By now, even the mild-mannered Canadian prime minister had had enough. Sir Robert Borden was no longer prepared to give unquestioned deference to the mother country’s needs and was increasingly exasperated by the lack of Canadian input into British military strategy. Did Westminster regard colonials as simply cannon fodder in the desolate landscapes of northern France? Borden expressed Canadian frustration at a meeting of the Imperial War Cabinet in London in June 1918. After a furious description of the ineptitude of British generals, he strode across the room and announced that no more Canadian soldiers would cross the Atlantic if such incompetence continued. When peace came five months later, Borden insisted that Canada sign the Treaty of Versailles in her own right, and take her own seat at both the new League of Nations and the International Labour Organization.
The war had been transformational: a different country was emerging in the northern half of North America. Thousands of families had lost loved ones: more than sixty thousand Canadian soldiers, airmen, and nursing sisters were dead. Every third man in uniform had been mutilated in mind or body: every tenth man had been killed. Bert Massey’s half-brother, Lieutenant Clifton Manbank Horsey, was killed in 1916 at St. Eloi and was buried in a military cemetery in Belgium. George Taylor Denison Jr., the forty-eight-year-old son of Colonel George Denison, died on May 8, 1917, after being wounded a month earlier at Vimy Ridge. There was no sudden “Birth of a Nation” moment, as the troops went over the top at St. Eloi, or Vimy, or Passchendaele. There was no suggestion that Canada was still anything but the most loyal as well as the oldest dominion in the British Empire. But there was now daylight between Ottawa and Westminster.
People whose families had crossed the Atlantic from the British Isles began to rethink their identity and define themselves as “Canadians.” The survivors of the bloodbaths of the Somme or Vimy Ridge came home with a new pride in their own as well as the mother country. Raw-boned Canadian lads, working alongside British troops as they tunnelled, charged, fired, bayonetted, or flew, had discovered that Canadians were different and were just as good on the battlefield as more experienced men. Harold Innis, who would become one of the country’s most renowned historians, wrote a thesis on “The Returned Soldier” while recovering in Surrey from wounds sustained at Vimy. He stammered out his personal mission and his burgeoning Canadian nationalism: “Work, work of brain and of brawn, co-operation, organization and determination to heal the sores … and to start again along the lines of sound national progress, is the hope of the Canadian people … that she may take her place among the nations of the world for the privilege of which her best blood had been shed.”
Even in Toronto, the centre of Canada’s Anglo-Celtic culture, a new generation began to feel the stirrings of a pro-Canadian sentiment. Such sentiment did not translate into greater tolerance of immigrants from non-British backgrounds: in August 1918, returned soldiers smashed fifteen restaurants in downtown Toronto that were suspected of employing enemy aliens rather than veterans. For seven days, there were repeated clashes between police and civilians, and although there were many arrests, most charges were dismissed. Nevertheless, the “Britishers” who had cheered the little girl from Sandy were now starting to define Canada as home and were eager to inject their own values into their country. They wanted a Canada where a wealthy elite could not expect unquestioning deference, and where men with diamond stick pins did not take advantage of eighteen-year-old servants.
At the same time, another seismic shift in attitudes was occurring close to the surface of Toronto society. For four years on the home front, women had played a vigorous and visible part in the war effort. In the early months of the war, the first duty of women was to allow loved ones to serve the Empire, but that soon ramped up into a fever of knitting to provide soldiers with socks, gloves, and scarves. The Toronto Patriotic League reported: “Lonely women on farms are knitting long into the night. Society women take their knitting to theatres and concert halls. Everywhere women have got back to their needles.”
Soon, women’s participation in the war effort took them into less traditional activities. Campaigns to increase recruitment of able-bodied men became increasingly aggressive: by 1918, approximately three out of every four Toronto men had offered to serve. Women from all walks of life began fundraising not just for hospital ships and motor ambulances, but for front-line weaponry. While hundreds of working-class servants braver than Carrie untied their aprons and signed up to work in munitions and aircraft factories, middle-class women slid into typically male white-collar jobs, such as bank clerks. The women shared a sense of public purpose they had never felt before.
In July 1916, three and a half thousand women crowded into Massey Hall for a rally to discuss how much more they might do to support the war effort. As knitting needles clicked throughout the hall, representatives of women’s organizations urged the audience to set free every available man. One of the most inspiring speakers was the Toronto Council of Women’s Mrs. Florence Huestis. “We are not looking for women to replace men permanently; we are not looking for a position that a returned soldier could fill; we are not looking for a position that an unfit man holds; but we are looking for positions that are held by men who ought to be in khaki.”
At the 1918 Canadian National Exhibition, on the shores of Lake Ontario, women gave demonstrations of handling tractors, lathing fence posts, and operating heavy machinery. A model tent field hospital had been set up, and, undeterred by drenching rain, nurses and female ambulance drivers displayed their medical competence. The News reporter caught the novelty of the show, as he described how the women “seemed to typify the spirit of the new age … They did not seem like the same women of a year or two ago … To many a man in the audience it was a new phase of womanly character which might never have been seen had it not been for the war.”
The campaign to give Canadian women the vote had begun well before the outbreak of war. The fiery orator Nellie McClung had led the fight in the west, and by 1916 women in all three Prairie provinces had won the right to vote in provincial elections. However, activists in the Ontario capital had to deal with more entrenched resistance. In 1909, Ontario Premier Sir James Whitney brushed aside a petition for female suffrage signed by a hundred thousand women with a dismissive “Not now.” Once Canada was at war, politicians were not alone in continuing to say, “Not now.” In 1916, the Women’s Patriotic League announced that efforts to win the vote for women should wait until the end of hostilities.
Leaders like Mrs. Huestis refused to be deterred. Why should women not be treated as equals when the war efforts depended on their labour outside the home and their formidable organizational achievements in fundraising and recruitment campaigns? Out in Alberta, McClung put the issue most concisely: “After you have driven your own car, will you be content to drive an ox in a Red River cart?” Finally, in 1917, nurses serving at the front and those with close relatives in the forces were given the right to vote. Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden had made this concession for Machiavellian rather than feminist reasons. He calculated that these women would vote in favour of his commitment to conscription and outweigh the votes of conscription critics in Quebec. But once the door was open, there was no turning back. The following year, the right to vote in federal elections was widened to include most Canadian women.
By war’s end, the balance of power between men and women had shifted, and women of all classes were no longer content to stay at the margins of public life. Returning soldiers found that most working-class women clung to factory jobs when they could, rather than return to dark basement kitchens, dirty fireplaces, and derisory wages. Women had proved they were more than helpless creatures in need of protection. They were not “little girls,” and they began to demand rights, not simple chivalry. It would take three-quarters of a century and a revolution in social attitudes before abused women were given explicit protection in the law, but Carrie Davies’s acquittal had hinted at the changes to come.
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The Later Years
What of Carrie Davies herself, in this social turmoil? Did she take a new position as a parlour maid? Did she risk German torpedoes and cross the Atlantic to visit her mother in the Bedfordshire village of Sandy? The Toronto newspapers were too busy following the horrors of war to keep track of her. Within a few days of the trial, she had slipped back into the shadows that envelope women like her. There is no trace of her in Toronto street directories, newspaper libraries, or obituaries.
However, in the early 1980s, an energetic Toronto Star reporter managed to track Carrie Davies down. Frank Jones had decided to write a novel about the case, and an acquaintance suggested he contact a Carrie Brown of Huttonville, a farming community a few kilometres west of Brampton, a city about fifty kilometres to the northwest of Toronto. It was the same Carrie, but when Jones called the number he had been given, he discovered that she had died two decades earlier, leaving a son and a daughter, Margaret Grainger. He arrived at the daughter’s door with some trepidation. “Death can cast a long shadow,” he recalls thinking. He was right to tread carefully. To his surprise, he discovered that Carrie had never told her children what had happened when she was eighteen. Jones described to an astonished Margaret the events of 1915 and showed her photocopies of all the newspaper stories. After Margaret had taken it all in, she quietly wept. “She had such a hard, hard life,” she told Jones.
Margaret was able to fill in some of the blanks, although she said her mother had never talked much about the war years. Carrie had returned to England and tried nursing, but found the sight of blood too upsetting to continue. By 1917, she was back in Canada, where she met and married Charles Brown, an Englishman a few years older than she was. The Browns struggled to make a living from a succession of farms in the Huttonville area, but the wolf was never far from the door. Charles tried to get a roofing business established, while Carrie cared for a market garden and worked as a school caretaker.
As Margaret described her mother to Frank Jones, she emphasized Carrie’s constant effort to help others, particularly young girls in a jam. “My girlfriend’s sister was always getting into trouble and Mother was always so sympathetic towards her … And I never understood why.” One of Carrie’s final jobs before her death was as a house mother at the Cedarvale Home for Wayward Girls in nearby Georgetown.
Carrie kept her secret. But Frank Jones’s revelation did explain to her daughter one anomaly in the life that the former domestic servant had fashioned for herself. After Carrie’s death, her children checked the brief trail of paperwork she had left. She had always said that her birth-date was April 28, 1900—the date on her passport. But her birth certificate showed she was born April 28, 1897. She had quietly eradicated three years from her life—probably her first three years in Toronto.
Thirty years later, with Frank Jones’s generous help, I reached out to Margaret, who was now ninety-one years old and living with her own daughter, a teacher in the Toronto area. I explained to Margaret’s daughter what I was doing, and asked if I might speak to Carrie’s daughter. I was told that Margaret had been unable to bring herself to read Frank Jones’s novel, Master and Maid: The Charles Massey Murder, and she did not want to speak to me.
Some stories are too painful—even after nearly a century.
The Massey family continued to regard the verdict rendered on February 27, 1915, as a miscarriage of justice. Shocked to see the Massey name linked with depravity rather than philanthropy, in the years ahead they rarely mentioned the violent death on Walmer Road. When they did, Bert’s death was firmly labelled a “murder.” But the two branches of the family—the descendants of Charles Albert, Hart Massey’s eldest son, and the wealthier descendants of Hart’s younger sons, Chester and Walter—went their separate ways.
In the short term, Bert’s widow, Rhoda, faced a difficult issue: How long could she afford to continue living on Walmer Road? Her husband had taken out some life insurance, but when the will was read, she discovered she and young Charlie had only $8,441.20 in the world. And she knew that the more illustrious Masseys, in their Yonge Street mansions, were unlikely to extend a helping hand.
Rhoda Massey never remarried. Sometime after her death in 1957, a simple marble monument marking the “other” Massey grave was finally erected in Mount Pleasant Cemetery. The inscription reads, “In Loving Memory,” and on the left-hand side, “Charles Albert Massey, Aug. 5, 1880–Feb. 8, 1915 / His Wife Frances Rhoda Vandegrift, Jan. 17, 1880–Jan. 19, 1957.” On the right-hand side lie Bert’s older brother, “Arthur Lyman Massey, Feb. 6, 1874–Feb. 17, 1936 / His Wife Mary Ethel Bonnell, May 21, 1875–Nov. 7, 1951.”
Bert and Rhoda’s son, Charles Albert Massey, emerged apparently unscathed from the family scandal that had erupted when he was fourteen. Seven years later, after attending the University of Toronto, he graduated at the head of his class at Osgoode Law School and won the Chancellor Van Koughnet Scholarship and gold medal. The Toronto Star noted that the good-looking young man, dark hair swept straight back from his broad brow, was “son of the late C.A. Massey and great grandson of the late Hart A. Massey.” Two years later, Charles Massey married into hockey royalty in a lavish ceremony at St. Paul’s Anglican Church, Bloor Street. The bride, Audrey Hewitt, was the daughter of William Hewitt, sports editor of the Star and “very well known in the sporting world [who] managed the victorious Canadian Olympic hockey team.” Charles’s new brother-in-law was Foster Hewitt, who became the Ron MacLean of his day—a CBC hockey commentator with an instantly recognizable voice.
Charles Massey practised law for only five years. He would later tell a reporter that, every time he had a court case, he suffered from nervous indigestion and ringing in his ears. “I couldn’t make a living as a lawyer,” he admitted; he found the courtroom experience too stressful. He went on to become president of Lever Brothers of Canada, one of Canada’s “youngest and most successful top executives.” The Tely reporter who wrote the glowing profile of this successful businessman did not mention the Massey family history, nor the court case that had sullied the Massey reputation and perhaps triggered Charles Massey’s panic. It was all too long ago.
In 1950, Charles Massey (now tagged “Canada’s soap king”) joined the board of Lever Brothers U.S. A member of the Conservative Party, the Toronto Club, the Toronto Hunt Club, and the Royal Canadian Yacht Club, he had been quietly absorbed into the Canadian establishment. His cousin (and lifelong Liberal) Vincent Massey served as the country’s first Canadian-born governor general between 1952 and 1959, but no correspondence between the two men has survived in Vincent Massey’s papers.
The other individuals involved in the Carrie Davies case all continued on the trajectories on which they were already set in 1915.
Hartley Dewart finally won a Liberal seat in the Ontario legislature in a by-election in August 1916. At first, he seemed bound for political prominence: his eloquence and debating skills were unparalleled. But he was just too ornery. He opposed both conscription and Prohibition, causing splits within his party, and his withering wit offended colleagues. Although he took the helm of the Ontario Liberals in 1919, as Opposition leader, he was denounced by the Toronto Star (usually a rock-solid supporter of all Liberals) and by his own MPPs. His abstemious Methodist father would have been appalled to read the Christian Guardian’s description of the younger Dewart as the “chief representative of the liquor interests in the legislature.”
The Star supported Prohibition, so perhaps that is why the newspaper turned against Dewart. But in his memoirs, newspaperman J.H. Cranston gives another reason. Joe Atkinson was furious that Dewart had successfully sued the Star for libel after the careless reference to a “murderess” in a headline. Cranston admitted that Dewart’s libel suit was a cunning tactic to pay Carrie’s legal bill. “But it is doubtful if his cleverness paid off in the long run. Atkinson gave orders that Dewart’s name was henceforth to be kept out of the Star newspapers, and politicians live on publicity.”
After Dewart lost the provincial election of 1923, he returned to private practice and lobbied Prime Minister Mackenzie King to be put on the Supreme Court of Canada. But the abstemious and prim King disapproved of Dewart’s drinking, and the only federal bone Dewart was thrown was a seat on a commission charged with producing a new consolidation of the statutes of Canada. In 1924, Dewart died at the age of sixty-two of overwork, according to his obituaries. Prime Minister King was one of the honorary pallbearers at his funeral.
In contrast, William Mulock, already known as the “Grand Old Man” in 1915, became an increasingly revered figure in the Canadian pantheon, called upon to grace endless official occasions with his venerable presence. He lived for another twenty-nine years. He remained chief justice of Ontario until he was ninety-three years old, a record in Canadian courts (and, given the unpredictability of some of his later judgments, perhaps part of the reason that judges today must retire at age seventy-five). During the Second World War, when he was ninety-nine, he chaired the Canadian Committee of the International YMCA, which supervised enemy prisoners in Canada. Appointed chancellor of the University of Toronto in 1924, he still held that office when he died, aged 101, in 1944.
At a luncheon in his honour shortly after his eighty-seventh birthday, Mulock described his attitude to growing old: “I’m still at work with my hand to the plough and my face to the future. The shadows of evening … lengthen about me but morning is in my heart…. [T]he testimony I bear is this: that the castle of enchantment is not yet behind me, it is before me still and daily I catch glimpses of its battlements and towers. The best of life is always further on. The real lure is hidden from our eyes, somewhere behind the hills of time.”
The Massey Murder Page 24