The Massey Murder (14 page)

Lawyers and KCs, as King’s Counsels were known, had almost certainly never intruded on Carrie’s narrow little world up to now. The circles in which Bert Massey moved included more salesmen than solicitors. If she had ever opened the door of 169 Walmer Road to a lawyer, he would likely have handed her his hat and coat without even glancing at her. Carrie knew nothing about the difference between a
suit-and-tie lawyer like Mr. Maw, who handled civil issues like marital, property, and commercial law, and a courtroom specialist like Mr. Dewart, who wore a silk-lapelled gown when he defended clients in court on criminal charges. But Carrie had been catapulted into an alien world, filled with expensive professionals, Latin phrases, and impenetrable legal process. She was the centre of the action, but she must have been totally bewildered.

The visitors whom Carrie most longed to see, Maud and Ed Fairchild, appeared in the jail’s cold, dank visitors’ room the day after Mr. Maw. When Carrie, clad in a regulation grey wool gown, was brought in by Mrs. Sinclair, the women’s superintendent, the sisters stared at each other, white-faced and mute with helplessness. Ed Fairchild reassured Carrie that he was doing everything he could. But it was a terrible time for the three working-class British immigrants. Even ignorant young Carrie recognized that she was in a predicament, facing the most serious charge in the Criminal Code. How could the trio possibly find the funds to pay Mr. Maw’s fees, let alone those of the famous Hartley Dewart, KC?

As it turned out, Carrie needn’t have worried. A wave of populist sympathy was about to wash over the eighteen-year-old, for reasons that had little to do with her. Toronto was in the middle of a brutal newspaper war. Newspaper wars always involve not only a battle for subscribers and advertisers, but also competing editorial visions for the society they serve. In the pre-television, pre-Internet era of the early 1900s, the stakes were much higher than today because newspapers were the
only
public sources of news. As British ties loosened and an autonomous Canada began to emerge, newspaper proprietors and editors were as important as politicians in shaping the national self-image.

The two newspapers involved in the battle for eyeballs in 1915 were the
Evening Telegram
and the
Toronto Daily Star
. Carrie’s case furnished each side with ammunition to attract readers and to promote their
proprietors’ views of where the Dominion’s loyalties should lie. The editors of each paper already differed on a crucial issue in the Walmer Road shooting: Who was the real victim?

In 1915, at major downtown intersections in Toronto, the shrill shouts of newsboys (some as young as nine years old) rose above the din of automobile engines and horses’ hooves throughout the day. Toronto boasted no fewer than six daily newspapers, and “special editions” and “extras” kept the newsboys’ lungs busy, filling any empty hours between regular print runs.

There were three morning papers, each costing two or three cents an issue, that were filled with lengthy political articles tailored to the interests of the professional classes who read them over leisurely breakfasts. The oldest, most serious, and self-important of these papers was the
Globe
, founded by George Brown in 1844 to promote his Reform politics, which now generally (but not always) leaned towards the Liberal Party. Its two morning rivals were the
Mail and Empire
and the
World
. In the evening, three one-cent papers hit the streets, with short, punchy articles designed to be read by blue-collar workers at the kitchen table after a day of manual labour. The three evening “rags” were the
Toronto Daily News
, the
Toronto Daily Star
, and the
Evening Telegram
.

Toronto could not yet claim to have Canada’s most important paper. That distinction belonged to Montreal, the largest city in the Dominion. The
Montreal Star
had the biggest circulation and the closest relationship to the Conservative government in Ottawa of any newspaper. But the Toronto newspaper market was booming alongside the city: most households took two papers a day. And one particular Toronto paper, the
Evening Telegram
(established in 1876 and usually known as the
Tely
), had already transformed both the city’s
administration and Canadian journalism with its innovative and brash approach to the news.

The 1915 newspaper war was nothing new in Canada. Throughout the nineteenth century, newspapers had proliferated as fast and frequently as the small towns they served. If a man (and it was always a man) wanted to broadcast his views in his community, all he needed was a few dollars to invest in a hand press, some boxes of movable type, and a nimble-fingered typesetter. The next day, the local
Examiner, Expositor
, or
Intelligencer
would be on sale, its smudgy columns filled with advertisements for local stores, verbatim reports of political debates, news items copied from larger papers elsewhere, and (the backbone of the paper) inflammatory editorials. One of the noisiest newspapermen in Canadian history was the politician William Lyon Mackenzie, the fiery leader of the 1837 rebellion who founded the
Colonial Advocate
as a vehicle for his outrage at the way Upper Canada was governed. But even the great polemicist himself was shocked by the invective in rival publications. He complained that the hundreds of newspapers circulating in Upper Canada had become “the denier resort of the venal, the profligate and the unprincipled in society.”

Local papers thrived, pulling isolated market towns and scattered farm families together into communities with their own heroes, habits, opinions, and rituals. By the 1880s, for example, the town of Port Hope, on the shore of Lake Ontario, had a population of about six thousand and no fewer than three papers, each a mouthpiece for its proprietor’s political views. These community papers were regularly put out of business by deaths, debts, or libel suits. But new ones always sprang up in their place, with owners eager to air their views.

As the twentieth century approached, and the Toronto newspaper market expanded, new technology changed the look and the economics of newspapers. They could now feature photos, thanks to photogravure. Keyboard-operated Rogers Typograph machines allowed one man
to work as fast as three manual typesetters. The enormous, clanking new presses churned out papers for mass circulation, but they required proprietors with deep pockets. So big-city papers like the
Globe
or the
Tely
had wealthier owners, as well as more pages and readers, than the scruffy small-town rags. Yet they were equally partisan, with editorial pages skewed to Conservative or Liberal opinion.

The
Tely
’s success was due to the knuckle-dusting commitment of its founder, John Ross Robertson, to produce a Conservative newspaper that appealed to “the masses not the classes.” He regarded “quality” papers like the
Globe
and the
Mail and Empire
as hopelessly stuffy, feeding their readers lengthy reports of parliamentary debates and indigestible, partisan editorials on national politics. The
Tely
was enthralling: it gave its readers punchy stories from city council, police courts, sports events, hospitals, high-life soirees, and low-life streets. Reporters combed downtown hotel registers for scandals; drunks hauled up before Colonel Denison’s court were named in the
Tely
’s columns. And the paper shone a light on municipal corruption by printing details of city contracts, so readers could decide whether their local taxes were being wasted. The paper’s appeal went far beyond Toronto’s rapidly expanding working class: it was soon the second paper in professional households. In the words of a contemporary writer, the paper was an “institution … read by every one from the fashionable belle in her boudoir to Biddy in the basement!”

The size of the
Evening Telegram
’s circulation attracted the most classified ads of any paper, and these money-spinners occupied the front pages of the paper, spilling into a further two pages in a sixteen-page issue, and a whopping five or six pages in the fat, twenty-eight-page Saturday
Tely
. “Business and Residential Properties” (for sale or rent) were plastered over the eight columns of page one, followed by columns of “Properties Wanted,” “Lost Items,” “Found Items,” “Unfurnished Rooms,” “Furnished Rooms,” “Business Chances,”
“Wanted—Male Help,” “Wanted—Female Help,” “Domestic Help,” “Employment Wanted,” “Situations Wanted, “ “Articles for Sale,” “For Sale or Exchange,” “Motor Cars,” “Articles Wanted,” and “Personals.” The front page often included an eye-catching display advertisement for a fashionable new product like Shredded Wheat (“A Canadian Food for Canadians”) or Royal Vinolia Vanishing Cream (“for those who dislike the sticky, grimy feeling of the usual cream.”) Above the fold on the right-hand side of the page there was a cartoon, featuring Colonel Denison, Prime Minister Borden, John Bull, or some other instantly recognizable target of satire. The paper also grabbed the lion’s share of splashy display ads from the new department stores of Timothy Eaton and Robert Simpson. The
Montreal Standard
reported that when Robertson’s five o’clock edition of the
Tely
appeared, it was “One of the sights of Toronto … literally hundreds of men on the streets seizing copies as they came out to read the Want Ads.” The paper made its proprietor money—a lot of it—almost from the first day.

The
Telegram
promulgated views that were bigoted even by the standards of the time. Like Colonel Denison, John Ross Robertson was convinced that Canada’s role within the British Empire was the Dominion’s most important feature, and the only defence against annexation by Uncle Sam. A stocky man with a goatee beard who was perpetually in a hurry, Robertson had been born in 1841 in a Toronto that was an unpretentious town of brick rowhouses, where the cobbled streets rang with English, Scottish, or Irish accents. The Robertsons themselves claimed impeccable Scottish heritage—direct descent from Duncan, born in 1347, chief (according to John Ross Robertson) of the Struan Robertson clan. Now Robertson found himself in a thrusting metropolis of company headquarters housed in steel-framed and marble-pillared skyscrapers, where you could hear Polish, Yiddish, and Italian alongside English on the paved roads around City Hall. Like
Colonel Denison, Robertson didn’t hide his antipathy to people from backgrounds different from his own, and he directed particular venom towards French Canadians and Roman Catholics. In September 1885, when Quebecers rioted in Montreal at the prospect of Louis Riel being hanged for leading the Northwest Rebellion, the
Telegram
’s proprietor had editorialized that Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald should “throw the French overboard.” A ferociously proud member of both the Orange Order (the fraternal Protestant organization) and the Masons, Robertson announced that it was time French Canadians understood that Canada was “a British colony, and that British laws, British customs and British language must prevail.”

For over thirty years, Robertson’s verbal fusillades appeared in the columns of the paper he owned. He had also spent some years as a member of Parliament in Ottawa: ornery as ever, he had run as Independent Conservative. By 1915, he was a seventy-four-year-old millionaire press baron in a three-piece suit, watch chain, and spats who didn’t hesitate to express fervent affection for the British monarchy and implacable hostility towards women’s suffrage.

These days, his devotion to the Masonic Order, patronage of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, and collections of historical memorabilia took most of his time, and others wrote his editorials. But he continued to keep tight control over the
Evening Telegram
, although his alter ego, editor Jack Robinson, ran the paper day to day. Robinson didn’t share his boss’s dapper style and was never part of Toronto’s privileged elite: he was a large, ungainly man, and his rumpled suits, quipped an associate, looked as though they were made in a tent factory. But “Black Jack,” as he was known on account of his thick thatch of dark hair, was as noisy and forceful as the boss he had served for twenty-seven years, and equally committed to temperance, the Orange Order, and the
Tely
. One of his
Tely
reporters described Black Jack as “A splendid bigot. And he believed in being a bigot.”

The newspaper locked in competition with the
Tely
for readers among the new British blue-collar immigrants was the
Toronto Daily Star
. This younger publication had a very different history. Originally established in 1892 by a group of printers who had been locked out in a labour dispute at another paper, the
Star
’s early years had been rocky. In 1899, it was bought by a group of influential Toronto businessmen who had decided that the city needed a staunchly Liberal evening newspaper to counter the influence of Robertson’s Tory
Tely
. The group included some of Toronto’s commercial heavy hitters: department store owner Timothy Eaton, Peter Larkin (founder of the Salada Tea Company), William Christie (head of the Christie, Brown biscuit company), George Cox (former president of Canada’s biggest bank, the Bank of Commerce, and now a Liberal senator). There were three more members of this elite little band of financiers whose influence would reverberate, explicitly or implicitly, through the Carrie Davies case sixteen years later. One was William Mulock, at the time a Liberal cabinet minister. The other two were the most important men in the Massey-Harris farm implement company: managing director Lyman Melvin-Jones and company president Walter E.H. Massey, Hart Massey’s son—and Bert Massey’s uncle.

This small, wealthy (and largely Methodist) clique of Liberals offered the job of editor and manager to an ambitious young newspaperman called Joseph Atkinson. Like Walter Massey, Atkinson was a Methodist who had started life in the little lakeside town of Newcastle. The similarities ended there: unlike the Masseys, the Atkinson family lived hand to mouth, and Joe’s widowed mother had run a boarding house for workers in Massey’s iron foundry.