The Massey Murder (20 page)

Soon after the Canadians arrived at the front, Torontonians began to learn of hand-to-hand fighting between German and British soldiers, and “deadly bayonet work,” near the Belgian town of Ypres. Each day, newspaper readers on Toronto’s streetcars, and in its taverns, clubs, and kitchens, absorbed increasingly ghastly bulletins from the front. There were heavy losses on both sides, with the Germans fighting “savagely and frantically,” and few prisoners taken because “action was too hot for much activity in this direction.” Farther down the line, Ontario battalions were “now experiencing active service conditions, eating bully beef and hard tack, and each man sleeping under one blanket.” It was only a matter of time before they came under fire.

The new technology of warfare exerted a chilling fascination on Canadians because it could perpetrate so much damage. Germany was experimenting with zeppelins—giant airships nearly two football fields long, held aloft by huge bags of hydrogen within their steel frames. These airships had been developed around 1900 by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin for reconnaissance and bombing missions. In 1915, the
German navy had two zeppelins patrolling continuously, regardless of the weather, under the personal command of Count Zeppelin. The lumbering dirigibles might lack the speed and manoeuvrability of Claude Grahame-White’s biplane, but they could fly at higher altitudes, carry heavy machine guns and bombs, and had greater range and endurance. Count Zeppelin’s nephew, Baron Gemmingen, had invented a zeppelin “observation car” that hung below the airship and allowed an observer to spot vessels, then relay navigation and bombing orders to aircraft flying above the clouds.

The Kaiser authorized bombing raids against England in January, causing a scramble in Britain to bolster air defences and prompting the
Star
to go after Count Zeppelin in a story headlined “Baby-killers’ ‘Father’ Excuses Aero-Murders.” Later in the war, the Allies would invent incendiary ammunition that destroyed zeppelins by setting them alight. But in this first year of fighting, German dominance of the skies unnerved the Allies and infuriated non-combatants. In some areas of London, crowds rioted after the first air raids, smashing the windows of merchants of German or Austrian origin. A locomotive of the London and North Western Railway named
Dachshund
was quickly rechristened
Bulldog
.

On Friday, February 19, the
Globe
printed a diagram of a zeppelin on its front page, with ominous news: “Germany now possesses about twelve first-class airships.” Readers who studied the menacing, torpedo-shaped aircraft could draw a little comfort from the story that a zeppelin had foundered in the North Sea, off the coast of Jutland, due to the weight of snow. Three crew members had drowned in the icy waters, and the rest had been interned in Denmark. In Toronto’s clubs, men found it easier to discuss novel airborne military machines than the stalemate on the ground.

But there was also news of confrontations on both the western and eastern fronts. In Poland, after the Battle of the Masurian Lakes,
German units continued to advance towards Warsaw. In northern France, the Germans had made a determined, though unsuccessful attempt to retake trenches lost the previous month. Casualties mounted on both sides: the
Globe
published the names of two more members of the Princess Pats killed in action, along with a list of Canadians who were wounded or who had died in hospital.

Toronto residents could no longer escape the pressure and proximity of war. On February 19, three days after Carrie Davies was indicted for murder, four thousand khaki-clad recruits, many of them mere boys, performed a route march from their camp on the Toronto exhibition grounds to Queen’s Park. These men had responded to Prime Minister Robert Borden’s January appeal for volunteers for another contingent of Canadian troops. Schools were closed for the day to allow children to cheer “the largest and most unique military parade this city has ever seen.” The column was so long that when its leaders reached the Legislature, the column’s tail was still at Bloor Street. Crowds lined the route, cheering fathers, brothers, sons, and friends who would soon leave homes and families far behind in Canada, in order to fight against a brutal enemy.

Meanwhile, pressure intensified on men below the age of forty to sign up. In London, England, women would soon be handing out white feathers, an ancient symbol of cowardice, to young men not in uniform. Rudyard Kipling, a hero of Colonel Denison’s, asked, “What will be the position in years to come of the young man who has deliberately elected to outcast himself from this all-embracing brotherhood?” Bert Massey could claim that his responsibility for wife and son was reason enough to keep him in Toronto. But plenty of men his age and in similar circumstances were in the khaki column that day, making a citizen described as a “man about town” and accused of trying to “ruin” a maid look ignoble in contrast.

Amidst the war fever, Black Jack Robinson of the
Evening Telegram
was not going to let Carrie Davies be forgotten. Hartley Dewart had let
him know, through their go-between Roebuck, that there was the promise of a good scandal when the Davies case came to court. And, like any good editor, he had a feel for the mood of his readership. Hunched and thoughtful, Robinson sat in his office surrounded by untidy piles of old papers, government reports, and proof sheets. He allowed himself a wolfish grin as he tapped a pencil on his cluttered desktop, cast a quick eye over the
Tely
newsroom, and then reread the menacing headlines from Europe. Events there were spawning outrage among
Evening Telegram
readers. The heartless German war machine was sideswiping innocent civilians, putting Canadians on edge, and making public opinion within Toronto easier to sway. The
Tely
could subtly suggest that Carrie Davies was simply a civilian who was trying to defend herself.

Carrie Davies’s murder trial would be heard at the Supreme Court by one of the young Dominion’s grand old men: the chief justice of Ontario, Sir William Mulock.

Like Colonel George Denison and John Ross Robertson, Chief Justice Mulock had watched the city of Toronto mushroom from a gossipy small town into a bustling metropolis. But unlike those anglophiles, and like Joe Atkinson, Imperial ties were less important to him than the task of constructing a nation. A white-bearded, cigar-chomping lawyer, Mulock had served as postmaster general and minister of labour in Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal cabinet before moving to the Supreme Court of Ontario in 1905.
Saturday Night
contributor H.F. Gadsby lauded the chief justice as “broad-gauged, big-brained, high-thinking and greathearted.” Prime Minister Laurier was blunter in his comment on his former colleague: “the best-hearted and worst-mannered man he knew.”

In short, Mulock was both a man of vision and an abrasive personality who rode roughshod over everybody, including his own relations. Devoted to the interests of his city, his country, and the Liberal Party, he liked to get things done. As postmaster general in the 1890s, he had implemented the Imperial penny post, personally designed a new
stamp that showed the extent of the British Empire, secured wireless telegraphy between Canada and London, and (perhaps most significant in the long term) brought an ambitious young Liberal called William Lyon Mackenzie King to Ottawa to work for him. There was barely an institution within Toronto in which Mulock did not play a role. Besides backing Joe Atkinson’s relaunch of the
Toronto Star
in 1899, Mulock had helped make the University of Toronto a major educational establishment and was among the founders of the Dominion Bank, the Toronto General Trust (both part of the TD Bank Group today), and the Wellesley Hospital.

Although he came from a relatively humble Irish-Canadian background, the chief justice was now in his seventies and deeply entrenched in the Canadian establishment. Distantly related to the wealthy Cawthra family, which had been part of the Family Compact back in the 1830s, as a young man he had ridden Cawthra coattails until he himself was wealthy. He then made an advantageous marriage to the startlingly plain but well-connected Sarah Crowther. When Mulock’s tall, spare figure strode through Osgoode Hall’s vaulted library or into the velvet-curtained dining rooms of the Toronto or York Club in Toronto, or the Rideau Club in Ottawa, at least a dozen admirers would rise to shake his hand. He had been painted by both of the fashionable portrait artists of the period (J.W.L. Forster and Wyly Grier) and shared his time between a prosperous farm near Newmarket, where he raised prize cattle and Shetland ponies, and an elaborate mansion at 518 Jarvis Street, just down the road from the Masseys. (His son Cawthra lived close by, at 538 Jarvis Street.)

In 1914, Sir William was at the forefront of Toronto’s response to the European conflict: he was co-creator and chair of the Toronto and York County Patriotic Fund, established to look after the families of Toronto volunteers. At the fund’s launch in a crowded Massey Hall, nobody sang “God Save the King” louder. When former U.S. president
William Howard Taft came to speak at the University of Toronto the following February, while Bert Massey’s cousin Vincent served as an usher on the floor of the hall, Mulock sat in the prime spot on the platform, next to the portly Taft. The following day, the former president lunched with Chief Justice Mulock.

(Other than the odds of America entering the war, what did they discuss? Sir William probably did not confide to the teetotalling Taft his current obsession: the threat of Prohibition in Ontario. The chief justice’s drinking habits were as rough as his manners. In 1886, he had bought hundreds of gallons of the best rye available, at a cost of less than a dollar a gallon, and stored it in barrels in his Jarvis Street cellar. Now he was busy constructing special concrete closets in which to hide it, in the event that Prohibition should place limits on personal stockpiling.)

In court, Chief Justice Mulock was known as a no-nonsense judge who had much in common with Magistrate Denison. In the words of journalist and social commentator Augustus Bridle: “Impatient with counsel, impetuous and severe with witnesses, and heavy with admonishment to the depraved prisoner … he asserts himself with the trenchant emphasis of a bushwacker splitting rails.” But if Mulock shared Denison’s brusque impatience, he did not share the Beak’s bigotry or rigid adherence to the status quo. Mulock was a go-getter, and having grown up poor, he felt no nostalgia about “the good old days.” He had little time for United Empire Loyalist snobbery or anti-American feeling. For all his respect for King and Empire and pride in the knighthood that had been conferred upon him in 1902 by King Edward VII, he harboured no hostility towards Catholics or non-British immigrants. As a cabinet minister in Ottawa he took French lessons at 6:30 every morning so he could speak to Quebec colleagues in their own language. Most important for Carrie, he was a compassionate man, noted in his judgments for occasionally going (as Bridle put it) “wide of the mark in mere sentiment.”

In general, Justice Mulock was considered to be lenient with the accused in criminal cases. Only one group of malefactors could expect no mercy: chicken thieves. So many of his own hens had been stolen from his Newmarket farm that the mere whisper of a missing Rhode Island Red or Leghorn would turn him purple with rage. One of his idiosyncracies was that he banned the use of brass clips to fasten court documents, because he had once torn his gown on one. (The rule prevailed for years after his death, long after the reason for the ban was forgotten.) Chief Justice Mulock’s unpredictability could be the wild card in a sensational case involving a world-famous family, murder, and sex.

The
Tely
’s Ross Robertson and Jack Robinson knew that the chief justice probably wanted to clean out all cases pending before the Ontario Supreme Court rose at the end of February. Carrie’s case might be heard within days. The
Evening Telegram
needed to keep interest in the case simmering so that donations for Carrie’s defence would continue to roll in.

“Interest in Carrie Davies, Many Want To Help” was the headline on one article, which claimed that the paper was flooded with letters about the case. Apparently, almost all these writers warmly championed Carrie, although the
Tely
(which had published several such letters only days earlier) now announced that it would be inappropriate to publish them because the prisoner should not be “tried by newspaper.” But it did mention that Mr. William Goldsmith of the Bedfordshire Fraternal Association was taking donations for a Carrie Davies Defence Fund, and that envelopes had arrived from “‘An Englishman,’ ‘Funny Looking One,’ ‘East Toronto Sympathiser,’ Henry Ashmead and others.” Carrie’s fellow worshippers at St. Monica’s Anglican Church were said to be pressing cash on the Reverend Robert Gay, their rector, and he was going to pass it on to the Bedfordshire Association.

How accurate was the
Tely
’s reporting? Rumours and misinformation were flying around. The
Toronto Evening Star
told a completely
different story. A couple of days after the
Tely
implied that money was pouring in for Carrie, the
Star
claimed that the Fund had only attracted $20 in donations, and that the Bedfordshire Fraternal Association had withdrawn its support for Carrie when it heard that the Local Council of Women had found her a lawyer who would give his services pro bono. President Hall of the Bedfordshire Fraternal Association, happy to hear of an offer that would take the burden of raising a large sum off his threadbare organization, was reported to have announced, “I shall strongly advise that the money which has been raised be returned to those who sent it.” Given that a KC’s fees for taking a murder case ran between $1,500 and $2,000, his reaction is understandable.

Such a possibility didn’t suit the
Evening Telegram
’s publisher and editor at all. If Hartley Dewart did not handle the case, the
Tely
would no longer have advance notice of any scandalous revelations the court might hear. And if Mrs. Huestis and her middle-class do-gooders took over the case,
Tely
readers might lose interest, and that could hurt sales.