Local papers thrived, pulling isolated market towns and scattered farm families together into communities with their own heroes, habits, opinions, and rituals. By the 1880s, for example, the town of Port Hope, on the shore of Lake Ontario, had a population of about six thousand and no fewer than three papers, each a mouthpiece for its proprietor’s political views. These community papers were regularly put out of business by deaths, debts, or libel suits. But new ones always sprang up in their place, with owners eager to air their views.
As the twentieth century approached, and the Toronto newspaper market expanded, new technology changed the look and the economics of newspapers. They could now feature photos, thanks to photogravure. Keyboard-operated Rogers Typograph machines allowed one man to work as fast as three manual typesetters. The enormous, clanking new presses churned out papers for mass circulation, but they required proprietors with deep pockets. So big-city papers like the Globe or the Tely had wealthier owners, as well as more pages and readers, than the scruffy small-town rags. Yet they were equally partisan, with editorial pages skewed to Conservative or Liberal opinion.
The Tely’s success was due to the knuckle-dusting commitment of its founder, John Ross Robertson, to produce a Conservative newspaper that appealed to “the masses not the classes.” He regarded “quality” papers like the Globe and the Mail and Empire as hopelessly stuffy, feeding their readers lengthy reports of parliamentary debates and indigestible, partisan editorials on national politics. The Tely was enthralling: it gave its readers punchy stories from city council, police courts, sports events, hospitals, high-life soirees, and low-life streets. Reporters combed downtown hotel registers for scandals; drunks hauled up before Colonel Denison’s court were named in the Tely’s columns. And the paper shone a light on municipal corruption by printing details of city contracts, so readers could decide whether their local taxes were being wasted. The paper’s appeal went far beyond Toronto’s rapidly expanding working class: it was soon the second paper in professional households. In the words of a contemporary writer, the paper was an “institution … read by every one from the fashionable belle in her boudoir to Biddy in the basement!”
The size of the Evening Telegram’s circulation attracted the most classified ads of any paper, and these money-spinners occupied the front pages of the paper, spilling into a further two pages in a sixteen-page issue, and a whopping five or six pages in the fat, twenty-eight-page Saturday Tely. “Business and Residential Properties” (for sale or rent) were plastered over the eight columns of page one, followed by columns of “Properties Wanted,” “Lost Items,” “Found Items,” “Unfurnished Rooms,” “Furnished Rooms,” “Business Chances,” “Wanted—Male Help,” “Wanted—Female Help,” “Domestic Help,” “Employment Wanted,” “Situations Wanted, “ “Articles for Sale,” “For Sale or Exchange,” “Motor Cars,” “Articles Wanted,” and “Personals.” The front page often included an eye-catching display advertisement for a fashionable new product like Shredded Wheat (“A Canadian Food for Canadians”) or Royal Vinolia Vanishing Cream (“for those who dislike the sticky, grimy feeling of the usual cream.”) Above the fold on the right-hand side of the page there was a cartoon, featuring Colonel Denison, Prime Minister Borden, John Bull, or some other instantly recognizable target of satire. The paper also grabbed the lion’s share of splashy display ads from the new department stores of Timothy Eaton and Robert Simpson. The Montreal Standard reported that when Robertson’s five o’clock edition of the Tely appeared, it was “One of the sights of Toronto … literally hundreds of men on the streets seizing copies as they came out to read the Want Ads.” The paper made its proprietor money—a lot of it—almost from the first day.
The Telegram promulgated views that were bigoted even by the standards of the time. Like Colonel Denison, John Ross Robertson was convinced that Canada’s role within the British Empire was the Dominion’s most important feature, and the only defence against annexation by Uncle Sam. A stocky man with a goatee beard who was perpetually in a hurry, Robertson had been born in 1841 in a Toronto that was an unpretentious town of brick rowhouses, where the cobbled streets rang with English, Scottish, or Irish accents. The Robertsons themselves claimed impeccable Scottish heritage—direct descent from Duncan, born in 1347, chief (according to John Ross Robertson) of the Struan Robertson clan. Now Robertson found himself in a thrusting metropolis of company headquarters housed in steel-framed and marble-pillared skyscrapers, where you could hear Polish, Yiddish, and Italian alongside English on the paved roads around City Hall. Like Colonel Denison, Robertson didn’t hide his antipathy to people from backgrounds different from his own, and he directed particular venom towards French Canadians and Roman Catholics. In September 1885, when Quebecers rioted in Montreal at the prospect of Louis Riel being hanged for leading the Northwest Rebellion, the Telegram’s proprietor had editorialized that Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald should “throw the French overboard.” A ferociously proud member of both the Orange Order (the fraternal Protestant organization) and the Masons, Robertson announced that it was time French Canadians understood that Canada was “a British colony, and that British laws, British customs and British language must prevail.”
For over thirty years, Robertson’s verbal fusillades appeared in the columns of the paper he owned. He had also spent some years as a member of Parliament in Ottawa: ornery as ever, he had run as Independent Conservative. By 1915, he was a seventy-four-year-old millionaire press baron in a three-piece suit, watch chain, and spats who didn’t hesitate to express fervent affection for the British monarchy and implacable hostility towards women’s suffrage.
These days, his devotion to the Masonic Order, patronage of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, and collections of historical memorabilia took most of his time, and others wrote his editorials. But he continued to keep tight control over the Evening Telegram, although his alter ego, editor Jack Robinson, ran the paper day to day. Robinson didn’t share his boss’s dapper style and was never part of Toronto’s privileged elite: he was a large, ungainly man, and his rumpled suits, quipped an associate, looked as though they were made in a tent factory. But “Black Jack,” as he was known on account of his thick thatch of dark hair, was as noisy and forceful as the boss he had served for twenty-seven years, and equally committed to temperance, the Orange Order, and the Tely. One of his Tely reporters described Black Jack as “A splendid bigot. And he believed in being a bigot.”
The newspaper locked in competition with the Tely for readers among the new British blue-collar immigrants was the Toronto Daily Star. This younger publication had a very different history. Originally established in 1892 by a group of printers who had been locked out in a labour dispute at another paper, the Star’s early years had been rocky. In 1899, it was bought by a group of influential Toronto businessmen who had decided that the city needed a staunchly Liberal evening newspaper to counter the influence of Robertson’s Tory Tely. The group included some of Toronto’s commercial heavy hitters: department store owner Timothy Eaton, Peter Larkin (founder of the Salada Tea Company), William Christie (head of the Christie, Brown biscuit company), George Cox (former president of Canada’s biggest bank, the Bank of Commerce, and now a Liberal senator). There were three more members of this elite little band of financiers whose influence would reverberate, explicitly or implicitly, through the Carrie Davies case sixteen years later. One was William Mulock, at the time a Liberal cabinet minister. The other two were the most important men in the Massey-Harris farm implement company: managing director Lyman Melvin-Jones and company president Walter E.H. Massey, Hart Massey’s son—and Bert Massey’s uncle.
This small, wealthy (and largely Methodist) clique of Liberals offered the job of editor and manager to an ambitious young newspaperman called Joseph Atkinson. Like Walter Massey, Atkinson was a Methodist who had started life in the little lakeside town of Newcastle. The similarities ended there: unlike the Masseys, the Atkinson family lived hand to mouth, and Joe�
��s widowed mother had run a boarding house for workers in Massey’s iron foundry.
A keen-eyed, clean-shaven thirty-four-year-old with a penchant for checkered suits, Joe Atkinson insisted that he should have total editorial freedom. At first, Senator Cox and Minister William Mulock were apoplectic at the idea: why would any smart politician invest in a news outlet over which they had no control? But their fellow investors, and Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier himself, persuaded the two men to accept Atkinson’s terms since they were all confident that their new employee’s loyalties lay firmly with the Liberal Party. Despite the paper’s big-business ownership, Joe Atkinson fought off political interference and insisted that the Toronto Daily Star was, as he repeatedly said, the champion of the “little people.” The co-owner who backed Atkinson through thick and thin, with both financial and moral support, was Walter Massey. “I know the other shareholders haven’t much interest in the paper any more,” he told his editor soon after Atkinson was appointed. “But you and I will see it through its troubles.”
Over at the Tely, John Ross Robertson regarded with skepticism Atkinson’s much-vaunted “editorial independence.” The Star’s slogan was “A Newspaper Not an Organ,” but Robertson told everybody in earshot that it should read “An Organ Not a Newspaper” because, he said, it was just a mouthpiece for plutocratic owners like the Masseys.
The only thing the two papers had in common was their determination to recruit working-class readers. Otherwise, they were poles apart. The Tely stuck to classified ads at the front of the paper: the Star followed modern practice and put news on page one. While John Ross Robertson’s Telegram took swipes at rail barons and the provincial government, Joe Atkinson’s Star portrayed the world as a place of progress, where business was enlightened, workers had rights, and government worked in everybody’s interests. While the Tely continued its anti-Laurier, anti-American, pro-Empire campaigns, the Star endorsed Laurier’s Liberal platform, which included free trade with the United States, Canadian nationalism, an aggressive immigration policy (limited, however, to Europeans), and support for labour unions. The Star did not share the Tely’s casual anti-Semitism: in 1906, the Star noted that in the past five years Jewish newsboys had almost totally displaced boys of British origin. “They are a better class and easier to handle than newsboys used to be. They are also more trustworthy … The street sales of The Star fall off 1,500 to 2,000 on Jewish holidays.” By contrast, the Tely would no more have praised Jewish work habits than it would have recommended Irish home rule or endorsed the campaign to give women the vote.
From 1899 onwards, the battle lines were drawn. The Tely spoke with the voice of Old Canadians and for Crown, Union Jack, and British immigration. The Star did not question the pervasive pride of Empire, but it added to the mix a note of vigorous Canadian nationalism: its reporters rode on immigrant trains to the west and ate with railway construction crews in their camps. The clash of visions resonated far beyond Toronto’s King Street, where both papers were printed. In 1909, when Britain requested support from Canada for the expansion of the British navy, the Telegram led the chorus of approval for granting the request while the Star backed the Laurier government’s proposal to build a Canadian navy. For the next half century, as Canada struggled to define itself as a nation, there would be skirmishes between Conservative loyalty to British traditions and Liberal support for a more inclusive, autonomous country. The two Toronto newspapers embodied this tension.
The most dramatic clashes usually erupted over Toronto issues. The Star championed the widening of Yonge Street; the Tely opposed it. The Star lobbied the city to acquire the frontage on Lake Ontario; the Tely accused its rival of representing the business interests that would benefit. In 1909, the Star led the campaign to have Toronto’s water supply chlorinated and filtered. The Telegram refused to join the crusade until typhoid fever spread the following year. Behind the rhetoric, both the Telegram and the Star spoke for powerful capitalist interests. They would take opposite sides, for instance, in 1910, when two different consortia vied for control of Toronto’s streetcar and street-lighting systems. It was no coincidence that, in each case, the newspapers’ proprietors were personal friends with the men who ran the consortia.
The early years of rivalry between the Star and the Tely were amicable: John Ross Robertson regarded Atkinson and the upstart paper with benign amusement. The proprietor of the Tely was a generation older than the editor of the Star, and although he still considered himself an outsider in Toronto social circles, he belonged to clubs to which this self-educated son of a small-town miller would never be admitted. Besides, the Star’s circulation in 1900 was less than 7,000, compared to the Telegram’s 25,144. When Robertson met Atkinson on King Street, he would ask, “Well, Joe, is it paying yet?” When the Star’s editor replied, “No, it is not,” the old man would guffaw and tell Atkinson to give up the struggle and join the staff of a paper with a real readership.
But one day, Atkinson answered, “Yes, it paid last month.” In 1906, the Star’s circulation topped 37,000 copies a day, overtaking the Telegram’s, and John Ross Robertson and Black Jack Robinson were no longer laughing. Only the Globe, with a circulation of 50,000, outsold the Star within the city. By 1913, the Star had the city’s largest readership, and Joe Atkinson, who had been steadily buying up the stock owned by the original investors, was the controlling shareholder. Walter Massey had sold his stock to Atkinson several years earlier, cementing the editor’s independence.
In the next few years, the papers indulged in a price war as competition for readers and advertisers grew vicious. Toronto’s paper wars followed the pattern established in New York, where Joseph Pulitzer’s World and William Randolph Hearst’s Journal went flat out to steal readers from each other with screaming headlines, breathless stories, gaudy comic strips, the latest fiction, sports news, and women’s pages. Joe Atkinson was particularly good at dreaming up schemes that encouraged Star readers to enjoy a sense of shared goals. In 1906, the paper founded its Santa Claus Fund (still a feature today), with the goal of ensuring that no child under thirteen was overlooked at Christmas. In 1912, during another typhoid outbreak, the Star sponsored a “Swat the Fly” contest in an attempt to reduce the spread of disease from garbage to food. A girl called Beatrice Webb collected the prize after killing 543,360 flies.
In this fevered battle to entertain, the Carrie Davies case was irresistible to penny-press editors looking for sensational headlines. Stories of assaults on young women always increased circulation, and how many Toronto citizens could walk past a newsboy who yelled, “Massey Murder”? Only a decade earlier, Montreal newspapers had made such a meal of the murder of a young girl that one publisher remarked that the papers “were hardly fit to be picked up with a pair of tongs.” No Toronto newspaper would ignore Carrie’s case, but the Evening Telegram and the Toronto Daily Star were the papers that devoted the most column inches to the murder of a Massey by his maid.
At the Telegram, John Ross Robertson and Black Jack knew that Bert Massey’s death put their main rival in an uncomfortable situation—a dilemma that revealed the social and class divisions within the Anglo-Canadian population of Toronto. Even though Walter Massey no longer held shares in the Star, the paper owed its success in part to Massey money, and Joe Atkinson must have felt some vestigial loyalty. Could Atkinson walk away from the corpse on the sidewalk, even if the slick car salesman Bert Massey had little appeal to a working-class readership?
Black Jack Robinson had no time for the Star’s editor: he called Atkinson “Whispering Joe” because he considered him so devious. The Tely could use the Carrie Davies case to paint the Star as a Massey mouthpiece. Meanwhile, the Tely could pursue a much more enticing storyline: the predicament of a helpless young English woman who had been assaulted by a member of one of Toronto’s leading families. Even though there was no doubt Carrie had fired the gun, or that Bert Massey had met a brutal and untimely death, Robertson and his editor decided the Telegram w
ould go to bat for the shooter. Helpless little Carrie Davies, the soldier’s daughter from the Motherland, would be treated as a working-class heroine. The Tely’s printing presses, housed in a massive four-storey building with plate-glass windows at the corner of King and Bay Streets, would clank into action on her behalf.
One of the Tely editor’s first steps had been to put Archibald McIntosh Fisher, one of his sharpest and most persistent reporters, on Carrie’s case. With black eyes flickering under dark brows and a cigarette hanging from his lip, Archie was known in the Tely newsroom as “The Crow,” because of his hooked nose and the long black overcoat he wore winter and summer. Archie was extremely good at ferreting out information (as he had proved by finding the Fairchilds the night of the shooting), then returning to the Tely’s offices and whispering it into Black Jack’s ear. Once on a story, he kept it moving faster than any other reporter in the city. The interview with Mary Ethel Massey, in which she came across as snobbish and sly, was a triumph of Archie’s style.
Next, Robertson and Robinson watched how the rest of the Toronto press was handling the Walmer Road shooting. After a week, the upmarket morning papers had decided that a crime committed by an underage servant girl was not a major event. War news took up all the front pages.
The Globe even had a major scoop on Monday, February 15: “Several aeroplanes make a raid into the dominion of Canada,” read its big, black headline. “Entire City of Ottawa in Darkness, Fearing Bomb-droppers.” The story reflected the xenophobic paranoia that was building in the Dominion. Although many Canadians of non-British origin had volunteered to fight for the Empire, they were branded as “alien suspects” and sent home from the Salisbury training camp. Hundreds of German and Austro-Hungarian Canadians were now being rounded up and marched into internment camps. Canadians were also growing nervous of the eight million Germans who had settled in the U.S. and were said to sympathize with the Kaiser. In January, the British consul in Los Angeles had warned that German sympathizers were planning attacks on Port Arthur, Fort William, and Winnipeg. Then, the British consul general in New York claimed that German Americans in Chicago and Buffalo were preparing cross-border offensives. Vivid imaginations fed wild rumours, and Prime Minister Borden was so unsettled that he requested a report on the invasion stories from the Canadian police commissioner.
The Massey Murder Page 11