Authors: Charlotte Gray
Two years after Jessie’s death, her father-in-law died. Hart Massey left a huge estate of almost $2 million (worth close to half a billion dollars today in purchasing power). The larger part of his money went to charitable and educational causes, and almost all the rest (after taking account of his widow’s needs) was divided among his surviving children, Chester, Lillian, and Walter. Bequests to the “poor” Masseys, now orphaned and struggling, were grudging, given the size of the estate: Bert Massey and his four siblings each received only $15,000 (about $402,000 today)—from which money advanced by their grandfather for their education was deducted. Belleville’s Albert Business College, the school Bert had attended, received $10,000 in Hart’s will—not much less than Bert himself. For several years, there had been ugly rumours that Hart Massey had quietly wrested a large portion of stock back from Charles Massey’s estate, to ensure that it would never be sold outside the family. This suspicion, and the stingy bequest, triggered a family lawsuit, finally settled out of court, that caused a bitter rift in family relations. The details were always hushed up.
From then on, Jessie’s children never cropped up in the family photograph albums or in news reports of Massey triumphs. Hart’s widow, Eliza, was equally stingy: when she died in 1908, almost all her estate went to Chester, Walter, and Lillian. She left nothing to her five grandchildren by her eldest son, Charlie, although an elderly brother-in-law and sister in the States each received $1,000.
Both of Charles Albert’s two sons appear to have inherited the Massey mechanical aptitude. Arthur, six years older than Bert, had invented and patented a particular design of bed for invalids while still
in his early thirties. Bert had opted for a career in the booming automobile industry. Yet there is no suggestion that either Arthur or Bert was offered a job at the Massey works, although there was no Jarvis Street heir in the next generation. (Chester’s two sons had little interest in farm machinery. Although Vincent was briefly in charge, he quickly moved into politics, while his younger brother, Raymond, was always determined to be an actor, not a tractor maker. It was unthinkable that one of Walter’s three daughters might join the company, while his son Denton—born in 1900—was still too young.) After Walter Massey’s death in 1901, the former general manager of the Harris firm, Lyman Melvin-Jones, took over the ever-expanding Massey commercial empire. Ironically, Melvin-Jones won the prizes that Hart felt he himself had deserved—a seat in the Canadian Senate and a British knighthood.
With a name like Massey, Bert was welcomed at smart clubs, and his friends were drawn from the Toronto establishment. Membership in the Masons (he benefited from family tradition) allowed him to troll for useful contacts and present himself as a
bona fide
businessman. He and Rhoda had started their married life in a smart house with elaborate wooden trim and twelve-foot ceilings on Madison Avenue, not far from his mother’s house in the newly named Annex district. However, money was tight, and the move to nearby Walmer Road was probably a sign that his grandfather’s legacy was gone and his income was dwindling.
But in 1915, few knew about the nasty family politics behind closed Massey doors. Masseys were Masseys—rich, powerful people who lived like kings. Number 169 Walmer Road might be a modest dwelling compared to such baronial piles as George Denison’s Heydon Villa or Hart Massey’s Euclid Hall, but it was still a comfortable detached house with room for servants and a carriage house in the backyard. And Bert Massey appeared to symbolize the thoughtless presumption of a playboy. He wore a diamond stick pin and sold Studebaker cars to wealthy
Torontonians. As a married man with a young son, perhaps he could be forgiven for not rushing to join the armed forces. Nonetheless, plenty of other thirty-four-year-old family men had already volunteered to fight for King and country.
Newspaper reporters latched onto the name Massey, unaware that the dead man belonged to a spurned branch of the family with no access to Massey millions. In 1952, the critic B.K. Sandwell made the same blithe assumption when Bert’s cousin Vincent Massey, a fourth-generation Massey to achieve eminence, was appointed Canada’s first Canadian-born governor general. Sandwell made the famous quip:
Let the Old World, where rank’s yet vital
,
Part those who have and have not title
.
Toronto has no social classes–
Only the Masseys and the masses
.
But it had never been quite as simple as that.
G
REAT
R
USSIAN
V
ICTORY IN
T
HE
C
ARPATHIANS
D
ESPERATE
B
ATTLE, IN
W
HICH
G
ERMANS
G
O
B
RAVELY TO
D
EATH THE
S
LAUGHTER
A
PPALLING
A
SSAULTS ON
R
USSIAN
T
RENCHES
R
EPELLED WITH
B
AYONET
… S
LOPES
D
OTTED WITH
S
LAIN
—Globe
, Thursday, February 11, 1915
C
ARRIE
D
AVIES
N
OW IN
J
AIL
H
OSPITAL
I
S
N
OT
C
ONFINED TO
B
ED
B
UT
H
AS
H
AD
S
EVERAL
F
ITS
All day Tuesday the girl sobbed and refused to be comforted or take any meals
.
She slept little at night and it is stated had several epileptic fits, to which she is supposed to be subject
.
—Toronto Daily News
, Thursday, February 11, 1915
T
he unfolding drama of a shocking death within a prominent family provided titillating relief for Toronto’s citizens. Gossip was easier to absorb than the welter of confusing stories out of distant countries on the far side of the Atlantic. The only sources of information about the war, now in its seventh month, were newspaper reports and the rumours they triggered: there was no radio, let alone any of the information technology we take for granted today—television, Internet, streamed videos of battles in real time, captured on cell phones by ordinary citizens. In Carrie’s world, newspaper readers were accustomed to getting the news when it was at least a day old, and to wondering if it had already been overtaken by events.
The official story in early February 1915 was that the war was going well. This was a contrast to the previous year, when for a ghastly moment Britain and its allies risked defeat in northern France and Belgium. Grey-uniformed German troops had headed for Belgium in 550 trains a day, some with “to Paris” chalked on their sides. By late August, German forces had captured Brussels, massacring civilians and pushing the remnants of the Belgian army out of the way as they moved into northern France. The French army had failed to contain the German surge across the border and were ill-equipped to mount an offensive to the southeast. French troops went into battle in eye-catching blue coats and brilliant red trousers that, in Adam Hochschild’s words, “had long
made them the most flamboyantly dressed of Europe’s foot soldiers.” It was a matter of Gallic pride: when a reformer at a parliamentary hearing had suggested toning down the colours two years earlier, the minister of war had bellowed,
“Jamais! Le pantalon rouge c’est la France!”
In case the vivid uniforms were not enough to guide German snipers, there was sound as well. Brass bands often led French infantry units into the attack.
Nevertheless, disaster had been narrowly averted. The French had halted the German advance towards Paris at the First Battle of the Marne in September, and the following month the British had crushed a clumsy German attack in the First Battle of Ypres. Canadians had been shocked by the horrendous casualties during these first three months of the war—the French lost 800,000 men (300,000 dead and the rest wounded or taken prisoner) and the British suffered a total loss of 95,000. Canadian newspapers described in blood-curdling detail how corpses littered the ground where Allied troops spent November and December extending the network of trenches—and getting their first taste of the months of misery ahead. Winter weather meant that the trenches were soon flooded and foul, and guns clogged with mud. Since Christmas, the western front had been relatively quiet.
Yet during this first year of fighting, an air of unreality lingered.
Saturday Night
had published a letter from an English officer in the North Staffordshire Regiment about the events on Christmas Day 1914, when German and British troops mingled freely in no man’s land, between the trenches. “This morning, after reveille, the Germans sent out parties to bury their dead. Our men went out to help, and then we all, both sides, met in the middle and in groups began to talk and exchange gifts of tobacco, food, etc. All the morning we have been fraternizing, singing songs. I have been within a yard, in fact onto their trenches, and have spoken to and exchanged greetings with a colonel, staff officers, and various company officers. All were very nice … The Germans
are Saxons, and a good-looking lot, only wishing for peace, in a manly way, and they seem in no way at their last gasp … The whole thing is extraordinary … It is weird to think that tomorrow night we shall be at it again hard.” A German juggler who had been onstage in London gave an impromptu performance to both sides in no man’s land. British soldiers from the Cheshire Regiment barbecued a pig and shared it with their enemies, and Saxon troops rolled a barrel of beer over their parapet and into British trenches.
The Christmas truce seemed to suggest that perhaps there was something noble about these warriors—that hostilities were a test of manhood rather than a brutal bloodbath. Such magical thinking didn’t last long. On December 26, snipers on both sides resumed their job of picking off easy targets. Screams, groans, and whimpers of pain replaced the sound of carols.
Immediately after Christmas, most of the fighting had been on Germany’s far distant eastern borders. In the lakes and forests of northeastern Poland, Russians and Germans had pounded each other with deadly machine gunfire, rifle shots, shell splinters, and whirling shrapnel. Phrases like “terrific slaughter” and “inferno of shells” were scattered through printed reports of the bloody Battle of the Masurian Lakes, which began in early February in a blizzard. Once again, the carnage was shocking: the Germans killed 56,000 Russians and captured 100,000 more. According to War Office spokesmen, the Masurian Lakes battle was a victory for the Russians, who had checked a German offensive.
Meanwhile, on the western front, the Allies’ artillery had captured two little towns on France’s border with Flanders, towns with names no one back in Canada could spell—Passchendaele and Langemarck. But these lofty pronouncements could not blot out the tales of bloody mayhem on both fronts that were seeping across the Atlantic. Some of those stories were propaganda, deliberately spread by government
warmongers in London and Paris to encourage enlistment. Others were straightforward reporting from the battlefield. Canadians bombarded with such reports had no way of knowing the difference.
“French Government Tells of the Fiendish Atrocities Perpetrated by the Kaiser’s Men” read one headline, over a story alleging that German soldiers had used scissors to gouge out the eyes of French soldiers. Army doctors reported that German shells were packed with phosphorus, which poisoned wounds and led to men dying of necrosis. At a medical triage station, a correspondent for the
Toronto Daily News
met men who were “tired, tired, tired … their eyes are heavy with gazing over-long in Death’s face” as they sat on trolleys and held up their “frost-bitten, bandaged feet.” The German navy had been given instructions, according to a Canadian Press dispatch, to drown any innocent women and children travelling on captured vessels. “Fiendish Determination of Germans Marks the Latest Development of Prussian Kultur.” A report from Poland asserted that the Germans were using “a new explosive, the fumes of which temporarily blind combatants.” The reporter described how the fighting was so intense that “it is no longer possible to distinguish individual gun explosions from the rattle of infantry. All are mingled in one inarticulate battle shriek. At night as if in a thunderstorm the darkness is pierced by intermittent flashes of fire while sickly green rockets shed a ghastly light over the lines.”
Gruesome reports like these circulated through Canada endlessly by word of mouth. The war news was increasingly unsettling: German tactics were not just belligerent, they were immoral. What kind of men assaulted women or deliberately blinded their enemies? In the little town of Leaskdale, eighty kilometres north of Toronto, the writer Lucy Maud Montgomery (who had a two-year-old son) confided to her journal, “There have been such hideous stories in the papers lately of [Germans] cutting off the hands of little children in Belgium. Can they be true? They have committed terrible outrages and crimes, that is
surely true, but I hope desperately that these stories of the mutilation of children are false. They harrow my soul … I cry myself to sleep about them and wake again in the darkness to cringe with the horror of it.”
What was happening to the brave lads who had left farms, factories, and families to defend the Empire? Families with menfolk at the front silently whispered prayers. Few people yet questioned the righteousness of the cause, or suggested that their boys’ bravery was anything less than heroic. “‘Tommy’ is majestic in his suffering,” the
Toronto Daily News
proclaimed on its front page. The fortitude of the rank and file despite appalling conditions and losses awed reporters. “These, mark you, are earth’s common men, the unnoticed men in the street,” wrote the
Daily News
correspondent. “Where do they learn it?”