Authors: Charlotte Gray
Would she return to domestic service, asked the reporter?
“Why yes, but not to the kind of domestic service that I have been in,” Carrie replied, revealing her lack of imagination about the future. In a world of widening opportunities for women, Carrie wanted to continue in “her place”—the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder. Her ambition was to become a parlour maid “or something like that. Some kind of light service where I will not be left alone or where I will
not have too much responsibility. That is where the trouble was at the Masseys. I was left alone too much.” She was locked into the subservient role assigned to her.
Carrie’s sister Maud Fairchild shooed the reporters away. Maud was astonished to discover that Carrie’s remarks about staying in service prompted job offers from people who had been following the case. Maud scotched any suggestion that her sister was ready to return to work. “There is plenty of time yet,” Maud told the
Star
. “Carrie will rest for a while until she has recovered from the shock before she decides what she will do.”
Two days after the trial had ended, a rumour erupted that the young woman was in a downtown Royal Bank branch office at the corner of Richmond and Yonge Streets. Immediately, people massed in front of the bank, peering through the glass windows and crowding through the doors. The frazzled manager sent a clerk out to find a policeman, but the sidewalk and intersection were so congested that the policeman had to call for backup. In the end, it took three sturdy Toronto police officers to clear the crowd. Carrie had never been near the bank.
The verdict triggered furious debate in pulpits and the press, as people tried to understand what had actually happened in the courtroom. The day after the verdict, the
New York Times
carried an article that reflected shock at the outcome. Describing Massey as a “wealthy clubman,” the article’s author pointed out in his first paragraph that the grounds for the acquittal were “something almost unknown to Canadian jurisprudence.” The headline was “Unwritten Law In Canada: It Saves Carrie Davies, Slayer of ‘Bert’ Massey at Toronto.” In London, England, the
Daily Sketch
also headlined its report “‘Unwritten Law’ Trial,” but the tone of the subsequent article (“Bedfordshire Girl Acquitted of Murder in Canada”) was more sympathetic to Carrie. As if loyalty to Empire might justify everything, the article’s final line read, “She has a sweetheart, who is now with the Canadian contingency of the Expeditionary Force.”
It was all very well to talk about “unwritten law” or “substantial justice … not strictly in accord with the rules,” but how far might such a pliable concept be pushed? Had old-fashioned notions of chivalry towards a weak and defenceless woman swamped the rule of law? In Wesley Methodist Church the day after the verdict, the Reverend Dr. J.A. Rankin pronounced, “Justice miscarried. I believe every word the girl said. But no man can say that what that man did deserved the death penalty.” A week later, at Bond Street Congregational Church, the Reverend Byron Stauffer deplored Canadian overuse of clemency. Citing the Carrie Davies verdict, he said, “We are becoming so lenient that we are apt to be swept off our feet at times.”
A “prominent Toronto lawyer” sounded off in an article headlined “Has the Carrie Davies Verdict of ‘Murder No Crime’ Created Dangerous Precedent?” The article (so sympathetic to the Masseys that they could have commissioned it) was carried in the
Star Weekly
, the Saturday supplement to the daily paper that had been most skeptical about Carrie’s story in early February. Insisting that the verdict was deplorable, despite its popularity, the lawyer suggested that the chief justice’s instructions to the jury were completely inadequate, that Hartley Dewart’s defence “extolled his client as a heroine in a language that would have been effusive if applied to Joan of Arc,” and that the newspapers’ treatment of the case was exploitative.
Newspapers’ correspondence columns were filled with passionate letters on both sides of the argument. “A father of four girls and two boys” told the
Star
that he admired Carrie’s “keen sense of honour. We may yet hope that a girl or woman could go through her life in Canada at least, in office, factory, or domestic life, without that fear of man that I fear too often rightfully exists at the present time.” Such sentiments enraged another
Star
reader: “It is a blot on Christian justice to so glorify this girl’s act … There is a home broken up, a widow, a boy left fatherless. No sympathy for them is spoken of. What honor
was there in staying in the house till her mistress came back, if it was only to remain and shoot the husband dead?” In the
Daily News
, John Simpson of Avonmore suggested the decision had “brought Canada into disrepute as a British country,” and he accused the jury of being “carried away by the twaddle served up by the lawyer for the defence.”
Critics of the verdict were particularly angered by the way donations rolled into the Bedfordshire Fraternal Association’s Carrie Davies Defence Fund, which the
Evening Telegram
continued to promote. Donors put their sense of solidarity with the young servant on display: accompanying the dollars, dimes, and quarters were notes signed by “Another funny-looking English girl,” “A few English working girls,” “English integrity,” “A young Englishman,” “Mother of six,” “Five sympathizers,” “A Yorkshire woman,” “Another English Carrie,” “A mother of twelve,” “Defender of Faith,” “Another Funny-looking one,” “Employees, Prince George Hotel dining-rooms,” “English Sympathizers at Ottawa,” “Polson Ironworks Machine Shop,” “Girls’ Ideal Women’s Wear,” and “A few box makers.” One hundred and eighteen captains and privates from an unnamed regiment contributed twenty-five cents each.
By March 1, there was close to $1,000 in the kitty. “Who is getting this money?” “C.H.J.” wrote to the
Star
. “Can it be that a public testimonial is being raised to reward Miss Davies for her courageous act in shooting in cold blood the man who some thirty-six hours before had made improper proposals to her? Has it come to this? That we regard murder as an act to be applauded and raise funds to enrich the one who kills? … Bah! The whole performance is sickening, and the sooner the newspapers of Toronto stop allowing themselves to be exploited, the sooner will one section of the public, at any rate, be satisfied.”
When the Bedfordshire Fraternal Association finally closed the fund on March 16, $1,100 had been collected. But even if this wasn’t enough to pay Hartley Dewart’s fee, it seems likely that the canny
lawyer secured the balance from the
Toronto Evening Star
. J.H. Cranston, who had been city editor at the
Star
in 1915, commissioned a reporter to write a story about women who had walked away from murder charges—a story reflecting Joe Atkinson’s views of the Carrie Davies case. According to a memoir Cranston wrote several years later, the article was fine, “but the heading I put on it all wrong.” The headline, “Ontario is Easy on Murderesses,” immediately attracted a libel suit. Hartley Dewart, recalled Cranston, “had had no chance of collecting fees for the defence of his client [and now] jumped at the chance to make the Star Publishing Co. pay the shot.” Since Carrie had been found not guilty of murder, there was nothing for the
Star
to do but negotiate an out-of-court settlement.
Disquiet about the jury’s verdict on Carrie Davies has lingered through the years, although nobody ever suggested that she might resort to such behaviour again. It is tempting to assume that those twelve rural Ontario stalwarts on the jury were appalled by sexual harassment. But that is wishful thinking: the term had not even been coined yet. Did Bert Massey’s lecherous behaviour really justify his death? Carrie successfully repelled his advances. Had she really brooded for a day and a half about his behaviour, and then, in a panic, grabbed a gun and shot him point-blank? Today, although the idea that a man might be shot dead for trying to kiss a young woman is shocking, we might admire Carrie for sticking up for herself and asserting her rights. In 1915, such concepts were unknown.
Looked at through a twenty-first-century North American lens, it is hard to imagine a situation where a woman’s virginity is widely considered her most precious possession, where an eighteen-year-old has few legal protections, where a penniless girl who has “sinned” is as good as ruined. Today, it is unlikely that Carrie would be acquitted, given that she shot Bert Massey in cold blood. Today, we are more likely to be shocked by notions of “unwritten laws” or “honour
killings.” But today, Carrie would have had more places to turn for domestic and legal protection.
More likely, it was a combination of chivalry and patriotism that shaped the jury’s decision. In the febrile wartime atmosphere, Dewart had managed to procure an unwritten gentlemen’s agreement that Carrie was a heroine because she had defended “British” values. “Character,” not facts, had determined the outcome. The hundreds of “Britishers” who cheered her and contributed to her defence were expressing a wider unease, to do with unspoken racial and class assumptions—rage against German brutes in the trenches, anger against wealthy employers who mistreated servants, frustration at the “foreigners” flooding into Canada and competing for blue-collar jobs in a booming city. Working-class wage-earning British men defended Carrie’s honour because, in doing so, they reaffirmed their own status. A nasty current of xenophobia underpinned the judgment.
There were plenty of women at the time, however, who looked at the case from a different angle. They knew that the only people women could trust in 1915 to look after their interests were themselves: vigilantism was the most effective defence against would-be rapists. Despite Du Vernet’s assertion, in his closing address, that Bert Massey could have been penalized in a court of law for his offence, since 1880, not a single Toronto domestic who had laid a complaint of indecent assault or rape against her employer had seen him punished. The law was an unreliable defender of their interests, and it took courage to challenge the status quo.
Mrs. Florence Huestis, with her knowledge of stigma, was one woman who knew this. The National Council of Women immediately began discussions on how to protect servants like Carrie from predatory employers. At the request of the Dominion conference of a moral reform group called the Canadian Vigilance Association, it floated the idea that there should be an office where domestics might bring complaints about
their employers. The Vigilance Association had even made the startling suggestion that domestics be entitled to ask for testimonials of their employers’ characters, as well as being required to produce testimonials about themselves. There is no evidence that this suggestion went anywhere, but the notion of employment rights, even for the most defenceless of employees, began to gain ground.
Working-class women were more explicit about their attitude to Carrie, as demonstrated in a letter to the
Star
. “I am a married woman of 30 years,” wrote someone signing herself “F. L. M.” “At the age of 18 I was a Carrie Davies, and though there was no weapon in my favour, I sent my adversary down a flight of stairs, and he picked himself up with great difficulty. I presume if he had been killed [Carrie’s critics] would have cried: ‘Down with her! Hang her!’ There are only too few Carrie Davies in this world … As for the financial side of it, God bless the donors: there are heaps of charitable subscriptions not half so worthy.”
The military strength of Germany is now at its maximum. Her troops are not now so disciplined as the highly-trained soldiers first put into the field, but they are more numerous. She probably has a million more men on both fronts than she had in September last when her tide of victory reached its crest. But the allies have made even larger additions to their forces and have overcome nearly every disadvantage that told against them in the first two months of the struggle. And as nations now neutral are certain to join the allies during the next two months, the outlook for Germany is eminently black
.
—Toronto Daily Star
, Monday, March 1, 1915
S
UFFRAGETS
[
SIC
] A
FTER
P
REMIER
H
EARST.
Open letter written by Canadian Suffrage Association to the Ontario Government… “It cannot be gainsaid that in social and moral reform work in which all good women are actively interested that valuable time is wasted, to say nothing of discouragement and defeat, when in order to bring about the desired results, Councils, Governments etc have to be ‘influenced’ by the indirect and frittering method of pleading, instead of by the direct method of the ballot, and thinking people feel that our country is the loser thereby.”
—Evening Telegram
, Wednesday, March 3, 1915
T
he international story soon swamped the local story, and interest in Carrie Davies evaporated as the war in France gathered momentum. Canadians were now within range of German guns. The first few days on the Franco-Belgian border, in early March, were nerve-racking for the newly arrived soldiers. “Come out, you Canadians! Come out and fight!” Germans yelled at them across no man’s land; machine guns clattered during the chilly days and flares exploded at night; German snipers picked off several men who unwisely stuck their heads above the trenches. The front-line trenches were soggy ditches with inadequate latrines and crumbling walls that offered little protection from shrapnel. The rats were large, vicious, and ubiquitous. Lieutenant Colonel John J. Creelman from Toronto confided in his diary, “I expect that a lot of men will lose their minds out here and others their hearing because the noise made by a shell bursting alongside is terrific.”