The Massey Murder Page 14

  But the publisher and editor of the Evening Telegram had no intention of letting the case languish. John Ross Robertson and Black Jack Robinson were busy on two different fronts on Carrie’s behalf.

  The Tely’s first priority was to shoot holes in the Massey claim that Carrie was unbalanced. The Masseys’ motives were obvious. If the court decided that the young woman was unfit to stand trial by reason of insanity, she would be locked away in an asylum until she became “fit” (if ever). In the unlikely event that she was declared fit, she might then have to go back and stand trial for murder. Meanwhile, Bert Massey’s behaviour would not get a public airing.

  The paper had already carried a story berating its competitors (particularly the News) for declaring that Carrie was subject to monthly fits of severe depression. The Tely’s headline over that story was “Slide to Asylum via Trial by Newspaper.” Now, immediately after Carrie’s appearance in the Women’s Court, the Tely published an article with the headline “Has the Govt. Taken Hand in Carrie Davies’ Case? From the Coroner’s Remarks It Looked as Though She Might Never Get a Trial.” As far as the Tely was concerned, Dr. Beemer’s presence at the coroner’s inquest was clear proof that the Masseys were pulling strings. The article claimed that Dr. Johnson had told the coroner’s jury, “Before her trial is arranged, the Government will probably see fit to order some enquiry into her mental condition. It will largely depend on that investigation whether she will ever be tried.”

  The day after the coroner’s inquest, the Tely’s Archie Fisher cornered Dr. Johnson and questioned him about this statement. Dr. Johnson denied making it (it does not appear in the official transcript, and no other paper reported such remarks). The coroner tried to shoulder aside the scruffy reporter, but Archie wasn’t going to be brushed off. “Have you had any orders from the Government or spoken to the Attorney General concerning Carrie Davies’s sanity?” Dr. Johnson insisted that no such conversation had taken place. He explained that it was normal practice for the government to appoint experts “in all cases where a person’s sanity is questioned.” Archie ostentatiously scribbled down every word in his dog-eared notebook as he persisted: “Did you know that Dr. Beemer of the Mimico Hospital for the Insane was present at the inquest?” Dr. Johnson admitted he saw him there, but denied that he represented the government. “I suppose he was there to get a line on the case.” Whatever the coroner said, a Tely reader could not escape Archie’s spin—that the government and the Masseys had ganged up on Carrie Davies in the interests of preserving the Massey reputation. Nor could the reader be satisfied that all the facts were on the table, because Archie made that clear, too. “It was clearly established that what the girl said was not her story of all that has happened. She only answered the questions asked her.”

  It was no coincidence that the Evening Telegram’s account of the coroner’s inquest echoed all the points Hartley Dewart had made. Dewart had not spent twenty-eight years at the Canadian bar without knowing the importance of perception. He had a smart young law student named Arthur Roebuck working in his office, and he quietly instructed Roebuck to keep in close touch with the Telegram’s city editor, Jerry Snider. Snider, in turn, had daily meetings with Black Jack. A quiet word to a reporter … a quick note sent over to the Tely office on King Street … and a reply to Dewart’s law office on Adelaide Street. Dewart and Black Jack were manipulating public opinion in unison. And Black Jack was not acting alone. “Nothing was ever done at The Telegram without Robertson’s approval,” according to Ron Poulton, John Ross Robertson’s biographer. “He engineered Carrie Davies’ defence because she was a lone figure against a member of The Establishment, just as he had been.”

  The Tely’s second tactic to save Carrie was the public fundraising campaign that Black Jack and Robertson had dreamed up a couple of days earlier. The letter from “Fair Play,” the paper announced, “has produced many others of similar strain.” The Tely orchestrated an outpouring of sympathy for Carrie, publishing every letter that offered support. “I can assure you in the east end district where the poor girl spent so many happy days, the public would be pleased to assist,” wrote “Justice,” who went on to describe the eighteen-year-old as “a very bright and cheerful girl, and at no time … ever known to have epileptic fits … I was in her company a good many times. We are ready to come forward to give any assistance it is possible to give.”

  Henry A. Ashmead of 16 Belmont Street was more explicit: “The suggestion of your correspondent ‘Fair Play’ that a subscription should be taken up to defray the expenses of counsel engaged in the defence of Carrie Davies is a very good one.”

  And an anonymous “Irish-Canadian” begged to know how he could help save the “poor orphan girl” from “the mad house.” “I would be pleased to contribute to help this young girl, who is probably the sole support of her poor widowed mother in the old land in her efforts to keep the body and soul of her small family together, in her fight to obtain justice under the flag that her father fought and died for.”

  “Fair Play of Waverley Road” turned out to be a Mrs. J.W. Drummond, who dropped her nom-de-plume and told the Tely that “the girl was only eighteen years of age and it could hardly be expected that a girl at that age would use the mature judgement of a man of forty [sic], nor have the financial resources necessary to prove, first her sanity and second, her innocence of the crime with which she is charged … Every person I have been speaking to feels the same as I do and is willing to assist in any way they can towards helping her. I would be quite ready to start a fund myself among my own friends.”

  Were these letters real? Who knows. But thanks to the Evening Telegram, momentum built for a Carrie Davies Defence Fund. The main beneficiary of the fund would inevitably be Carrie’s lawyer—and the Tely’s ally—Hartley Dewart. But the newspaper put more emphasis on other, more poignant uses—uses that might open sympathizers’ purses. “May Have to Bring Mother to Save Girl from Gallows,” read a headline in Monday morning’s paper. But who should establish the fund? One correspondent suggested either Toronto veterans or the Sons of England, a benevolent society founded in Toronto in 1874 with goals dear to the hearts of the Evening Telegram’s owner and editor—to assist needy Protestants from England and to promote the British monarchy. Another correspondent urged the newspaper itself to organize the fund.

  How much did Carrie’s mother, back in Bedfordshire, know about the murder case gripping Toronto? Since she almost certainly did not have a telephone, and two weeks had elapsed since Bert Massey’s death before news of the case was featured in the British press, the answer is probably nothing. No matter. What could be more wrenching for Tely readers than the image of the blind and grieving mother, helpless on the wrong side of the Atlantic?

  The most surprising suggestion, however, was not promoted in the Tely’s columns. Although representatives of Toronto’s Local Council of Women had been indifferent to Carrie Davies when she first appeared in the Women’s Court, and had barely noticed her when they shared a City Hall elevator, the case had now caught the attention of Florence Huestis and her colleagues. A couple of days after Carrie’s second appearance in the Women’s Court, the LCW had its monthly meeting at the Margaret Eaton Studio, a progressive girls’ school housed in an ersatz Greek temple on Bloor Street that Timothy Eaton’s wife, Margaret, had financed. The fearless Florence Huestis was in the chair. At the end of the meeting on Wednesday, February 17, in a discussion of the Women’s Court, Mrs. Huestis rose. Dignified and articulate, she clasped her hands in front of her and raised a question that she knew would provoke some discomfort in the room: Should the LCW take a position on the Massey case, or even contribute to the legal defence of the young English girl now in Don Jail?

  There was a long silence. On the one hand, these women knew the vulnerability of young women in this city, and the frequency with which they were exploited. Hadn’t the LCW already spoken out about the horrors of the white-slave trade? A donation to a public defence campaign would
demonstrate the LCW’s commitment to protecting women’s interests. Unlike Helen Ball, these women were sufficiently secure socially to show sympathy for a member of the working class. One member reported that the Council was prepared to offer the unfortunate girl the services of one of Toronto’s most prominent KCs (probably the husband of one of the women present).

  On the other hand, many of these women would have found Carrie’s actions more shocking than the accusations against Bert Massey. Men would be men, but did the submissive young women sweating away in their own kitchens harbour murderous thoughts about their employers? And surely it wasn’t right that a member of one of Toronto’s most prominent families now lay six feet under in Mount Pleasant Cemetery? Florence Huestis’s own loyalties must have been torn. She instinctively sympathized with Carrie, but she herself had known the Massey family since she was a little girl and regularly visited Bert Massey’s cousins at Dentonia, their handsome country estate east of Toronto.

  Before discussion got much further, someone mentioned that the girl’s sister had engaged Hartley Dewart, KC, and that the Bedfordshire Fraternal Association (a local branch of the Sons of England) was taking up subscriptions to pay his fees. The collective sigh of relief that the matter was taken out of LCW hands was almost audible. The minute-taker noted that, “It was felt by the Council that any interference in the case by the members would be an impertinence.” Florence Huestis briefly moved the meeting on to the appointment of new conveners for a dozen standing committees, dealing with circulating Council literature; citizenship; conservation of national resources; education; employment for women; finance; immigration; laws affecting women and children; objectionable printed matter; press; equal moral standard and prevention of traffic in women; and public health.

  Once the business was over, members enjoyed tea and sandwiches and heard a talk by Mrs. Horace Parsons on “Life in the North”—the North, in this case, being the new Ontario railway town of Cochrane.

  { CHAPTER 10 }

  Deadly Bayonet Work

  WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 17 TO FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 19

  Members of the first Canadian contingent are likely to be under fire this week. If the enemy can locate the point in the line to which the Canadians are sent they are certain to pay them very special attention … The entire Canadian people will henceforth feel their hearts stirred as they read accounts of the fighting in Northern France and Belgium in which the men of their own blood are risking their lives in a great cause.

  —Toronto Daily Star, Monday, February 15, 1915

  CARRIE DAVIES SHOT WITH INTENT TO KILL VERDICT OF CORONER’S JURY IN MASSEY MURDER ALLEGES SELF-DEFENCE STATEMENT TO POLICE AFTER THE SHOOTING ACCUSED MASSEY OF IMPROPRIETY—MENTAL CONDITION TO BE EXAMINED.

  —Globe, Tuesday, February 16, 1915

  After Carrie’s second appearance in the Women’s Court, she temporarily disappeared from the headlines of Toronto’s newspapers. Even the Evening Telegram, Carrie’s staunch ally, relegated her to the back pages. Editors knew that public interest in the Massey murder would revive only when that wan, cheerless girl was back in court, in the prisoner’s dock.

  The weather turned bitter, with sharp winds and cold rain many days, coating the sidewalks in ice. Citizens pulled woollen scarves over their faces as they hurried past the recruitment posters in office windows. Up to now, the European conflict had seemed a long, long way away—which is why the previous week’s story of a possible bombing raid in Ottawa had triggered unusual excitement. The war’s most noticeable impact on Toronto was the cancellation of several events—Toronto’s major military training camp, for example, had bumped the Automobile Trade Association’s annual show from the Exhibition grounds. The mood amongst lawmakers was sombre. On Thursday, February 4, when the Dominion Parliament opened in Ottawa, “khaki and questions of war superseded the gold lace and scarlet and attendant social gaieties of other years,” according to the weekly magazine Saturday Night. Two weeks later, when the Ontario Legislature opened a new session, the expected reception in Premier Sir William Hearst’s offices was not held, out of respect for his predecessor, Sir James Whitney, who had died five months earlier. The session promised to be “unusually quiet socially,” predicted Saturday Night.

  Yet this was a critical week for Canadians. It was the week when the first contingent of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, which had spent the winter training on Salisbury Plain after being recruited the previous August, finally reached the battlefield. For the first time, an intensely personal commitment to events across the Atlantic hit newspaper readers. And the emotions aroused by the war, and those stirred up by the Massey killing, began to merge.

  The first bulletin about troop movements appeared in a box on the Globe’s front page on Saturday, February 14, three days before Magistrate Denison committed Carrie for trial. “Canadians landed safely,” the paper announced. The First Canadian Division, consisting of most of the men who had spent a bitter winter on Salisbury Plain, had been shipped across the English Channel. Once on French soil, they were loaded into cramped rail cars, labelled 40 hommes ou 8 chevaux, for a forty-six-hour trip to the western front. With no seats or lavatories in the rail cars, it was a miserable journey. But the Canadians were welcomed at the front, where the core of the British Expeditionary Force had been wiped out in the war’s early battles.

  The contingent was made up of about nineteen thousand men—three infantry brigades of four thousand men each, plus artillery, cavalry, and supply columns. There were already Canadians in the trenches—a few hundred who were members of British regiments, and over a thousand members of the elite Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, a privately raised Canadian regiment of experienced soldiers (mainly British-born) that had been in France since December. But now there were more than ten times that number—over twenty thousand Canadians altogether within earshot of German guns. The four thousand volunteers who had left Toronto the previous August were among them, and on February 16, the Star ran the headline “Toronto men first to enter trenches.”

  Private George Bell of the 1st Battalion described in a memoir the troops’ elation during their February crossing to France: “While we may have been a bit deficient in discipline and some of the finer points of military etiquette, our eagerness to get into the big show was not lacking.” There was still a Boy’s Own Annual tone to some of the war coverage. The same day that the Globe announced that the Canadians troops had landed safely in France, Claude Grahame-White, a daring British aviator, and his elegant wife, Ethel, appeared in a front-page photograph posed next to a flimsy canvas and plywood biplane. Grahame-White’s plane was one of thirty-four little flying machines that had soared across the British Channel in the “Greatest Aeroplane Raid in All History” to bomb German military and submarine bases on the Belgian coast. “A Beautiful Flight,” wrote the Globe correspondent, before explaining that Flight Commander Grahame-Wright had unfortunately fallen into the sea. Luckily, a nearby French vessel had scooped him out of the chilly water. The bombs had little effect.

  But during Carrie Davies’s ordeal, the rhetoric of war was shifting in Toronto. After the harsh German occupation of Belgium, notions of chivalry and honour had evaporated, along with respect for Germans as industrious, Christian, and sensible fellow immigrants with an endearing fondness for beer and children. A hazy romanticism about war had developed during the century since Britain fought its last major European battle, at Waterloo—a century during which the reality of butchery and death had been obliterated by tales of heroism and valour. The misery of the Crimean War in the 1850s was long forgotten. The previous August, Toronto Mayor Horatio Clarence Hocken had told one regiment, “You will have the proud privilege of fighting not only for the British Empire but for the cause of civilization.” By February 1915, that kind of language had begun to sound hollow to some people, even though politicians continued to talk about “The Great War for Civilization.” Lucy Maud Montgomery read the war news obsessively: “The sufferings o
f the men everywhere in the trenches this winter must be dreadful,” she confided to her journal. “I never go out on these cold dark nights without thinking of them miserably. I am ashamed that I am warmly clad and housed.”

  The four million–strong Imperial German Army had proved itself well armed, well drilled, and ruthless. Now, German gunsights were trained on Canadians, including the progeny of many of Toronto’s best-known families. Colonel George Denison, for example, had already lost a nephew, Bertie Denison, who was in a British regiment during the fighting in France in September 1914, and had watched his own son George Taylor Denison, his grandson Alexander Kirkpatrick, and his nephew Edgar Denison volunteer for duty and disappear to France. Bert Massey’s half-brother, Clifton Manbank Horsey, now a twenty-four-year-old engineer, had joined the 13th Battalion of the Canadian Infantry as soon as war was declared. He and Carrie’s anonymous boyfriend were almost certainly in France, along with hundreds of British-born immigrants from working-class neighbourhoods like Cabbagetown and Leslieville who had returned to Europe to defend the Empire.