Authors: Charlotte Gray
Dewart Senior’s fight with Hart Massey erupted in 1888, over the future of Victoria College, Ontario’s most important Methodist educational establishment. At the time, Victoria College occupied an elegant Greek Revival building in the middle of the little lakeside port of Cobourg, one hundred kilometres east of Toronto. Founded in 1836 as an egalitarian challenge to the Anglican upper crust of Toronto, it boasted celebrated divines such as Egerton Ryerson and Nathanael Burwash among its principals. But by the 1880s it had fallen on hard times, and in the
Christian Guardian
the Reverend Dewart argued that the college should move to Toronto and become part of the University of Toronto federation of colleges that William Mulock was then promoting. For Edward Dewart, the transfer would boost the Methodist crusade against immorality: Methodism would reinforce the right values in the dangerously open-minded atmosphere of university life. “No modern culture,” Dewart argued, “can be safely substituted for the fire and faith of the early Methodists.”
However, another faction of powerful Methodists, including Hart Massey, regarded the proposed move as an Anglican takeover of the school. The ruthless patriarch of the farm machinery business tried to block it by offering $250,000 ($7.5 million in today’s currency) to keep Victoria College in Cobourg. Despite the dangled donation, the move went ahead—but not before the Toronto press had savaged all Methodists, including both Hart Massey and Hartley Dewart Senior. A vicious series in the
Toronto World
alleged that Dewart had supported
Massey in a ruthless stock deal years earlier, in the hope of receiving financial donations to the
Christian Guardian
. Dewart was outraged: he and the Masseys had been on opposing sides of the Victoria College battle, and now his name had been dragged through the mud. The Dewarts did not forget.
The Carrie Davies case offered Hartley Dewart, KC, a chance to settle an old score with the Masseys.
There was another reason why Carrie’s case had a particular attraction for Hartley Dewart. It reminded him of a notorious murder case in which he had been involved twenty years earlier, when he was a junior Crown counsel and a brilliant defence lawyer called Ebenezer Forsyth Blackie Johnston had run rings around the Crown.
This was the case of Clara Ford, a sturdy black seamstress who in 1895 had confessed to killing the son of a wealthy Toronto family. Dewart had watched with astonishment as the senior Crown prosecutor, the well-regarded Britton Bath Osler, floundered on what everyone thought was an open-and-shut case. Osler was a hero in Anglo-Protestant Toronto: he was the lawyer who had successfully prosecuted Louis Riel a decade earlier. As the dignified, courteous Mr. Osler laid out the evidence against Clara Ford, her chances of avoiding the noose seemed slim. She pleaded not guilty, but she had confessed to the murder, and she shocked observers with her refusal to display the feminine delicacy expected of women. In fact, she was downright aggressive. Before her trial, rumours had spread about her penchant for wearing men’s clothes, brandishing a gun, and getting into fights. One newspaper asserted that she jumped onto streetcars “like a man,” another hinted that she liked eating raw meat, and racist and sexist innuendoes reverberated in references to her “African blood” and checkered past.
Yet Dewart saw the Crown’s case slipping away in the face of Blackie Johnston’s adroit performance. Despite Clara Ford’s confession, Johnston made her the heroine of a powerful tale. Ford, in his
version, was a poor girl who had been wronged by a rich villain, and then forced into a false confession by unscrupulous detectives who were only interested in advancing their own careers. Johnston demonstrated his own selflessness and chivalry by offering to represent her without fees. Clara’s new image, as a penniless woman who had been mistreated by an upper-class rake and was now on trial for her life, excited a groundswell of sympathy amongst Toronto’s working classes. Popular distaste for a cross-dressing immigrant who swore like a trooper was forgotten, and Clara became the victim, claiming that a big-city detective had “kept repeating I was in a net … The more I denied, the more he pressed me to confess. At last, I said I did it.”
Osler struggled to make the charge stick, but Johnston was unstoppable. And then the inexperienced Dewart found himself taking on Blackie Johnston in person. Osler’s wife suddenly died halfway through the trial, so Osler’s junior had to stand up and conduct the case for the Crown. Dewart spent three hours cross-examining Clara in the hope of poking holes in the new story of the “forced” confession. But it was in vain. He was followed by Johnston at full throttle, the latter reminding the jury in his closing remarks that the jury must return a verdict of “murder or nothing.” Johnston asked the twelve men if they were prepared to accept the awful responsibility of sending a poor, wronged woman to the gallows. The jury acquitted Clara.
People have always been fascinated by violent crimes. And Blackie Johnston was in the great tradition of barristers, on both sides of the Atlantic, who deliberately played into that public fascination.
For years, British barristers had charted the intersection of murder and popular culture and treated courtrooms as theatres in which they enacted dramas. Nineteenth-century lawyers had plenty of material to draw on, as real-life events morphed into crowd-pleasing melodrama. The story of Eliza Fenning, a cook in London, was a typical example. When Fenning was convicted of poisoning her employers and hanged
in 1815, as many as forty-five thousand watched her execution outside Newgate prison. Eliza’s story re-emerged in 1844 as a play entitled
The Maid, the Master and the Murderer
. In 1858, the outlines of Fenning’s case reappeared in a story by Wilkie Collins published in Charles Dickens’s magazine
Household Words
. Dickens himself, who frequently attended executions, titillated his readers with gruesome murders in short stories and in several of his novels, notably
Oliver Twist
. By the 1890s, readers were hooked on murders, especially when the villains were identified by fiendishly clever fictional detectives like Sherlock Holmes (who had made his first appearance in 1887). Fictional accounts of murders featured stock characters—innocent maidens, untrustworthy foreigners, helpless women, honest workmen, or wealthy cads. Defence lawyers used versions of these one-dimensional stereotypes in the narratives they shaped for juries.
Canadians shared the taste for murder: books by Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle were bestsellers on this side of the Atlantic, especially among British immigrants. But by Carrie’s day, a unique brand of crime fiction had evolved here, featuring two aspects of the country that enthralled outsiders: its wilderness, and its North West Mounted Police as incorruptible heroes. (The villain was often winter weather.) The first serial character in Canadian crime fiction was Corporal Cameron of the North West Mounted Police, launched in 1912 by the bestselling author Charles Gordon, a Presbyterian minister whose pen name was Ralph Connor. The same year, the Mounties’ image got a jolt of hero-worship from the ballad “The Riders of the Plains” by Mohawk poet Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake):
For these are the kind whose muscle makes the power of the Lion’s jaw
,
And they keep the peace of our people and the honour of British law
.
All melodrama celebrates the triumph of virtue, but Canadians’ glorification of the Mounties reflected respect for law and morality. Canadian readers enjoyed police procedurals even more than grisly murder mysteries, and they ate up black-and-white morality tales. The simplistic crime reporting from Toronto’s police court provided by the
Tely
’s Harry Wodson and his colleagues fed this appetite.
Blackie Johnston knew all about the public taste for melodrama. His forte as a Canadian defence lawyer was to construct a convincing theory of innocence for his client, and then to tailor every question in his cross-examination to support his portrayal of Clara Ford as a wronged damsel and her victim as a debauched scoundrel. By the time he had finished his defence, jurors could almost hear the wicked cackle of the victim—now transformed into a villain.
Johnston had served a year as honorary president of the Canadian Bar Association in 1911, and Dewart (who was elected a bencher of the Law Society of Upper Canada the same year) had heard him discuss his methods. As the elderly lawyer liked to remind colleagues, he never asked a question to which he did not know the answer, and he never allowed a witness to lead him off in an unplanned direction. The job of a defence lawyer, insisted Johnston, was to weaken his opponent’s arguments and win his client’s acquittal, and his witnesses were carefully rehearsed. To expose truth or falsehood was not his job, and he rarely spoke directly to a client accused of murder. Instead, he wove together a compelling script from the facts gathered by his juniors, then treated the jury with Uriah Heep–like deference as he staged his storytelling magic. His case for the defence always captivated the popular imagination. There was little defence for Clara Ford in the letter of the law, but an appeal to the jury’s hearts had overridden that technicality.
Hartley Dewart never forgot his defeat at Blackie Johnston’s hands. Moreover, nervous little Carrie was a much more virtuous heroine than belligerent Clara Ford. Twenty years after Dewart had lost the Ford
case, Carrie’s case offered him the chance to prove himself the equal of the great Ebenezer Blackie Johnston in playing the coveted role of defender of wounded womanhood. If he won, he would be the envy of his peers and the talk of the town. All in all, the prospect of emerging as the victor in a David-and-Goliath battle against the mighty Masseys was irresistible.
But to win, Dewart had to develop a storyline for Carrie, and the clock was ticking. The winter session of the Ontario Supreme Court was due to wind up within days—it had already extended its sitting by two weeks. Nevertheless, both the Crown and Chief Justice Mulock had let it be known that they wanted to deal with Carrie this month, rather than letting the case and its attendant publicity fester for several weeks until the spring session opened in April. Carrie’s case would be heard with a rapidity that was unusual in 1915 and would be unheard of today.
W
EDNESDAY
, F
EBRUARY 24 TO
T
HURSDAY
, F
EBRUARY 25
German submersibles have scored again. The British steamer “Oakby,” going “light” from London to Cardiff, Wales, was torpedoed and sunk and the crew landed all safe today at Ramsgate. A Berlin report that a British transport had been sunk probably referred to the government collier “Branksome Chine,” destroyed off Beachy Head yesterday
.
—Toronto Daily News
, Wednesday, February 24, 1915
H
EARST
H
EARS
O
LD
S
TORY
P
ROMISES
“C
ONSIDERATION
” P
ROSPECTS FOR
V
OTES FOR
W
OMEN AT A
W
AR
S
ESSION
N
OT
V
ERY
B
RIGHT
B
UT
T
HERE
W
AS
N
O
R
OW
Canada was rapidly becoming a nation, said Dr. Stowe Gullen. It was high time that Canada recognized the rights of women … The war would not have occurred if women had equal rights in the world and had a chance to direct affairs
.
—Evening Telegram
, Wednesday, February 24, 1915
A
t the second police court hearing, Dewart had entered a plea of not guilty on Carrie’s behalf. But how could her defence team justify that plea? What were the choices facing Hartley Dewart, as he sat at his desk in the Home Life Building and started to map out his strategy to rescue Carrie from a murder rap?
Dewart was well aware that his options were limited. If Carrie were found guilty of murder, the only punishment in law was the mandatory death penalty. However, Dewart also knew that, even if his client was convicted, she was unlikely to hang. Since Confederation, close to half a century earlier, only twenty-one women, compared to 555 men, had been convicted of murder and had faced the death sentence. Most female convictions involved miserable stories of family abuse and social stigma, with violent husbands or unwanted children as the victims, and judges and juries had chosen to be lenient. Such women were more to be pitied than punished, in the eyes of the community if not the law. In the wake of all twenty-one murder convictions, petitions for clemency were sent to the governor general in Ottawa (although the minister of justice in fact made the decision): eighteen of the death sentences had been commuted to manslaughter and the women given prison sentences. Only three of the twenty-one women swung from the gallows.
But a woman who killed her employer in cold blood presented a different and more serious kind of challenge. The closest precedent to
Carrie’s case augured ill for Carrie. Hilda Blake, a twenty-one-year-old English-born domestic servant in Brandon, Manitoba, shot and killed her employer’s wife in July 1899. Local newspapers went over the top in their relish for bloody details. The
Western Sun
described the killing as “one of the most atrocious crimes in the annals of Manitoba’s history and one of the most villainous that ever occurred in the Dominion of Canada.” Although Hilda was an attractive woman who may have been seduced by her employer, she had allegedly destroyed the kind of Victorian marriage idealized in literature, and her crime left four young children motherless. She was sentenced to hang. In Ottawa, Prime Minister Laurier refused to commute the sentence to life imprisonment, despite arguments in her favour from no less an advocate than Governor General Lord Minto.