The Massey Murder (9 page)

Charles was popular with Massey employees because he remembered names and promoted social activities. His love of music prompted the formation of the Massey Band, String Orchestra, and Glee Club, as well as the Massey Cornet Band, which was in constant demand at provincial fall fairs and at skating rinks throughout the winter. But he was seriously overworked, and by 1882 his father, Hart, now in robust health, had returned to Canada and resumed control of the company. His management style was a great deal harsher than his son’s, but Charles was too incapacitated to dilute his father’s iron rule.

Massey fortunes surged and Hart purchased a twenty-five-room mansion—an architectural frenzy of turrets and balconies—on fashionable Jarvis Street that he named Euclid Hall (433, subsequently renumbered 515). Charles and his family built a house close by and began to raise their children alongside those of Toronto’s expanding plutocracy. Toronto’s industrial boom was phenomenal in these years: furniture and clothing manufacture, piano-making, meat-packing, engineering, and breweries had all taken off. Furnaces, rubber and paper goods, carriages, chemicals, corsets, brass fittings, railway bolts—the catalogue of products churned out in hastily built factories was endless. The Bell Electric Light Company moved from London to Toronto in 1883 and was soon selling equipment across the continent. In 1884, the Toronto Electric Light Company began lighting central streets with steam-generated electricity. Several of Hart Massey’s counterparts were fellow Methodists, including Joseph Flavelle, a prominent financier who had begun in the meat-packing trade, and the department store dynasty the Eatons. Nevertheless, in this heaving mass of entrepreneurial vigour, the Masseys stood out. The Massey Manufacturing Company was the city’s biggest employer and single largest contributor to the city’s wealth.

But the city’s social elite was an exclusive club. Toronto’s Fine Old Ontario Families (“FOOFs,” as they had come to be called) resented
the new mercantile class. “I do not care for Toronto as I used to do,” Colonel George Denison, who typified the old guard, told a friend in 1911. “Parvenus are as plentiful as blackberries, and the vulgar ostentation of the common rich is not a pleasant sight.”

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 interest 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.