The Tely story went on to make outrageous claims about cutthroat competition triggered within the legal fraternity. Representatives from law offices “have camped on Carrie Davies’s trail as though she were a missing heiress. Some got past the police and visited her in the cells— so they boasted.” The newspaper even managed to find a lawyer who insisted he had “been able to visit her at the jail in the guise of ‘medical expert,’ but he couldn’t get in the place, possibly owing to the crush of other [lawyers] who wanted to get out.” The vivid (and unlikely) account of legal rivalry ended on a note of bathos: “But while the Fairchilds are thus loaded with offers of counsel, nobody has come forward with very much cash.”
Archie Fisher ended this particular article with a dramatic catalogue of questions that “had to be asked,” for which expensive expert testimony would be required:
Is Carrie Davies sane?
Can she prove it?
Is Carrie Davies innocent of the crime of murder?
Can she prove it? …
Quality rather than quantity in expert technical evidence counts, and quality costs.
The melodrama of Archie’s defence of Carrie, “a poor English girl, two years out from ‘ome, in a desperate scrape,” was matched only by some appalling verse that appeared on the same page of the Evening Telegram, two columns away, that hit the same note of British solidarity and pluck. Written by a deservedly forgotten poet named Albert E. Sleighs, it was entitled “Queen’s Own,” a reference to one of the Toronto regiments seeing action in France for the first time that week.
O, listen to the bugle call that summons men to arms,
Their King and country need them at the front;
They leave the desk and factory, they leave the town and farms,
To face the foe and bear the battle’s brunt …
Queen’s Own, Queen’s Own,
Sure a finer lot of lads were never known.
You’ve a bonnie lot of laddies,
You’ll be missed by Rose and Gladys,
When you’re fighting at the front, Queen’s Own.
They’ve made their wills and settled up and counted every cost,
Though most of them to give had only life,
But they’ll give it, give it freely and count it cheaply lost,
To help the Empire triumph in the strife.
Queen’s Own, Queen’s Own,
When you’re fighting in the cannon-roaring zone,
When you’re charging with the bayonet
And the blood of foemen stain it,
Don’t forget the slaughtered babes, Queen’s Own.
How many Tely readers, slumped at kitchen tables with the paper and a cup of tea after a long day, could resist the sentimental appeal of two parallel stories—a young girl in trouble, and the Empire imperilled? Brave boys were defending the Empire, but who was looking after poor Carrie, who had tried to protect her virtue while her boyfriend was at the front? Was she really so different from “Rose and Gladys,” who were missing their laddies at the front?
{ CHAPTER 11 }
Legal Circles
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20 TO WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24
The once vast armies of the Germans are melting away from day to day … and their feverish activity and frightful sacrifice of life shows that they know the desperate nature of their position.
—Toronto Daily News, Wednesday, February 24, 1915
]DOCTORS TO SEE CARRIE DAVIES SHE PLEADED NOT GUILTY WHEN CASE WAS OPENED THIS AFTERNOON INDICATIONS ARE THAT THE DEFENCE OFFERED WILL BE INSANITY
—Toronto Daily News, Wednesday, February 24, 1915
Carrie would never fully appreciate how lucky she was to have Herbert Hartley Dewart, KC, as her defence counsel. She was fortunate not because Dewart was already a distinguished member of the Toronto bar, but because her high-profile case was particularly enticing for him.
It was pure chance that Dewart was Carrie’s legal representative. When her brother-in-law Ed Fairchild heard from the Tely’s Archie Fisher that Carrie had been arrested, he was both horrified and helpless. What did a bricklayer know about the Ontario bar? Ed had gone to James Wickett, his employer, on the morning after the killing and asked him to recommend a lawyer. His employer scribbled down the address of a solicitor called Henry Wilberforce Maw, who handled the bread and butter of a busy legal partnership—house and land sales, wills, civil suits. Clutching the scrap of paper, Ed had then found his way to the Home Life Building, an imposing nine-storey brownstone building on the northwest corner of Adelaide and Victoria Streets, two blocks south of City Hall. There, he knocked on a door on which was painted in gold letters: “Dewart, Maw & Hodgson.” A clerk opened the door, listened to the agitated bricklayer stutter out Carrie’s sad tale, and invited Ed to wait in an outer office while he consulted Mr. Maw. After a short wait, the clerk returned and told Ed to follow him into Mr. Maw’s office. Henry Maw asked the breathless, unhappy Ed to sit down and explain what this was all about. Ed Fairchild repeated his story as Henry Maw listened, nodding gravely and silently wondering who would pay for the young woman’s defence. Nevertheless, after asking a few questions, he agreed to look into Carrie’s case, though he couldn’t make any promises.
That evening, Henry Maw had made his way to the city morgue on Lombard Street to hear Coroner Arthur Jukes Johnson open the inquest into Bert Massey’s death. Once Maw had grasped the outlines of the Carrie Davies case, he knew that his partner, who handled all courtroom work, would love this case. It touched on two sensitive issues in Dewart’s past.
Hartley Dewart was such a familiar figure around Toronto that even distant acquaintances referred to him as “Hartley.” Born in 1861 and a graduate of Toronto’s best public schools and the University of Toronto, he was shrewd enough to recognize that law was his ticket into the city’s educated elite and the stepping stone to a political career. Up until the mid-1880s, legal education in Ontario had been rudimentary, consisting of office apprenticeships, rote learning, and slavish adherence to precedents. The Law Society of Upper Canada, housed since 1829 in Osgoode Hall, the elegant Queen Street building, had sometimes offered courses of lectures, but initially shied away from requiring Ontario’s legal students to attend them. Only in 1889 was a formal three-year bachelor of laws (LL.B.) program for university graduates established. (The first school at which common law was taught in Canada was Dalhousie Law School in Halifax, which had opened in 1883.) Dewart had studied at Osgoode, but emerged from its library with sufficient qualifications to start practising two years earlier, in 1887, when he was twenty-six.
By the dawn of the twentieth century, many other ambitious young lawyers had followed Dewart’s route into the tightly woven network of Toronto lawyers, where family connections were as important as they had been in the pre-Confederation days of the Family Compact. By 1915, when Hartley Dewart had been in practice for more than a quarter of a century, the city had over 660 lawyers, of whom about a third were in solo practice. It was a homogeneous profession, dominated by men of Scottish or English origin and including only a handful of Jews. The exclusiveness of the profession was most starkly illustrated by the fact that in the Canadian Law List for the City of Toronto in 1915 there was only one woman: Clara Brett Martin. When Martin first applied to Osgoode, an outraged and deeply conservative bencher harrumphed that her admission would prove “disastrous to the best interests of women,” and that anyway, no self-respecting woman of fashion would want to wear the official robes of a litigator. It had taken a lot of courage for her to pry open Osgoode Hall’s elaborate gates. “I was looked on as an interloper, if not a curiosity,” she later wrote. She had been one of the women who lobbied for the Women’s Court at City Hall.
The city’s most prestigious lawyers had their offices in the multi-storey brownstones, built in the previous couple of decades within walking distance of City Hall, the courthouse, and the men’s clubs. The building boom had been financed by the banks, investment houses, and insurance compani
es that were doing so well. There were twenty-two law firms in the handsome Confederation Life Building, for example, and ten in the Canada Life Building. Most partnerships included only two or three lawyers, but a handful of larger and more muscular ones were already emerging, and most included at least two generations of the same family. In the Dominion Bank Building, McCarthy, Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt numbered six KCs on its brass plate and included three McCarthys and two Oslers among the nine lawyers. In the Bank of Commerce Building, Blake, Lash, Anglin & Cassels boasted three KCs among its eleven lawyers, who included three Lashes and two Casselses. These lawyers were corporate advisers and governmental confidants: their powerful connections into the provincial and federal governments, the banks, trust companies, insurance companies, and brokerage and investment houses guaranteed a steady flow of clients. Outsiders, like the Jewish partnership of Abraham Cohen & Ephraim Sugarman in the Sun Life Building, or Clara Brett Martin on Adelaide Street, rarely got a whiff of this lucrative business.
In contrast, Hartley Dewart moved comfortably through this world. He had excellent contacts: like Sir William Mulock, he was a solid Liberal with an ardent admiration for Sir Wilfrid Laurier. As a student, he had helped establish and then run the Young Men’s Liberal Club, and he had run unsuccessfully in two federal elections, in 1904 and 1911. He also shared the chief justice’s impatience with United Empire Loyalist pretensions, a belief in Canada’s future as an autonomous North American nation, and a vehement dislike of the Prohibition movement. Dewart often displayed an Irish skepticism about the benefits of the British Empire.
At social events, you always knew where Hartley was in the crowd—he was wherever people were chuckling. Now fifty-four, he was charming, with a jaunty youthfulness and dry humour. He remained active within his alma mater as an examiner in English and a member of the university senate. His name remained in play as a possible candidate for either the provincial legislature or the federal Parliament. Strangers liked him—he was once described in Saturday Night magazine as “one of the most genial and popular young men in Toronto.”
Hartley Dewart’s colleagues all agreed that he was a sharp-witted lawyer, and the partnership of Dewart, Maw & Hodgson thrived. Even by the standards of the period, its client list was particularly rich. Dewart, the senior partner, acted in both criminal and civil cases. He was counsel to several banks and insurance companies, and to both the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Toronto Railway Company. His success had allowed him to purchase a farm near Uxbridge and a spacious mansion at 5 Elmsley Place, close to the university and surrounded by elm trees. He and his wife, Emma, filled their homes with a magnificent collection of antiques, including several paintings by William Hogarth and a huge oak four-poster bed in which Queen Elizabeth I was said to have slept. The Toronto Golf Club, the Toronto Hunt Club, the Ontario Club, and the Toronto Club had all welcomed him as a member. It was a well-upholstered life.
Yet by 1915, unrealized ambitions and his fondness for the bottle were beginning to sour Dewart. Those closer to the tall, lean, elegantly dressed lawyer had always known he had an irascible streak under the boyish charm, and he could be ornery, especially when he had a drink in his hand and a bee in his bonnet. He refused to toe party lines when his party endorsed temperance, and his disdain for imperialism didn’t sit well with fellow Liberals. In court or political debate, people pulled away from him when he became pugnacious and uncompromising. He and his wife were childless, almost certainly not by choice. And he had never escaped the shadow of a famous father—a controversial Methodist clergyman who had crossed swords with the mighty Methodist extraordinaire, Hart Massey.
Hartley’s father, Edward Hartley Dewart, was an Irish-born convert to Methodism who had become an ordained preacher in Upper Canada when he was in his twenties. The Reverend Dewart epitomized nineteenth-century Methodism at its most rigid and repressive. Eyes blazing and broad forehead gleaming in the candlelight of small stone churches, he exhorted fellow Methodists to seek salvation and abjure free thinking, sin, and whiskey. He also promoted Canadian literature, publishing one of the very first anthologies of Canadian verse in 1864. Five years later, he was named editor of the official Methodist newspaper, the Christian Guardian, which was required reading in thousands of Canadian households. But his editorials grew increasingly grumpy and conservative over the next thirty years. Dewart Senior thundered against the insidious creep of modern thinking, which questioned Old Testament prophets and Biblical certainties. One of his contemporaries described how Edward Hartley Dewart “rained sledge-hammer blows [of] argument” upon opponents. The young Herbert Hartley Dewart was a smoother debater than his father, and he had cast off the Reverend Dewart’s aversion to alcohol. But he had inherited his father’s rhetorical passion, as well as his desire to see Canada develop as an independent nation.
Dewart Senior’s fight with Hart Massey erupted in 1888, over the future of Victoria College, Ontario’s most important Methodist educational establishment. At the time, Victoria College occupied an elegant Greek Revival building in the middle of the little lakeside port of Cobourg, one hundred kilometres east of Toronto. Founded in 1836 as an egalitarian challenge to the Anglican upper crust of Toronto, it boasted celebrated divines such as Egerton Ryerson and Nathanael Burwash among its principals. But by the 1880s it had fallen on hard times, and in the Christian Guardian the Reverend Dewart argued that the college should move to Toronto and become part of the University of Toronto federation of colleges that William Mulock was then promoting. For Edward Dewart, the transfer would boost the Methodist crusade against immorality: Methodism would reinforce the right values in the dangerously open-minded atmosphere of university life. “No modern culture,” Dewart argued, “can be safely substituted for the fire and faith of the early Methodists.”
However, another faction of powerful Methodists, including Hart Massey, regarded the proposed move as an Anglican takeover of the school. The ruthless patriarch of the farm machinery business tried to block it by offering $250,000 ($7.5 million in today’s currency) to keep Victoria College in Cobourg. Despite the dangled donation, the move went ahead—but not before the Toronto press had savaged all Methodists, including both Hart Massey and Hartley Dewart Senior. A vicious series in the Toronto World alleged that Dewart had supported Massey in a ruthless stock deal years earlier, in the hope of receiving financial donations to the Christian Guardian. Dewart was outraged: he and the Masseys had been on opposing sides of the Victoria College battle, and now his name had been dragged through the mud. The Dewarts did not forget.
The Carrie Davies case offered Hartley Dewart, KC, a chance to settle an old score with the Masseys.
There was another reason why Carrie’s case had a particular attraction for Hartley Dewart. It reminded him of a notorious murder case in which he had been involved twenty years earlier, when he was a junior Crown counsel and a brilliant defence lawyer called Ebenezer Forsyth Blackie Johnston had run rings around the Crown.
This was the case of Clara Ford, a sturdy black seamstress who in 1895 had confessed to killing the son of a wealthy Toronto family. Dewart had watched with astonishment as the senior Crown prosecutor, the well-regarded Britton Bath Osler, floundered on what everyone thought was an open-and-shut case. Osler was a hero in Anglo-Protestant Toronto: he was the lawyer who had successfully prosecuted Louis Riel a decade earlier. As the dignified, courteous Mr. Osler laid out the evidence against Clara Ford, her chances of avoiding the noose seemed slim. She pleaded not guilty, but she had confessed to the murder, and she shocked observers with her refusal to display the feminine delicacy expected of women. In fact, she was downright aggressive. Before her trial, rumours had spread about her penchant for wearing men’s clothes, brandishing a gun, and getting into fights. One newspaper asserted that she jumped onto streetcars “like a man,” another hinted that she liked eating raw meat, and racist and sexist innuendoes reverberated in references to her “African blood” and checkered past.
Yet
Dewart saw the Crown’s case slipping away in the face of Blackie Johnston’s adroit performance. Despite Clara Ford’s confession, Johnston made her the heroine of a powerful tale. Ford, in his version, was a poor girl who had been wronged by a rich villain, and then forced into a false confession by unscrupulous detectives who were only interested in advancing their own careers. Johnston demonstrated his own selflessness and chivalry by offering to represent her without fees. Clara’s new image, as a penniless woman who had been mistreated by an upper-class rake and was now on trial for her life, excited a groundswell of sympathy amongst Toronto’s working classes. Popular distaste for a cross-dressing immigrant who swore like a trooper was forgotten, and Clara became the victim, claiming that a big-city detective had “kept repeating I was in a net … The more I denied, the more he pressed me to confess. At last, I said I did it.”
Osler struggled to make the charge stick, but Johnston was unstoppable. And then the inexperienced Dewart found himself taking on Blackie Johnston in person. Osler’s wife suddenly died halfway through the trial, so Osler’s junior had to stand up and conduct the case for the Crown. Dewart spent three hours cross-examining Clara in the hope of poking holes in the new story of the “forced” confession. But it was in vain. He was followed by Johnston at full throttle, the latter reminding the jury in his closing remarks that the jury must return a verdict of “murder or nothing.” Johnston asked the twelve men if they were prepared to accept the awful responsibility of sending a poor, wronged woman to the gallows. The jury acquitted Clara.
People have always been fascinated by violent crimes. And Blackie Johnston was in the great tradition of barristers, on both sides of the Atlantic, who deliberately played into that public fascination.
For years, British barristers had charted the intersection of murder and popular culture and treated courtrooms as theatres in which they enacted dramas. Nineteenth-century lawyers had plenty of material to draw on, as real-life events morphed into crowd-pleasing melodrama. The story of Eliza Fenning, a cook in London, was a typical example. When Fenning was convicted of poisoning her employers and hanged in 1815, as many as forty-five thousand watched her execution outside Newgate prison. Eliza’s story re-emerged in 1844 as a play entitled The Maid, the Master and the Murderer. In 1858, the outlines of Fenning’s case reappeared in a story by Wilkie Collins published in Charles Dickens’s magazine Household Words. Dickens himself, who frequently attended executions, titillated his readers with gruesome murders in short stories and in several of his novels, notably Oliver Twist. By the 1890s, readers were hooked on murders, especially when the villains were identified by fiendishly clever fictional detectives like Sherlock Holmes (who had made his first appearance in 1887). Fictional accounts of murders featured stock characters—innocent maidens, untrustworthy foreigners, helpless women, honest workmen, or wealthy cads. Defence lawyers used versions of these one-dimensional stereotypes in the narratives they shaped for juries.
The Massey Murder Page 16