The Massey Murder (19 page)
Authors: Charlotte Gray
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.
W
EDNESDAY
, F
EBRUARY 17 TO
F
RIDAY
, F
EBRUARY 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
C
ARRIE
D
AVIES
S
HOT WITH
I
NTENT TO
K
ILL
V
ERDICT OF
C
ORONER’S
J
URY IN
M
ASSEY
M
URDER
A
LLEGES
S
ELF
-D
EFENCE
S
TATEMENT TO
P
OLICE
A
FTER THE
S
HOOTING
A
CCUSED
M
ASSEY OF
I
MPROPRIETY
—M
ENTAL
C
ONDITION TO
B
E
E
XAMINED.
—Globe
, Tuesday, February 16, 1915
A
fter 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 of 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.
Anger against “the Hun” smouldered. A mob of Torontonians attacked the Liederkranz Club, the city’s leading German institution, when it continued to fly the German flag. Soldiers’ families were yet more unsettled by February’s news from the eastern front, where the Germans, according to the
Globe
and other papers, resorted to “point-blank slaughter by rifle fire and bayonet” and “poisonous chemical smoke.” Letters from individual soldiers started to appear in the evening papers: the
Star
printed one from a private in the 48th Highlanders who described seeing a little Belgian girl who “had no eyes; they had been gouged out by one of the Kaiser’s officers. I know of many cases of outrage …” The rules had changed: while the British and French were sending cavalry into battle, the Germans were using brutal new methods of industrial warfare.
This was a different kind of combat—a gruelling war of attrition instead of a quick-fire, knockout blow. Its costs were going to be far greater than imagined, and the casualty lists longer. Toxic rumours abounded. In mid-February, Toronto editors had a welter of items from Europe to jigsaw together on their front pages. The same day that Carrie was returned to the hospital wing of the Don Jail, charged with murder, group portraits of men in uniform dominated newspaper front pages. The
Toronto Daily Star
featured twelve of the Toronto soldiers, sporting the moustaches required by army regulations, who had left the previous summer. The
Globe
’s gallery included officers of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, their names a roll call of Family Compact and United Empire Loyalist membership: Lieutenant-Colonel Macdonell, Lieutenant-Colonel Nasmith, Major Chisholm, Major Beatty, Colonel Heard, Lieutenant-Colonel Hamilton, Major Sutherland, Captain Clifford, and Brigadier-General E.A. Lawrence among them. “Most of the officers shown here are no doubt in France,” read the caption. How many would return? On the same page of the
Globe
, another headline read, “Patricia’s are paying their share of death toll.” Three of the Princess Pats had been killed in a minor skirmish, one had subsequently died of wounds, and a fifth was seriously wounded. The Canadian force was moving ahead to relieve the division to which the Princess Pats were attached.
There was upsetting news everywhere. The naval war was in full swing, with German submarines scoring hits against the British navy, once thought invincible. Although civilian vessels from neutral countries were supposed to be exempt from hostilities, transatlantic shipping companies like the Cunard Line were concerned about the safety of their New York–bound liners. The United States had not yet joined the Allies, so captains quietly lowered the Union Jack and raised the Stars and Stripes when they were in danger zones. Now the German government announced that it intended to enforce a blockade around
Britain by sowing mines around the British Isles. The
Globe
described such an action as “nothing short of indiscriminate murder on the greatest scale ever attempted in the history of maritime warfare,” since the floating mines would “strike blindly at both neutral and belligerent and destroy not only their ships but the peaceful and unsuspecting sailors on board.” Part of the “warrior culture” that had once defined previous European conflicts had been respect for civilians, especially women and children, but once again, the Germans were showing no respect for civilian lives. Within days, German mines had sunk two American steamers, and a German torpedo struck a cross-Channel steamer from Boulogne to Folkestone. With war more dependent on the strength of an entire economy, the morale of civilians became a key target. Winston Churchill, then first lord of the admiralty, pronounced the German tactic “piracy” and promised active reprisals.
