Bert Massey turned off the sidewalk towards his front door. He had no idea what awaited him.
Behind the front door stood the Massey family’s English domestic servant, Carrie Davies. Carrie was a mere slip of a girl, a mousy eighteen-year-old who rarely spoke unless spoken to. She was one of hundreds of thousands of demure little housemaids in cities all over the English-speaking world, from Sheffield to Chicago, Manchester to Melbourne, Tunbridge Wells to Toronto. In her black dress, white cap, and starched apron, Carrie blended into the background decor that, similarly, scarcely varied across continents—heavy velvet curtains, dark wood panelling, framed sepia photographs. In the bourgeois world of 1915, the Carrie Davieses barely merited a glance, let alone a footnote in history. Women like her formed the silent army that kept households humming, and yet remained almost invisible to many of its employers. Carrie’s life was particularly exhausting because she was Bert and Rhoda Massey’s only servant. They couldn’t afford the army of cooks, butlers, parlour maids, and lady’s maids that kept up the houses of richer Masseys. Carrie had to do everything, during days that began at six in the morning and might not finish until well after 9 p.m.
But tonight, this particular young woman carried a gun—Bert Massey’s own .32-calibre Savage automatic pistol. Such guns (“The most powerful, accurate and rapid fire pistol invented”) were available in the Eaton’s catalogue for $18. And she was standing close to the door because she had just told the paper boy that her employer was not yet home. When she heard Bert Massey mount the steps to the verandah, she raised her right arm. At first, Bert did not see her in the shadows. Then Carrie pulled the door open and stepped forward. A shot rang out. A sharp pain erupted in Bert’s left side. He gaped at the young woman before backing quickly down the steps. A second shot rang out. Bert had barely reached the street before he fell and the life began to drain out of him. Carrie Davies lowered the gun, turned round, and disappeared into the house, shutting the door behind her.
Ernest Pelletier was halfway down the block when he heard the shots. For a second, he assumed that the sharp crack was the sound of one of the new electric street-lamp bulbs exploding. Then he swung round—and watched in disbelief as the man to whom he had spoken only seconds earlier staggered down his front steps and collapsed on the sidewalk. Ernest sprinted back to him. Beatrice Dinnis, who lived at 126 Walmer Road, had seen the flash of a gun and heard Bert exclaim, “Oh,” as he buckled to the ground. She was one of the first passersby to cluster around the fallen man, who was groaning in distress. One stranger hammered on the doorway of 169 Walmer, but there was no answer. So he went next door and asked for a glass of water, explaining that a man had been taken ill on the sidewalk.
Nobody knew what to do. A woman screamed. There was no observable wound, no gush of blood. Yet Bert Massey was obviously in desperate straits. Curtains twitched in Walmer Road windows as neighbours peered through the gathering darkness at the huddle of shocked witnesses. A youth who lived at number 133 ran to telephone the police. Dr. John Mitchell, who lived a few doors north and was familiar to his neighbours, shouldered through the crowd, loosened Massey’s collar, and had him carried into the house next door, number 171. By the time Charles Albert Massey had been laid on a chesterfield there, he was dead. He had not uttered a word since the first shot was fired.
The police wagon arrived minutes later.
Patrol Sergeant Lawrence Brown and two constables marched up to the front door of number 169 and knocked. Again, no one came to the door. Sending Constable Follis to the back door and instructing Constable Martin to stand guard at the front door, Brown entered the unlocked house. Most of the lights were on in the evening gloom.
The front hall was a cramped space: ahead of him, the sergeant saw a staircase leading upwards, and to his right, through an open door, an empty sitting room. The stocky policeman walked carefully towards the back of the house. In the kitchen, someone had just finished making supper, and there was an unbaked loaf of bread on the table. Brown heard a noise from below, and was startled to see Bert Massey’s fourteen-year-old son, Charlie, emerge from the basement in his shirt sleeves. What had he been doing? Perhaps he was smoking one of his father’s cigarettes, or even taking a quiet swig from a bottle “borrowed” from the liquor cabinet. Sergeant Brown didn’t care. He was more concerned by the boy’s expression of shock at seeing a policeman in the house. The noise of the gunshot had not reached the basement, and Brown realized that Charles Albert had no idea of what had occurred. The policeman took Charles to the front door and instructed Constable Martin to look after the boy. White-faced and frightened, Charles kept asking what had happened. Nobody told him.
Sergeant Brown continued his search of the house. The ground-floor rooms were empty, so he cautiously started up the staircase. When he reached the landing, he heard a tremulous call from the third floor: “Who is there?” He replied, “The police.” The girlish voice said, “Come on up,” but Brown drew his revolver and said, “Come on down.”
It was barely half an hour since the two shots were fired. In a bare attic bedroom, Carrie Davies had risen from the table where, in a state of eerie calm, she had just finished writing two short notes. One was to Maud Fairchild, her married sister who also lived in Toronto. The second was to her friend Mary Rooney, another domestic servant who worked for Bert Massey’s older brother and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Massey, a few blocks away on Admiral Road. Carrie behaved as if in a stupor, oblivious to the furor outside in the street. When she heard the policeman’s voice, she had thrust her hands into the arms of a shabby brown cloth coat and picked up the gun again. This time, she held it by the muzzle. Then she started downstairs.
On the second-floor landing, Sergeant Brown stared up in astonishment at the slight figure proffering a pistol as she came towards him. Without taking his eyes off Carrie’s expressionless face, the burly policeman grasped the weapon by its handle, and then followed her back to her room.
“I shot him,” the young woman announced. Sergeant Brown stared at her, and then gave her the standard caution: “You needn’t make any statement unless you like, but any statement you make may be used as evidence either for or against you. [Do] you understand that?” Wide-eyed, Carrie intoned, “Yes.” Almost as an afterthought, she added, “He ruined my character … They have been good to me and I have been good to them, but he disgraced my character.” The policeman looked at the gun, and then back at her. Carrie began to cry, and repeated, “He has ruined my life … Take me out of here.”
Brown didn’t ask her to explain her remark. He took her firmly by the arm and escorted her out the front door of number 169, through a crowd of shocked onlookers. Carrie kept her head down. She appeared to be clinging to Sergeant Brown rather than being unwillingly frog-marched away from the scene of the crime. After the sergeant had bundled her into the paddy wagon, Constables Martin and Follis, solemn and silent, climbed in after her.
A few minutes later, the paddy wagon drew up outside Police Station 11, on London Street close to Bathurst, so that Sergeant Brown could make a note in the duty register of her name, age, and birthplace. Until now, Carrie Davies had behaved as though nothing had happened: she was her meek little self, doing what she was told. But at the police station, she overheard horrified whispers that Mr. Massey was dead. She gasped, then broke down in tears.
Sergeant Brown knew that this case was more than the London Street station could handle. So Carrie was bundled back in the wagon and driven downtown, to police headquarters at City Hall, at the intersection of Queen and Bay Streets, where Inspector George Kennedy, Toronto’s most senior detective, had his office. The police sergeant ushered the now-terrified young woman into the inspector’s presence. When the detective began to question her, she admitted in her pronounced English accent that she had pointed a gun at her employer and pulled the trigger. Her motive for the killing, she sobbed, was that “he tried to ruin me.”
Brown and Kennedy exchanged shocked looks. Sergeant Bro
wn had already told Inspector Kennedy that this was more than a routine crime, because the dead man was a Massey. Kennedy’s eyebrows had nearly lifted off his face when he realized he would be dealing with a family that was already a Canadian legend: the Masseys were respected for their fierce Methodism, appreciated for their public benefactions (Toronto’s Massey Music Hall and Fred Victor Mission were only two of the numerous Massey good works), and resented for their power. By the start of the twentieth century, Methodists like the Masseys—along with the Eatons and the Flavelles—were on their way to becoming Toronto’s new capitalist class, an elite that challenged the city’s Victorian aristocracy in both wealth and snobbery. Bert Massey’s relatives lived in one of the grandest houses in Toronto, “Euclid Hall” on Jarvis Street, and Bert himself, as a child, had been dressed like a prince, in velvet coats and broderie anglaise collars. The family was not used to seeing its members enmeshed in gossip.
Now this frightened young woman had uttered the sensational accusation “He tried to ruin me,” and the two Toronto policemen realized that they had a major scandal on their hands. “Ruin,” in this context, meant only one thing: that Bert Massey had tried to have sexual intercourse with his maid. Reporters on the crime beat would swarm City Hall as soon as they got wind of the shooting—Kennedy could already hear a buzz of excitement in the front office. Moreover, at the time of the crime, Bert Massey had been unarmed and several feet from Carrie—an apparently law-abiding breadwinner returning from a long day at work. Carrie had taken him completely by surprise. Was she speaking the truth? And anyway, how many eighteen-year-old domestics knew how to fire a revolver? Under questioning, Carrie stammered that she had worked for Mr. and Mrs. Charles Albert Massey for two years, and she repeated that they had always been kind to her.
The two policemen stared at the wretched girl in dismay. Still, all they could do was follow procedure. Inspector Kennedy began the routine questioning—name, age, height—and then took Carrie through the events of the evening, noting her answers in longhand. Within half an hour, Carrie had answered all the questions put to her, and Kennedy, in a rush to get the paperwork finished so she could appear in the police court the following morning, had instructed his assistant to take Carrie away. In his haste, he forgot to ask her to sign the statement.
Carrie was taken to the Court Street station, the hub of the police department, which was three blocks south of City Hall at the busy corner of Church and Adelaide Streets, behind the elegant Georgian facade of the Adelaide Street courthouse. The police station had cells in the basement for transient prisoners—cells that were cramped, dirty, and stank of human sweat and excrement. There she spent the night in custody, listening to indignant shouts and clanging bolts as drunks, hookers, and other petty criminals were locked up alongside her. In her short life, Carrie had often been uncomfortable—in her overcrowded English home, or the drafty attic bedrooms of employers’ houses, or the shared steerage berth when she crossed the Atlantic. But a night in the cells, surrounded by harsh sounds and human misery, with no idea what the next day would bring, must have been the most traumatic night of her life. A shabby cloth coat could not protect her from jailhouse chill, let alone the terror and humiliation of her predicament.
For three weeks, the sensational tale of the Massey killing gripped Toronto. On several days, the case received more coverage than a much more important story—the war in Europe. Thousands of young Canadian men had donned uniforms, crossed the Atlantic, and, in the same month that Carrie faced the court, were preparing to risk their lives in the defence of the British Empire.
This was an extraordinary period in Canadian history. Although the former British colony had entered the twentieth century relatively poor and largely rural, its resources underdeveloped and only a third of its arable land settled, it now had the world’s fastest-growing economy. Until war broke out in Europe in 1914, immigrants by the hundreds of thousands had poured into the West, factories had sprung up in the east and railways had criss-crossed the landscape. The Dominion of Canada, still less than half a century old, was riddled with anachronisms and paradoxes—the first gasoline-driven tractors had appeared on Saskatchewan and Manitoba prairies where teams of sturdy Doukhobor women were still harnessed to single-furrow plows. Small general stores served rural housewives, but in the cities huge department stores like Mr. Eaton’s on Yonge Street were becoming palaces of consumption. City dwellers were snapping up gadgets like electric toasters, irons, and vacuum cleaners, and filling store cupboards with bottled tomato ketchup, Shredded Wheat, and Palmolive soap, while out west, farm hands still lived in sod huts, ate salt pork and cabbage, and lined their boots with newspapers. A giddy optimism had spread across the country, but though Canada now exercised almost complete control over its internal affairs, it continued to deal with the external world as a ward of Great Britain, the historic “motherland.”
Nevertheless, the Dominion was starting to see itself as an autonomous nation. In 1904, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the country’s seventh post-Confederation leader and first French-Canadian prime minister, had made a startling prediction: “Canada has been modest in its history, although its history is heroic in many ways. But its history, in my estimation, is only commencing … The nineteenth century was the century of the United States. I think we can claim that it is Canada that shall fill the twentieth century.”
The slow evolution of a Canadian identity rubbed up against Canada’s passionate attachment to “the Old Country,” and in 1915 no province was more profoundly British in its sentiments than Ontario. On the flyleaf of the Ontario Fourth Reader of 1910, beneath the Union Jack, appeared the motto “One Flag, One Fleet, One Throne.” On the first page appeared a quotation from Rudyard Kipling: “Oh Motherland, we pledge to thee, Head, heart and hand through years to be.” The first picture in the Reader was a portrait of the late King Edward VII. Loyalty to Britain suffused Canada’s most populous province, even as its residents watched their own country develop economic muscles and political sinews unthinkable at Confederation.
At the same time, no Canadian city was undergoing more wrenching changes than the province’s largest city. Toronto was almost unrecognizable from the muddy town it had been when the Dominion of the North was established in 1867. Back then, with only about fifty thousand residents, it was smaller than Halifax, Nova Scotia, in population and area. But in the 1880s it absorbed adjoining Riverdale, Yorkville, the Annex, Seaton Village, and Parkdale, and within a few years it was linked by electric trolleys and steam railways to outlying communities like Scarborough, Richmond Hill, and Newmarket. In the first decade of the new century, the city’s population had grown by a staggering 81 percent, from 208,040 to 376,500, and by 1915 it had over half a million residents—with at least one-third born outside the country. Montreal was still the Dominion’s largest city and financial centre, but Toronto had emerged as Canada’s industrial leader.
Now, within a city and country under stress, Carrie Davies’s actions played into contemporary disquiet about the dissolution of Old World standards of behaviour. Whatever did Carrie Davies think she was doing? Was this the kind of thing that would happen if people didn’t know their place, and women were given the vote? Did Charles Albert Massey’s death presage more fundamental shifts, perhaps—at best, Canada’s evolution towards its own unique national identity; at worst, a slide into social chaos within Toronto thanks to growing numbers of immigrants?
{ CHAPTER 2 }
The Beak in the Women’s Court
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 9
THIS IS THE 189TH DAY OF THE WAR.
Today’s report notes a heavy German bombardment of Ypres.
—Evening Telegram, Tuesday, February 9, 1915
Mrs. Edward Fairchild, sister of Carrie Davies, stated this morning that the only reason that she could advance for her sister’s act was that she was in a state of nervous depression caused by the fact that all the money she earned had to be sent home.
—Toronto Daily Star
, Tuesday, February 9, 1915
The day after Bert Massey’s abrupt death dawned chilly and damp: a thick, grey layer of cloud hung low in the sky, blotting out the winter sun. Despite the biting wind that whistled down Queen Street and the slush on the sidewalk, people had been scurrying towards City Hall since dawn. This massive municipal palace, opened only sixteen years earlier, epitomized Toronto’s growing commercial muscle and expansive self-belief. Replacing a more modest building on the dirty waterfront, it had been built around a courtyard and covered a whole city block: it housed both Toronto’s City Council and the police courts, and it was close to Osgoode Hall, home of the Law Society of Upper Canada and the province’s first law school. Like a judge’s dais in a courtroom, City Hall’s imperious bulk was elevated above the street by twenty wide granite steps so that it dwarfed surrounding buildings.
But the eager court watchers were indifferent to the building’s Romanesque gargoyles, rusticated stone arches, and gigantic clock tower; they clustered on the steps and waited impatiently for one of the three large oak doorways to be unlocked. Once inside, the crowd milled around the base of the Grand Staircase, below the monumental stained-glass window that depicted (with typical Toronto braggadocio) “the Union of Commerce and Industry.” At the rear police entrance on Albert Street, eager rubberneckers stamped their feet and waited for the police wagons to arrive from the Court Street station with the previous night’s crop of arrests.
Detective Inspector Kennedy’s gloomy fears had been realized: the editors of Toronto’s six newspapers rushed to cover the bloody death of the grandson of pioneering industrialist Hart Massey. For the past few days, the front page of the Globe, the paper that served the city’s business and political elite (“Canada’s National Newspaper,” boasted its masthead), had featured exclusively war news. Today, it had a startling change of topic in column five: “C.A. Massey Killed By House Servant. Carrie Davies, Aged 18, Under Arrest. Shot At His Own Door.” The story began with a breathlessness unusual for the establishment’s favourite paper: “A murder of sensationally dramatic and personal interest took place in Walmer Road last evening …”
The Massey Murder Page 2