A farm machinery company making precision aircraft parts? No chance.
“They were considered forgers of crude iron up to that point,” said Rob Adlam of the Brantford-based Canadian Industrial Heritage Centre.
“There’s a world of difference between making a hand plow and making aircraft components,” Adlam said. “The government even had doubts they could do it.”
But wartime calls for creativity, and Cockshutt Plow Company in Brantford — best known for making tractors and harvesters — rose to the occasion to get Allied planes into the sky to take on Nazi Germany.
From inside a million-dollar factory on Greenwich Street — built in just three months in 1943 — Cockshutt’s newly formed aircraft division turned out landing gear for the Lancaster bomber, targeting components for the B-29 Superfortress bomber, and fuselages for the Mosquito, a speedy, lightweight fighter made of laminated plywood.
Pilots at Commonwealth air force training bases across Canada — including in Jarvis and Dunnville in Haldimand County — learned to fly inside the Avro Anson, whose exhaust manifolds were made by Cockshutt’s wartime workforce.
“No implement manufacturer had ever attempted any of that,” Adlam said. “But they proved that they could do it.”
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