Authors: Charlotte Gray
A wave of sympathy for Canadians who found themselves helpless cannon fodder began to build. Somehow, the untoward death of a thirty-four-year-old man on the streets of Toronto didn’t seem quite so outrageous …
Nevertheless, for the Masseys, Bert’s untimely death was a dreadful blot on the family name. Even if Bert Massey did not live on Jarvis Street like his cousin Vincent, or enjoy the perks of wealth, his close relatives were determined to protect his name and reputation.
Two papers had already quoted Carrie Davies’s assertion that her employer had “tried to ruin me.” Had Bert Massey assaulted the girl while his wife was away? In theory, this was a shocking suggestion; in practice, within Bert’s circle for as long as anyone could remember, girls at the bottom of the social ladder had often been regarded as “easy prey” by male employers. Bert wouldn’t have been the first man in Toronto to embark on such a dalliance, which might be justified either by blaming the servant for the seduction, or by dismissing it as
a “harmless flirtation.” His friends probably spent more time discussing Bert’s foolishness in getting caught or his bad luck in hiring the wrong maid. If they spent any time on Carrie’s role, it would have been to speculate on how an eighteen-year-old girl had got her hands on Bert’s pistol and knew how to fire it. What really alarmed them was the idea that a “harmless” backstairs seduction led to Bert’s death. Moreover, it looked as though the girl had planned the death: this wasn’t a crime committed in the heat of a struggle. But Bert’s relatives didn’t appreciate the salacious gossip that was starting to spread. The first step towards suppressing the story was burying the corpse. Step two was promoting the Massey version of the facts.
Rhoda Massey, newly widowed and facing an uncertain future, remained out of sight. She did not appear at any of the court hearings in the days to come, and she made no public statements. Most likely, she and her son remained in the guest room at 165 Admiral Road, rather than return to unhappy memories and the lack of domestic help at Walmer Road. Arthur Massey’s two children, eighteen-year-old Arnold and eleven-year-old Dorothy, could keep their fourteen-year-old cousin company. Meanwhile, Arthur and his wife, Mary Ethel, were more than up to the task of promoting the Massey side of the story.
Arthur Massey was a more successful professional than his brother. Trained as a bookkeeper, with his friend Walter Chandler he had set up a hospital and physician supplies business called Chandler and Massey. It was a family affair: his sister Jennie was married to Walter Chandler’s brother, and the two men had persuaded John Haydn Horsey—Arthur’s stepfather, who now managed a Dominion Bank branch office—to be vice-president. Now forty, Bert’s brother was the picture of bourgeois respectability (although he maintained his youthful taste for rather flashy bow ties.) When a reporter from the
Toronto Daily Star
appeared at his Admiral Road door before the funeral, Arthur spent several minutes with him on the doorstep.
Sporting a black armband, and speaking in a pained but stoic tone, Arthur explained, “We have only a feeling of sympathy for the unfortunate girl. We feel sure that the crime was committed in a fit of temporary insanity.” He mentioned that there had been an episode the previous summer when Carrie had behaved strangely—”she was probably deranged.” Perhaps, he suggested, she had worked herself into a frenzy because she had not heard from her young man in France. “There can certainly be no suspicions against Mr. Massey, and there is absolutely no truth in any report that credits him with any indiscretions.”
A reporter from the
Toronto Daily News
was given the same spin. The paper featured it on its front page: “‘Our family bears absolutely no resentment towards the girl, because we do not believe that she knew what she was doing,’ said Mr. A.L. Massey today. ‘It was very unfortunate for us that my brother should have been the victim. She might have shot anybody who happened to come along.’” The
Daily News
reported as fact that the doctors who had treated her the previous summer “will testify at the trial as to her mental state,” adding, “The relatives express extreme indignation that any suggestion of indiscretion should be made against the murdered man.”
In 1915, newspaper reporters automatically treated a man of Arthur’s position with deference. With his firm Massey chin and air of authority, his “more in sorrow than in anger” tone struck the right note of patrician forbearance as he gently sketched a compelling picture of an unhappy, unstable, and not very bright girl. He made it clear that the Masseys were not looking for revenge. Protecting the family name took priority over punishing a simpleton.
However, Mary Ethel Massey did not share her husband’s subtlety. After the family’s return from Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Rhoda Massey had gone upstairs to rest when a reporter from the
Evening Telegram
rang the doorbell and asked to speak to the grieving widow. The reporter was an unprepossessing-looking character in a long black coat and
with a battered bowler hat perched on the back of his head. Mary Ethel Massey, an impatient woman used to getting her way, knew that Rhoda would never speak to the press, so she led him into a room where they would be undisturbed. Undaunted by the reporter’s scruffy appearance, or the pencil hovering over his notebook, she let rip.
“Motive? Why, there wasn’t any motive. We are all perfectly satisfied that the girl was not mentally responsible when she shot Bert. I know that it has been hinted that Mr. Massey may have been indiscreet and acted improperly towards the girl, but the whole story is ridiculous. No person who knew Bert will believe that for a minute. He was not the kind of man to act that way.”
The reporter must have realized that a snobbish
grande dame
in full flow would give him a great article—one that would grip and shock his paper’s working-class readers, and that might play into the resentment of wealthy shirkers that was starting to bubble through Toronto. All he had to do was ensure that his shorthand was accurate and fast enough to stay abreast of Mrs. Massey’s tirade, and then he could slot the interview almost verbatim into the
Telegram
’s columns. He carefully noted how Mrs. Massey always referred to the unfortunate Carrie as “the girl” and never by name, and kept returning to the rumours of an attempted seduction.
“We are satisfied, we are sure,” continued Mary Ethel, “that Mr. Massey was innocent of wrongdoing, and that the girl had no cause to kill him. There was no motive, except that the girl was out of her head. Of that I am quite satisfied.”
The reporter lifted his head from his pad to ask, “What leads you to believe that there was something wrong with her mentally?”
Mary Ethel settled back to give a long account of the incident from the previous summer to which her husband had referred. “Last summer Mr. and Mrs. C.A. Massey visited us at our summer home on the island. One night while we were over at the National Yacht Club this girl went
out in the park with our maid. She suddenly became ill. She was carried from the park to our house, and when we returned from the club she was attempting to tear her hair and bite her fingers. It took six people to hold her.” The notion that it took six people to hold a girl who could not have weighed more than fifty kilograms must have seemed a stretch to the reporter, but he didn’t challenge Mrs. Massey. She continued her story, describing how the Masseys had summoned two doctors and a nurse, who suggested that Carrie had “suffered a spell.”
After Monday night’s shooting, Mary Ethel Massey explained, she and her husband had spoken to one of the doctors. “Since talking it over, we are convinced that another spell came on … The fact that she shot Mr. Massey on the steps seems to me to prove that she was not mentally responsible. If she had shot him in the house then her story might be substantiated … Mr. Massey was not a man who would bother about servant girls or attempt to act indiscreetly.”
The reporter then revealed that he had already talked to someone else about the case—that he had, in fact, found out a lot more about Carrie Davies than any member of the Massey family had bothered to learn. Watching his interviewee carefully, he mentioned, “The girl told her sister that Mr. Massey once came into her room in quest of a buttonhook.” (In the days before zip fasteners and Velcro, buttonhooks were used to fasten the rows of tiny buttons on women’s boots.) Unblinking, Mary Ethel brushed aside the suggested impropriety. “Well, I was just going to explain that. Mrs. Massey was going away one time and she told Bert that she was taking her buttonhook…. While Mrs. Massey was away, Bert invited a number of married couples to the house for a party. We were invited but Mr. Massey had the grippe and we could not go. When the guests were ready to go one young woman had to put on her overshoes. Bert was asked for a buttonhook and he ran up into the maid’s room and got the one she had. That is all there is to that story.”
Had Mrs. Massey ever noticed anything wrong with the Davies girl?
“Well, to my knowledge her character was perfectly good. She was a straight little girl as far as I know. Once or twice I was struck by a peculiar look which she seemed to have but I put it down to her English ways and the fact that she had only been in the country two years. A seamstress who calls at my house to do work told my maid that she shouldn’t go out with the girl as there seemed to be something wrong with her mentally.”
The reporter noted down Mrs. Massey’s dismissive comments. Mary Ethel Massey rose to signal that the interview was over. With the blind self-assurance of a woman who had never had anything to do with the press, she assumed that her story would have more credibility than anything a half-educated child said. She was confident that she had convinced this obsequious newspaperman that Bert Massey, and the Massey family, were blameless.
Mary Ethel could not have made a worse choice of reporter to whom to unburden herself. The newspaperman, whose name was Archie Fisher, was equally satisfied with the interview for very different reasons. His story about Mrs. Arthur Lyman Massey would appear in the
Evening Telegram
under the headline “Family of Dead Man Explain the Tragedy,” alongside an article that gave a very different picture of a young Englishwoman with “a peculiar look.”
F
RIDAY
, F
EBRUARY 12 TO
S
UNDAY
, F
EBRUARY 14
N
EW
W
AR
T
AXES
A
LL CLASSES HELP TO CARRY THE BURDEN
Hon. W.T. White, Finance Minister, is being congratulated on all sides today for his able budget speech … He needed money to carry on our share of the Empire’s struggle. He placed his taxes where wealth is accumulated, and as far as possible placed the burden on the rich rather than the poor
.
—Toronto Daily News
, Friday, February 12, 1915
G
IRL
H
AD
P
ERIODIC
F
ITS OF
D
EPRESSION
C
ARRIE
D
AVIES
I
S
S
TILL IN
J
AIL
B
UT
I
S
F
EELING
B
ETTER
… The rumors of indiscretions on the part of the murdered man prior to the shooting are not credited by the majority of the police officials
.
—Toronto Daily News
, Friday, February 12, 1915
I
n the Don Jail, Carrie Davies heard little about the war or anything else going on outside the prison’s high walls. She remained confined to the hospital ward, under the medical supervision of jail physician T. Owen Parry. Dr. Parry was a no-nonsense, unsmiling man who rarely showed sympathy for his patients: one of his duties was to attend executions so he could sign the death certificate after the hangman had done his job. But he felt sorry for Carrie and allowed her to remain in the hospital ward, where better food was served. After a good night’s sleep, on her third morning in jail she tucked into porridge, syrup, coffee, bread, and milk. For her first two days in prison she had sobbed uncontrollably and refused to be comforted, but now she was reported to be “more cheerful” and mingling with fellow prisoners. However, on Friday morning she fainted, and Dr. Parry was quickly summoned. Was this the mental instability that the Masseys had spoken of? A diagnosis of “epilepsy” had been bandied about—devastating if true, in an age when there was no treatment and the condition was often seen as a form of demonic possession. Dr. Parry batted off the suggestion. “She has shown no signs of epilepsy. We have been watching her very closely for this since she came to the jail … She has not had any fits, but has been weak and hysterical. There was a marked improvement in her condition today.”
By now, Toronto’s newspaper readers knew a little more about the young woman who shot Bert Massey, thanks to the indefatigable
Evening Telegram
reporter Archie Fisher. Three days after his first visit to the Fairchilds, on the night of the killing, Archie Fisher again made the long journey east to Morley Avenue for another chat with Carrie’s sister Maud and brother-in-law Ed Fairchild. He was under instructions to milk the pathos of Carrie’s life for all it was worth in a lengthy
Tely
feature.
In the fuggy warmth of the Fairchilds’ parlour, Maud poured out her fears and her family history to the reporter. It was a story of a miserable working-class English family spiralling towards destitution—a story with no redeeming note of virtue rewarded or generosity extended. Maud and Carrie were among the nine children of a British army sergeant and his wife. Carrie was born in Woolwich, an army town on the Thames River, and spent her early childhood in Aldershot, a military town in southern England. Army pay was low, but the family had kept its head above water because Mrs. Davies had run a small store. Carrie, “just a cheerful, normal girl” according to her sister, had attended an army primary school. But life took a downturn when Sergeant Davies was severely injured in an accident while in charge of an army transport wagon during the South African War. Discharged from the army, he came limping home with no pension and no prospects. The Davies family moved to a grimy village called Sandy in Bedfordshire, on the main Great Northern Railway line, seventy-four kilometres north of London. They tried to make ends meet with what Archie Fisher called a “wayside inn,” but it was a struggle—especially with the arrival of more babies.