The Massey Murder (8 page)
Authors: Charlotte Gray
Carrie’s anonymous sweetheart on Salisbury Plain, drilling in a downpour in defence of Empire, was as good as a character witness for her.
R
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TILL
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USY IN
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… Thousands of Belgians watched the terrific battle in the air. When the [German] Taube pitched earthwards, signalling the victory of the British flyer, the crowd broke out in a great chorus, singing “God Save the King” …
—Globe
, Wednesday, February 10, 1915
The relatives express extreme indignation that any suggestion of indiscretion should be made against the murdered man
.
—Toronto Daily News
, Wednesday, February 10, 1915
C
harles Albert Massey’s funeral took place three days after his death. Rhoda, Bert’s widow, had returned the previous day from Bridgeport, Connecticut, after what must have been a shocking telephone call from her brother-in-law Arthur Lyman Massey. The trip home, which had involved at least two changes of train (likely in Boston and Montreal), had taken twenty-four hours, and probably felt much longer. A front-page story in the
Toronto Daily News
said she was “Prostrated with Grief.” Arthur Massey met her at Front Street Station and escorted her to his house at 165 Admiral Road. Admiral Road was only five blocks from Walmer Road, but with its leafy elm trees, spacious lots, and turreted homes it was several degrees smarter. There Rhoda was greeted by her son, fourteen-year-old Charlie, who was traumatized by the death of his father and the arrest of Carrie, the shy young woman only four years older than him with whom he had often been left alone in the house. He used to chat to her while she cooked and cleaned in the kitchen, and in the basement he had enjoyed demonstrating to her his skill with his father’s firearm. Arthur Massey and his forceful wife, Mary Ethel, had swept Charlie off to Admiral Road immediately after the dreadful events of the previous Monday. Now they were busy burying the whole business, including Rhoda’s husband, as fast as possible. They had already made arrangements for the funeral.
Rhoda Massey wanted her husband to receive a Masonic burial. Like father and grandfather before him, Bert had been an active Freemason, belonging to the Ashlar Lodge on Yonge Street, one of more than a dozen Masonic lodges in Toronto. His wife relished this connection with the secret brotherhood that was deeply rooted in Toronto’s WASP establishment. “It was my husband’s wish that he be buried under Masonic auspices,” she told the
Toronto Daily Star
, adding querulously, “but although I returned home just as soon as possible, I was not in time to give his lodge … the three days’ notice required.” Either the Ashlar Lodge, or her brother-in-law, had decided that an elaborate ceremony for Brother Massey would be inappropriate. Arthur briskly informed her that there would be a short service, for family only, at 165 Admiral Road, and then the Hopkins Burial Company would convey the coffin and family party to Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
Mount Pleasant was the final resting place for
haute
Toronto: among those buried in its two hundred and five carefully groomed acres of graves and memorials were Sir Oliver Mowat, the former premier of the province, and both of the men who had revolutionized the Dominion’s retail business: department store kings Timothy Eaton and Robert Simpson. One of the cemetery’s most lavish memorials was the massive Massey mausoleum, designed by architect Edward J. Lennox. Lennox had also designed City Hall, where Colonel Denison held sway in the Police Courts, and the architect had used the same heavy Gothic hand to memorialize the Massey family’s illustrious forebear, Hart Almerrin Massey. The monument, a shrine to Massey muscle, was a solid lump of rusticated masonry encrusted with every excrescence imaginable—steps, windows, gables, pillars, and a turret. It was topped by a life-size statue of a hefty woman standing on a small Greek temple, gazing westward and radiating a grim power.
When the Hopkins hearse drew up outside the Arthur Massey residence, there were a couple of reporters loitering outside, hands thrust
into the pockets of their wool coats as the February wind whipped the bare branches of the trees along Admiral Road. They watched the coffin carried through the front door, followed by an Anglican minister, the Reverend Mr. James of Bloor Street’s Church of the Redeemer, who arrived to conduct the service. Mary Ethel Massey had imported Anglicanism into this branch of the family. The reporters were still there when, less than an hour later, the black-clad mourners straggled out for the drive to the cemetery. “Many beautiful floral tributes testified to the popularity and esteem in which the late Mr. Massey was held by a host of friends and acquaintances,” the reporter from the
Star
noted respectfully. The paper listed Bert’s friends who acted as pallbearers by name: “Messrs. James McFadden, H. H. McNamara, Kenneth Zimmerman, John L. Hynes, Howard Frederick Massey, Arthur A. Allan.” It was left to readers to wonder why Frederick Massey, a distant cousin, was the only pallbearer related to the dead man. Bert’s twenty-seven-year-old first cousin Vincent Massey, then a member of the University of Toronto’s History Department, attended the service. (He noted in his diary, “Went to Bert Massey’s funeral from Arthur Massey’s house.”) But he had darted out early because he had more pressing priorities. He had already been obliged to miss a lecture on musketry at the university. That evening, former U.S. president William Taft was scheduled to speak at the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall, and the ambitious Vincent had wangled for himself the honour of being an usher.
From Admiral Road, the funeral cortege drove slowly up Yonge Street into Mount Pleasant Cemetery. By now, the press had lost interest. Had a reporter from the
Star
or
Evening Telegram
followed the cortege, he would have watched the sad little straggle of mourners skirt the Massey mausoleum and head towards a snow-covered, treeless southern corner of the cemetery. The procession finally stopped in an area of modest memorials and unmarked graves close to the cemetery wall. The undertakers swiftly lowered Bert’s coffin into a hole in the ground;
equally swiftly, the handful of mourners dispersed. There would be no grave marker for half a century.
The physical distance between Hart Massey’s mausoleum and Bert Massey’s grave reflected a bigger gulf—the distance between a hard-nosed entrepreneur and his less-favoured descendants.
Of all the industrialists who helped lay the foundations for the Dominion’s wealth, Bert Massey’s grandfather was the best known inside and outside Canada. By 1915, he had been dead almost two decades, but the Massey name was stamped on Toronto’s largest factory, on millions of pieces of agricultural machinery, and on buildings dotted around Toronto. His fame and philanthropy guaranteed that his grandson’s untimely death would become a sensational news story.
But there was another side to Hart Almerrin Massey, and one that Charles Albert Massey knew well. Bert was sixteen years old when his grandfather died, aged seventy-three, and he had clear memories of the tall, gaunt, frock-coated figure with the white beard, gimlet eyes, and forbidding demeanour of an Old Testament prophet. For the first few years of his life, Bert and his siblings had been the darlings of their grandparents’ eyes. Abruptly, when Bert was about ten, Hart had pushed them all to the margins of the Massey empire. The Massey name was an ambiguous inheritance.
Massey family history has all the characteristics that Canadians once relished—log cabin beginnings, devotion to duty, efforts rewarded.
However, the first Masseys to set foot in British North America arrived for commercial reasons rather than through loyalty to the Crown or imperial ambition. The Masseys were Yankee Methodists who came up from Vermont in 1802. Hart Massey, Bert’s grandfather, had archetypal pioneer beginnings: he started life in 1823 on a hardscrabble
family farm north of Lake Ontario, close to the little port of Cobourg. These were years when Canadian agriculture consisted of an annual cycle of backbreaking drudgery: land-clearing, rock removal, plowing, seeding, scything, and threshing—all done by hand. Land was cheap, but the work was brutal and monotonous. The hardships prompted the English immigrant Susanna Moodie to write, in
Roughing It in the Bush
, “My love for Canada was a feeling very nearly allied to that which the condemned criminal entertains for his cell.” Subsistence farmers like the Moodies and Masseys scratched a living from primitive farms on the harsh Canadian Shield and struggled to feed their families. They seized on any primitive labour-saving device, such as patented stump-pullers and improved harrows, that local blacksmiths hammered into existence. By the time he was six, Hart Massey knew all about rising at dawn to fetch water, feed chickens, collect eggs, harness horses, and gather kindling.
But Massey men shared a valuable talent: an aptitude for fiddling around with bits of metal. Hart’s father, Daniel, was fascinated by mechanical inventions and acquired a workshop in nearby Newcastle. From an early age, Hart too had demonstrated primitive engineering skills, and in 1851 he took over the Newcastle works, which was now a solid local foundry. Hart had vision, and an intuitive understanding of market forces, and the family foundry’s reputation rapidly spread beyond the rock-strewn farms around Newcastle. Hart geared the “Newcastle Foundry and Machine Manufactory” to the production of mechanical mowers and reapers. His machines made farmers’ lives incomparably easier, and Massey products were soon winning prizes at agricultural shows. In 1867, the year of Canada’s Confederation, Hart Massey’s combined reaper and mower won a gold medal at an international exposition in France. The foundry expanded, profusely illustrated Massey catalogues were widely distributed, and Hart Massey was on the road to becoming one of Canada’s first self-made millionaires.
Some of the Massey success was due to Massey mechanical and marketing skills, but much was due to the larger national context. Massey machines appeared when there was a scarcity of farm labour, increasing demand for wheat production, and (thanks to the U.S. Civil War) little competition from the States. Massey machines continued to win international prizes as Canada expanded westwards and the population grew. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were over six million Canadians, and the most popular image of Canada for decades to come was of acres of golden wheat, waving in the prairie breeze, awaiting the Massey thresher. Massey reapers had helped transform Canada from a handful of sparsely populated colonies (with a population of less than a million when Hart was born) into the breadbasket of the Empire.
Hart Massey and his wife, American-born Eliza Phelps, would have four sons (a fifth died as an infant) and a daughter. Their eldest child, Charles Albert (Bert’s father), was born in 1848. The Masseys had retained close links with family and business interests in the United States, and when Charles was a lanky, lantern-jawed twenty-three-year-old, his father left him in charge of the family’s Newcastle factory and moved to Cleveland, Ohio, for health reasons.
Charles Massey had inherited from his grandfather and father their entrepreneurial flair and appetite for work. However, he was also a gentler character, with a sweet smile and a passion for music: he began playing the organ at services in Newcastle’s Methodist Church when he was only thirteen. He and his pretty American wife, Jessie, lived next door to the Newcastle works in a white clapboard house. Their first surviving child, Winona Grace, was born in 1872; four more babies would follow. Jessie reported to her own mother that her husband would frequently come home during the day to visit his growing family: “Charley plays with [the baby] so much, she cries for him now when he goes out and wants to stay with him all the time he
is in the house.” But Charles did not neglect the foundry. Under his shrewd management, business increased 50 percent in the eight years after his father’s departure.
In 1878, the Massey Manufacturing Company introduced its first machine of wholly Canadian design, the Massey Harvester. Plans called for two hundred of these reapers to be made the first year: more than five hundred orders flowed in. Business boomed. By 1879, the company had outgrown the Newcastle premises and Charles took the bold decision to move it to Toronto. He commissioned “the largest and best equipped factory ever built in Canada” on a six-acre site on King Street West, sandwiched between railway tracks (it had its own spur line) on the outskirts of the city. The main plant consisted of a huge four-storey building of solid red brick, lit by gas and safeguarded from fire by an automatic sprinkler system. A couple of years later, the company opened a branch plant in Winnipeg just as immigrants began to pour into Manitoba. By 1883, the Massey Manufacturing Company’s aggregate business was a million dollars, more than ten times the amount done in 1870, the year of its incorporation. With seven hundred employees, it was Toronto’s largest factory.
Charles, Bert’s father, worked like a dog through these years, keeping the Newcastle plant running while building the new Toronto works, then switching production to Toronto and ramping up to meet increased demand. As general manager, he ran the works and was responsible for all the advertising, wages, hiring, stock purchases, banking, and correspondence—he wrote as many as a hundred and fifty letters a day. He and Jessie left their modest Newcastle home and moved to a town house in Clarence Square, at the southern end of Toronto’s Spadina Avenue, that was a ten-minute drive, in a horse-drawn carriage down tree-lined dirt roads, to the new Massey factory. Their fourth child, and second son, Charles Albert (“Bert”), was born here in August 1880. A year later, Bessie Irene completed the family.