William plant · Fort William (now Thunder Bay), Ontario — Wartime Hurricane and Helldiver production; now an Alstom railcar plant
• Montreal shops · Montreal, Quebec — Railcars; CBY-3 built here in 1944

People

• Elsie MacGill · chief engineer — Led Hurricane production and its winterisation
• Michael Gregor · designer — FDB-1 fighter