CHAPTER 8
The material in this chapter is drawn from the inquest transcript, plus commentary from the Globe and the Evening Telegram of February 17, 1915.
CHAPTER 9
There are two excellent books about the feisty women reporters in Toronto newsrooms: Marjory Lang’s Women Who Made the News: Female Journalists in Canada 1880–1945 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999) and Linda Kay’s The Sweet Sixteen: The Journey That Inspired the Canadian Women’s Press Club (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012).
CHAPTER 10
My chief sources for this chapter were the February 1915 issues of Saturday Night magazine and Tim Cook’s At the Sharp End. Information about Sir William Mulock came from several sources, including Augustus Bridle’s Sons of Canada: Short Studies of Characteristic Canadians (Toronto: Dent, 1916) and John Honsberger’s Osgoode Hall: An Illustrated History (Toronto: Dundurn, 2004.)
CHAPTER 11
I found material on Hartley Dewart, KC, in the DCB, and a discussion of his handling of the Carrie Davies case in Carolyn Strange’s article “Wounded Womanhood and Dead Men: Chivalry and the Trials of Clara Ford and Carrie Davies,” in Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Women’s History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), edited by Franca Iacovetta and Mariana Valverde. Information about legal education comes from Christopher Moore’s The Law Society of Upper Canada and Ontario’s Lawyers, 1797–1997 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), amongst other publications.
Judith Flanders gives an excellent overview of murder in popular British culture in The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime (London: HarperPress, 2011).
CHAPTERS 12 THROUGH 16
Material on Dewart’s defence strategy and the two-day hearing in court is drawn from contemporary newspaper accounts, particularly the Evening Telegram. On particular points of law and use of precedent, I referred to Simon Verdun-Jones’s article “‘Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity’: The Historical Roots of the Canadian Insanity Defence, 1843–1920,” in Crime and Criminal Justice in Europe and Canada (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1981), edited by Louis A. Knafia; Jim Phillips and Rosemary Gartner’s Murdering Holiness: The Trials of Franz Creffield and George Mitchell (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003); and Angus McLaren’s The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
The case of Hilda Blake is described in Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell’s Walk Towards the Gallows: The Tragedy of Hilda Blake, Hanged 1899 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2002).
CHAPTER 17
Sandra Gwyn’s Tapestry of War: A Private View of Canadians in the Great War (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1992) dealt movingly with the impact of the war on Canadians, and the quotation for Harold Innis is taken from her book. Another poignant discussion of the long shadow cast by the bloodbath is My Grandfather’s War: Canadians Remember the First World War, 1914–1918 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1981) by William D. Mathieson.
CHAPTER 18
Frank Jones discussed his encounter with Carrie’s descendants in his novel, Master and Maid (Toronto: Irwin, 1985), pp. 333–337.
Acknowledgements
Time travel back to the Toronto of 1915 was a fascinating challenge, as I walked along old streets lined with new buildings and tried to visualize the smaller, less confident but unassailably smug city of Bert Massey and Carrie Davies. Several people were immensely helpful: Rachel Young and Jacob Bakan (layout of Old City Hall); Thomas Klatt (history of the Lombard Street morgue, today shuttered and covered in graffiti); David Wencer (information about Toronto streets and buildings); Elise Brais (library researcher extraordinaire). Paul Leatherdale, archivist at the Law Society of Upper Canada, helped with information about the lawyers involved in the case. At the Toronto Star, John Honderich gave me a sense of the Star’s continuing commitment to progressive values and opened the doors to the newspaper’s archives, where Astrid Lange and Peggy Mackenzie were generous with time and help.
I would like to thank Elinor Groom, librarian at Sandy Public Library, Bedfordshire, for information relevant to Carrie Davies’s background, and Kathy Southee for sharing with me family details about her great-grandmother, the remarkable Mrs. Huestis.
In the course of writing this book, I talked to many members of the legal profession who provided me with crucial feedback and suggestions for future reading. Justice Robert Sharpe and Susan Binnie gave me legal references and advice. I am particularly grateful to Justice James MacPherson, who invited me to speak to the Ontario Court of Appeal study day, where I met Professor Jim Phillips, editor-in-chief at the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History. Professor Phillips’s encouragement (“The law is part of social history; it reflects and incorporates contemporary social values”), his insights into the “unwritten law” defence, and his rigorous review system have helped make this a better book.
Frank Jones, author of Master and Maid, generously shared the information and insights he had gathered while writing his novel about the Carrie Davies case. I am truly in his debt. Vincent Tovell helped me understand the Massey side of the story. I am also grateful to Dr. Sandy Campbell, Dr. Duncan McDowall, Dr. Tim Cook, Dr. Norman Hillmer, and Rosemarie Tovell, who carefully read some or all of the manuscript, suggested further dimensions of the story, corrected my more egregious errors (those that remain are entirely mine), and offered encouragement. Dr. Naomi Griffiths and Monique Begin gave me a sense of the challenges facing twentieth-century feminists. Thanks are due to friends who cheer me on: Patricia Potts, Maureen Boyd, Cathy Beehan, Wendy Bryans, Judith Moses, and Julie Jacobson.
Special thanks go to editor and publisher Phyllis Bruce, who championed this book from the start, and as usual provided extraordinarily constructive counsel on how to amplify and strengthen my first draft. I am grateful to the team at HarperCollins Canada, who shepherded the book to publication, particularly my editor, Jennifer Lambert—a pleasure to work with—and Noelle Zitzer, Lloyd Davis, Tilman Lewis, Alan Jones, Greg Tabor, Maylene Loveland, and Dawn Huck. My agent, Hilary McMahon at Westwood Creative Artists, was helpful at every stage of the process.
My husband, George Anderson, remains my most rigorous and supportive reader, with a gimlet eye for clichés.
Finally, I am grateful to the Office of Cultural Affairs in the City of Ottawa and to the Canada Council of the Arts for financial assistance. Without their continued support for writers, Canada would be diminished in ways that most of us would recognize only when it is too late.
About the Author
Charlotte Gray, one of Canada’s preeminent biographers and historians, has won many awards for her work, including the prestigious Pierre Berton Award for a body of historical writing, the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction, the Ottawa Book Award, and the CAA Birks Family Foundation Award for Biography. Her nine books have brought our past to life. A member of the Order of Canada, Gray was a panellist for the 2013 edition of CBC Radio’s Canada Reads. She lives in Ottawa.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
ALSO BY CHARLOTTE GRAY
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Nellie McClung (2008)
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The Museum Called Canada (2004)
Canada: A Portrait in Letters (2003)
Flint & Feather: The Life and Times of E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake (2002)
Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill (1999)
Mrs. King: The Life and Times of Isabel MacKenzie King (1997)
Photographic Insert
The Evening Telegram was on top of the Massey murder case from the start.
The Masseys were one of Toronto’s most prominent families: Bert Massey’s grandfather lived in a magnificent ma
nsion on Jarvis Street.
Hart Massey with his grandchildren Vincent (Chester’s elder son) and Ruth (Walter’s eldest daughter).
In June 1915, four months after Bert Massey’s death, his cousin Vincent Massey married Alice Parkin in Kingston’s St. George’s Cathedral. None of Bert Massey’s siblings were invited.
The Massey mausoleum in Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
City Hall, completed in 1900, was a landmark building for Toronto.
Yonge Street was lined with imposing multi-storey office buildings and festooned with telephone wires.
City Hall’s marble staircase and stained-glass window reflected Toronto’s solid sense of self-worth.
At the intersection of King Street and Yonge Street, a member of Toronto’s police force struggled to keep up with Toronto’s explosive growth in population and traffic.
The Denison dynasty in 1877: Colonel George Taylor Denison III (seated at left) was proud of the family’s military traditions.
The National Club (right) was the scene of regular white-tie-and-tails dinners (above) for members such as Colonel Denison.
Hartley Dewart, QC (above), had his offices in the Home Life Building on the corner of Adelaide and Victoria Streets (right).
Florence Huestis, president of Toronto’s Local Council of Women, lobbied for mothers’ pensions, children’s playgrounds, and votes for women.
Sir William Mulock, chief justice of Ontario and the Grand Old Man of Anglo-Canada.
All of Ontario’s lawyers had to be admitted to the bar at Osgoode Hall.
In 1915, ties to Britain remained strong in Ontario, and Queen Victoria’s birthday was an annual opportunity to flaunt them.
Until the outbreak of war in 1914, British immigrants streamed into Toronto, and 85 percent of the city’s residents claimed British ancestry.
Joseph Atkinson was the young and ambitious editor of the Toronto Star.
During a typhoid outbreak in 1912, a girl called Beatrice Webb won a Star-sponsored “Swat the Fly” contest by trapping and swatting 543,360 flies.
John Ross Robertson was proprietor of Toronto’s Evening Telegram, which appealed to “the masses not the classes.”
The Telegram moved into a lavish new building on the corner of King and Bay Streets in 1900.
Newsboys as young as nine called out the headlines at street corners.
Printers in the Telegram’s composing room set the type for stories of scandal and corruption.
The Telegram’s state-of-the art printing presses.
Each evening, the unemployed desperately scanned the Telegram’s Want Ads.
On their return journey from the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, sixteen women reporters founded the Canadian Women’s Press Club and dedicated themselves to making journalism a more accessible profession for women. Mary Dawson Snider is standing fourth from left, their host George Ham fourth from right. Grace Denison and Kathleen Coleman missed the official photo session.
The back of City Hall directly overlooked the wretched slums of the Ward.
Immigrants from Eastern Europe crammed into the Ward’s rooming houses.
Residents of the Ward lived in poverty and squalor, but they could expect no help from the city’s health department.
Diseases such as tuberculosis were rife in overcrowded family homes.
The south end of Morley Avenue boasted better housing than the north end, where the Fairchilds lived, but cars were no match for its mud after a downpour.
Toronto’s policemen spent more time enforcing bylaws about public decency than chasing criminals.
Toronto Star, Friday, February 26, 1915: At her murder trial, Carrie told a new story (see top-right column).
Canadian soldiers spent the winter in ankle-deep mud. An epidemic of spinal meningitis broke out.
Each Sunday, the Canadian troops attended a church service close to Stonehenge.
In February 1915, the next contingent of Canadian soldiers marched through downtown Toronto, before their departure for Europe.
News of the dreadful Canadian casualties in France dampened morale back home.
As fear of enemy saboteurs mounted, sentries were posted around Toronto’s key buildings.
Women flocked into new jobs in munitions factories, as well as into traditional occupations like nursing. Munitions workers wore coveralls, like male mechanics.
Bobsledding in High Park: Women with factory jobs could enjoy themselves all weekend, unlike domestic servants, who had only one or two afternoons off a week.
Swimming in the Humber River, in all-too-revealing costumes, was another favourite occupation for Toronto’s “good-time girls.”
The carnage of the Great War, as it was known, meant that many young girls like these would never achieve the old-fashioned dream of home, husband, and family.
Department stores employed increasing numbers of female sales assistants.
Court drawings from the Toronto Star, Saturday, February 27, 1915.
Bert Massey worked in a booming industry: Toronto’s annual automobile show was a glamorous occasion.
Evening Telegram, Saturday, February 27, 1915: The surprise end of Carrie Davies’s ordeal.
Credits
Cover Art: City of Toronto Archives
Copyright
The Massey Murder
Copyright © 2013 by Charlotte Gray.
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