The Massey Murder Read online

  As Methodists and tradesmen, the Masseys were regarded as nouveaux riches by Toronto’s self-designated gentry, even though they certainly didn’t flaunt their success. On Sundays, the Masseys attended the dour Metropolitan Methodist Church at the corner of Church and Queen Streets, where they droned gloomy psalms about lost sheep. Not for Hart the displays of finery and feather-trimmed hats sported by the parishioners of St. James’ Anglican Cathedral, farther down Church Street, where cheerful hymns such as “Jerusalem the Golden” reflected the sense of entitlement shared by FOOFs. Hart Massey and his relatives rarely appeared in Saturday Night magazine’s social columns, and no Massey matron would be included alongside the opera singers, society leaders, and wives of governors general in turn-of-the-century Canada’s equivalent of Hello! Canada: Henry J. Morgan’s volume of gushing prose about 358 women, Types of Canadian Women, published in 1903. Hart Massey barely noticed: he had no interest in joining any Toronto club, and he regarded drinking, dancing, and theatre-going as sins.

  Various producers of agricultural machinery had sprung up in the young Dominion, but there were only two of real size: the Masseys, who dubbed their binder “The Mighty Monarch of the Fields,” and A. Harris, Son and Company of Brantford, whose binder was known as “The Little Brantford Beauty.” Rivalry between the two companies was intense. Reaping tournaments were held in hundreds of sweltering, dusty harvest fields scattered from Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy to Alberta’s Bow Valley. Given the ups and downs of agricultural life (poor harvests, weather disasters), farmers found themselves both grateful for every improvement in the machines they relied on and beholden to distributors to whom they were often in debt. It was said that the Dominion’s farmers were divided into three camps—those who swore by Massey, those who swore by Harris, and those who swore at both of them.

  By the end of the nineteenth century, Hart Massey had won the Great Harvester War. The Massey and Harris firms merged in 1891, but Hart was the boss. He presided over the Massey-Harris Company and the Massey family controlled the largest block of shares and all the patents, production methods, and facilities. The Masseys were brilliant at promotion, churning out colour catalogues, house organs, leaflets, agricultural pronouncements, and the ambitious, general-interest Massey’s Magazine. (Canadian writers such as Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, and Duncan Campbell Scott, along with artists Charles W. Jefferys and George Reid, were regular contributors.) In 1892, Massey-Harris advertised that it was the largest maker of farm implements and machinery under the British flag. Massey-Harris equipment was used on the Royal farms at Windsor. Orders from around the globe now kept fifteen hundred men in Toronto employed flat out in a fifty-nine-hour workweek.

  Thanks to influence in Ottawa, Hart’s monopoly in the domestic agricultural implement market was reinforced by tariff policies that kept his American competitors out of Canada while protecting his own exports to Imperial markets like Australia and South Africa. “How can he contend that he can compete with the American manufacturers in their country but not in his own?” asked a Globe editorial in 1893. Like his American contemporaries Andrew Carnegie and Nelson D. Rockefeller, Hart Massey insisted that what was good for his company was good for his country. Massey Manufacturing was shipping tractors, threshers, reapers and cutters, and binders, some steam-driven and others gas-fuelled, to markets from South America to the Middle East. Surely he deserved to be made a senator? “My long experience has enabled me to systematize and put into successful operation one of the largest manufacturing industries in the world,” he told Conservative Prime Minister Sir John Thompson in 1893.

  The aging millionaire had additional reasons to believe that he was entitled to a seat in the Upper Chamber. In accordance with his Methodist principles, in his later years he devoted increasing amounts of time and money to philanthropic enterprises. Best known of his projects were two institutions familiar to everybody in Toronto: the Fred Victor Mission for homeless men, named after his youngest son, who died aged only twenty-three in 1890, and the Massey Music Hall, a major concert auditorium from the moment it opened in 1894 with a performance of Handel’s Messiah. Dozens of other institutions benefitted from Massey benevolence: Methodist colleges all over the country, a Methodist camp in Muskoka, the Methodist Social Union of Toronto, industrial training initiatives in Toronto’s schools, organs for various Methodist chapels, the Salvation Army’s Rescue Home in Parkdale, the Chautauqua summer festival in upstate New York, and Victoria College at the University of Toronto, which received an endowment for a chair in religious education. Toronto boasted many wealthy businessmen as the Victorian age drew to a close, but none gave more generously—or more carefully—than Hart Massey.

  Nevertheless, entrepreneurial success and good works were not enough to win the elderly industrialist a seat in the Senate. Politicians were aware of a western backlash against the monopolist who had managed to exclude from the Canadian market his American competitors and their agricultural machines that were more suitable for heavy prairie soils. The nascent labour movement sniped at the enormous wealth of an authoritarian businessman who kept wages low and who fought the reduction of the working day from ten to eight hours because, argued Hart Massey, such a short working day would mean that his employees would not be able to make ends meet. Daniel John O’Donoghue, leader of the Knights of Labour, described Hart Massey as a “brute … devoid of soul.”

  Hart Massey died, aged seventy-two, on February 20, 1896. He had built an insignificant colonial village smithy into the mightiest manufactory of its kind in the British Empire. But he was a stern moralist and strict disciplinarian—the kind of rigid, self-righteous Methodist who insisted that Toronto should remain a repressed, closed-on-Sunday, Godfearing, and fun-shunning city. It was the influence of prominent citizens like Hart Massey that prompted a British visitor to the city to comment that “Sunday is as melancholy and suicidal a sort of day as Puritan principles can make it.” Alongside the fulsome eulogies to an outstanding businessman was a layer of hostile comments. “His was not the impulsive charity that springs from an exuberant disposition,” read the obituary in the Toronto Daily Star. “He gave because he thought it was his duty, not because he loved much.” The man who could be a devoted husband and father could also be mean, as his family had already discovered.

  Bert Massey, Carrie Davies’s employer, knew firsthand what a tyrant his grandfather could be.

  In 1884, Hart Massey had suffered a tragic loss. Only weeks after moving his family into the new house on Jarvis Street, his eldest son and heir apparent, thirty-five-year-old Charles Albert Massey, had caught typhoid fever. Doctors had tried all the newest therapies, including direct blood donation and a desperate, experimental injection of milk directly into the patient’s veins. But Charles’s health was already impaired by stress and exhaustion. In his final hours, the sick man admonished his three older children to study their Bibles, and gave each of his two babies, Bertie and Bessie, a last kiss. Then his eyes closed for the last time. The Massey who had done more than any other member of the family to develop and consolidate the company’s success was gone.

  Hart Massey commissioned a stained-glass memorial window for the factory’s offices that portrayed a seraphic Charles above a field of ripened grain, in which one of the company’s Perfect Binders was parked. But the old man did not let grief dilute tight-fisted business instincts. Jessie Massey, now a thirty-one-year-old widow with five children, found herself with no right to any share of the family company’s revenue, and a drastically reduced income. Less than a year after settling on Jarvis Street, she was obliged to move to a narrow brick house at 288 Ontario Street, in far less fashionable Cabbagetown. Jessie continued to be welcome in Euclid Hall’s drawing room, with its thick carpet and thicker drapes, and Hart and Eliza made a fuss over their five grandchildren. But Hart’s love and ambitions were now focused elsewhere. He turned to his sons Chester and Walter to fill their brother’s shoes. It was soon evident that Chester had little inte
rest in business; he focused on his art collection and the family’s philanthropy, while Walter, aged only twenty, became secretary-treasurer of the company. (At this stage, Fred Victor was still a schoolboy.)

  In 1887, Jessie Massey remarried. Her new husband was a clerk in the Dominion Bank named John Haydn Horsey. By now, only Hart Massey’s thirty-three-year-old daughter Lillian still lived at home, and he missed the energy of a household of children. Jessie’s three elder children were in boarding school, and Hart Massey suggested that the two youngest, Bertie and Bessie, should come and stay with their grandparents for a while to allow Mr. and Mrs. John Haydn Horsey a little privacy.

  Jessie gratefully accepted this invitation, and on Saturday, April 14, 1888, Hart triumphantly noted in his daily journal: “Charley’s children came to live at Euclid Hall.” Eight-year-old Bert Massey and his seven-year-old sister left Cabbagetown for the opulence of 515 Jarvis Street, where an elegant fountain played in the marble-floored front hall and a coachman called Dick groomed horses in the carriage house. In a photograph from this period, Bessie and Bertie are dressed in the elaborate children’s outfits with which prosperous families displayed their own success. Bert looks like Little Lord Fauntleroy in a tiny velvet frock coat with silver buttons and a lace collar, and well-polished black ankle boots. But after a year, Jessie told her father-in-law that she wanted her children back. The old man prevaricated, and then began insisting that Jessie could visit her children only at set times. On a couple of occasions, Bessie and Bertie were allowed to visit their mother, but their grandfather’s carriage stayed on the curb, waiting to take them back to Jarvis Street. Jessie became more insistent that the children should rejoin her. Hart wouldn’t let them go.

  It must have been painful for the two youngsters, torn between two households. One day, as Bessie would tell the Massey biographer Mollie Gillen, Jessie had had enough. She hired a cab, drove to the school that the children attended, and asked the principal if she could see them. When they appeared, she led them out to the cab and asked them solemnly whether they wanted to come and live with her and her new husband, John Haydn Horsey. Bertie and Bessie didn’t hesitate: they wanted to rejoin her. Jessie quickly told the cab driver to take them all to her own house. She then sent the driver to Euclid Hall with a note for Hart in which she assured her former father-in-law that the children were safe in her hands, and could he please send their possessions?

  Hart Massey was furious. Few people had challenged him so directly and got away with it. He refused to send a single one of their belongings. Jessie remained fearful that the family autocrat might try to reclaim the children, but she needn’t have worried. To all intents and purposes, Hart Massey slammed the door on Charlie’s children. Soon he had two more small grandchildren to dress in velvet and photograph on his knee: Vincent, born in 1887 and the elder of Chester’s two sons, and Ruth, the first of Walter’s four children, who arrived in 1889. Most of the Massey clan now lived in grand mansions on Jarvis Street. Only Jessie’s five children lived elsewhere, in a far more modest home, with their mother, stepfather, and half-brother, Clifton Manbank Horsey, who was born in 1890. Jessie herself died in 1894, when she was only forty-two. By now, her older children were about to leave home, and Haydn Horsey appears to have taken responsibility for the younger Massey stepchildren as well as his own four-year-old son. Hart Massey grudgingly advanced funds for fourteen-year-old Bert’s education.

  Two years after Jessie’s death, her father-in-law died. Hart Massey left a huge estate of almost $2 million (worth close to half a billion dollars today in purchasing power). The larger part of his money went to charitable and educational causes, and almost all the rest (after taking account of his widow’s needs) was divided among his surviving children, Chester, Lillian, and Walter. Bequests to the “poor” Masseys, now orphaned and struggling, were grudging, given the size of the estate: Bert Massey and his four siblings each received only $15,000 (about $402,000 today)—from which money advanced by their grandfather for their education was deducted. Belleville’s Albert Business College, the school Bert had attended, received $10,000 in Hart’s will—not much less than Bert himself. For several years, there had been ugly rumours that Hart Massey had quietly wrested a large portion of stock back from Charles Massey’s estate, to ensure that it would never be sold outside the family. This suspicion, and the stingy bequest, triggered a family lawsuit, finally settled out of court, that caused a bitter rift in family relations. The details were always hushed up.

  From then on, Jessie’s children never cropped up in the family photograph albums or in news reports of Massey triumphs. Hart’s widow, Eliza, was equally stingy: when she died in 1908, almost all her estate went to Chester, Walter, and Lillian. She left nothing to her five grandchildren by her eldest son, Charlie, although an elderly brother-in-law and sister in the States each received $1,000.

  Both of Charles Albert’s two sons appear to have inherited the Massey mechanical aptitude. Arthur, six years older than Bert, had invented and patented a particular design of bed for invalids while still in his early thirties. Bert had opted for a career in the booming automobile industry. Yet there is no suggestion that either Arthur or Bert was offered a job at the Massey works, although there was no Jarvis Street heir in the next generation. (Chester’s two sons had little interest in farm machinery. Although Vincent was briefly in charge, he quickly moved into politics, while his younger brother, Raymond, was always determined to be an actor, not a tractor maker. It was unthinkable that one of Walter’s three daughters might join the company, while his son Denton—born in 1900—was still too young.) After Walter Massey’s death in 1901, the former general manager of the Harris firm, Lyman Melvin-Jones, took over the ever-expanding Massey commercial empire. Ironically, Melvin-Jones won the prizes that Hart felt he himself had deserved—a seat in the Canadian Senate and a British knighthood.

  With a name like Massey, Bert was welcomed at smart clubs, and his friends were drawn from the Toronto establishment. Membership in the Masons (he benefited from family tradition) allowed him to troll for useful contacts and present himself as a bona fide businessman. He and Rhoda had started their married life in a smart house with elaborate wooden trim and twelve-foot ceilings on Madison Avenue, not far from his mother’s house in the newly named Annex district. However, money was tight, and the move to nearby Walmer Road was probably a sign that his grandfather’s legacy was gone and his income was dwindling.

  But in 1915, few knew about the nasty family politics behind closed Massey doors. Masseys were Masseys—rich, powerful people who lived like kings. Number 169 Walmer Road might be a modest dwelling compared to such baronial piles as George Denison’s Heydon Villa or Hart Massey’s Euclid Hall, but it was still a comfortable detached house with room for servants and a carriage house in the backyard. And Bert Massey appeared to symbolize the thoughtless presumption of a playboy. He wore a diamond stick pin and sold Studebaker cars to wealthy Torontonians. As a married man with a young son, perhaps he could be forgiven for not rushing to join the armed forces. Nonetheless, plenty of other thirty-four-year-old family men had already volunteered to fight for King and country.

  Newspaper reporters latched onto the name Massey, unaware that the dead man belonged to a spurned branch of the family with no access to Massey millions. In 1952, the critic B.K. Sandwell made the same blithe assumption when Bert’s cousin Vincent Massey, a fourth-generation Massey to achieve eminence, was appointed Canada’s first Canadian-born governor general. Sandwell made the famous quip:

  Let the Old World, where rank’s yet vital,

  Part those who have and have not title.

  Toronto has no social classes–

  Only the Masseys and the masses.

  But it had never been quite as simple as that.

  { CHAPTER 5 }

  A Peculiar Look

  THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11

  GREAT RUSSIAN VICTORY IN THE CARPATHIANS DESPERATE BATTLE, IN WHICH GERMANS GO BRAVELY TO DEATH
THE SLAUGHTER APPALLING ASSAULTS ON RUSSIAN TRENCHES REPELLED WITH BAYONET … SLOPES DOTTED WITH SLAIN

  —Globe, Thursday, February 11, 1915

  CARRIE DAVIES NOW IN JAIL HOSPITAL IS NOT CONFINED TO BED BUT HAS HAD SEVERAL FITS

  All day Tuesday the girl sobbed and refused to be comforted or take any meals.

  She slept little at night and it is stated had several epileptic fits, to which she is supposed to be subject.

  —Toronto Daily News, Thursday, February 11, 1915

  The unfolding drama of a shocking death within a prominent family provided titillating relief for Toronto’s citizens. Gossip was easier to absorb than the welter of confusing stories out of distant countries on the far side of the Atlantic. The only sources of information about the war, now in its seventh month, were newspaper reports and the rumours they triggered: there was no radio, let alone any of the information technology we take for granted today—television, Internet, streamed videos of battles in real time, captured on cell phones by ordinary citizens. In Carrie’s world, newspaper readers were accustomed to getting the news when it was at least a day old, and to wondering if it had already been overtaken by events.

  The official story in early February 1915 was that the war was going well. This was a contrast to the previous year, when for a ghastly moment Britain and its allies risked defeat in northern France and Belgium. Grey-uniformed German troops had headed for Belgium in 550 trains a day, some with “to Paris” chalked on their sides. By late August, German forces had captured Brussels, massacring civilians and pushing the remnants of the Belgian army out of the way as they moved into northern France. The French army had failed to contain the German surge across the border and were ill-equipped to mount an offensive to the southeast. French troops went into battle in eye-catching blue coats and brilliant red trousers that, in Adam Hochschild’s words, “had long made them the most flamboyantly dressed of Europe’s foot soldiers.” It was a matter of Gallic pride: when a reformer at a parliamentary hearing had suggested toning down the colours two years earlier, the minister of war had bellowed, “Jamais! Le pantalon rouge c’est la France!” In case the vivid uniforms were not enough to guide German snipers, there was sound as well. Brass bands often led French infantry units into the attack.