Authors: Charlotte Gray
The first stage of Carrie Davies’s journey through the legal system was her appearance in a police court, which would decide whether she
should be allowed out on bail or remain in custody. Carrie’s remand hearing would take place in an unusual judicial institution: a police court that dealt exclusively with women. South of the border, such courts had been established in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City, but this was the only one of its kind in Canada.
Toronto’s Women’s Court was the result of efforts by the local branch of a powerful organization called the National Council of Women (NCW). Toronto’s Local Council of Women (LCW) had fought for a separate court for women because the LCW’s leaders insisted that judicial decks were stacked against women who fell afoul of the law. Women had no way to participate in the development or the administration of the law: they could not be voters, legislators, coroners, magistrates, judges, or jurors. At City Hall’s law courts, all court officials and almost all the police were men, and for every woman detained, nineteen men were arrested. Male spectators leered and jeered at women prisoners. Underage girls arrested for “vagrancy” (a euphemism for soliciting) were often followed home and dragged down, in the words of an LCW member, “to Heaven knows what infamy.”
In the early twentieth century, most women and men believed that, while men committed
crime
, women committed
sins
. The LCW argued that, since women could be “saved,” they should be treated differently from hardened male criminals. Most important, they should be shielded from the idle throng of male hangers-on, loafers, and lawyers hanging around City Hall, on the hunt for scandal and gossip.
The reasoning of LCW activists seems well intentioned but naive today: they wanted to protect women because, as the “weaker sex,” they needed to be shielded from the full force of the law. This was the heyday of “maternal feminism”—the belief that women and men had different roles in society, thanks to women’s “motherly” perspective. Proponents of this view did not argue for gender equality: instead, they suggested that women should have a role in the public realm because
their maternal values and influence would improve debate. Some LCW leaders were ambivalent about the Votes for Women campaign because they felt that women could exert their influence indirectly. Others were ardent suffragettes because they believed that the values and behaviour of mothers would elevate the public realm. Out west, Canada’s leading suffragette, Nellie McClung, argued early in the war that “women are naturally the guardians of the race,” and that if there had been women in the German Reichstag (“deep-bosomed, motherly, blue-eyed German women”) they would have stopped the Kaiser going to war.
Despite their differences on the suffrage issue, Toronto activists were united in their abhorrence for the way that women were treated in the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of City Hall’s police courts. LCW lobbying had paid off: in February 1913, the Women’s Court was established. Women arrested by Toronto police could now be remanded in a court to which no men were admitted, unless they were witnesses or officers of the court. All spectators, including reporters, had to be female. The courtroom was located on the second floor of City Hall, in No. 1 Committee Room, and unlike the stark courtrooms on the floor below, it featured walls painted a soft brick colour, pictures hanging on them, and an ordinary chair rather than a railed dock for prisoners. Most important, women who were discharged from the court could slip away without being harassed by onlookers. The
Globe
remarked, “To the onlooker it seemed all as simple as being called to the teacher’s table at school.”
The muckraking journal
Jack Canuck
enthused over this new institution, suggesting that “the new and humane order of things will work wonders in the reclamation of the unfortunate daughters of Eve.” Mrs. Florence Huestis, the formidable president of the Toronto branch of the NCW, reported that her members attended the court regularly and “did their best to help fallen girls and women.” This was where Carrie Davies, already en route from Court Street police station cell, would appear.
By 9.30 a.m., when court sessions were scheduled to begin, the tiled corridors of City Hall were thronged with idlers eager for a glimpse of the trigger-happy domestic. The sensational tale of the murdered Massey had swelled the throng, but Carrie Davies wasn’t the only draw. Toronto’s police courts, where 90 percent of the city’s criminal cases began and ended, always pulled a crowd. Local newspapers covered these courts as if they were covering circus acts and music hall turns, reducing a day’s slate of individuals charged with crimes to a cast of ridiculous stereotypes—drunken Irishmen, comic African Americans, naive hayseeds, tarts with hearts. Rubberneckers cheered for decisions they supported and booed those they disagreed with.
The
Evening Telegram
ran a regular column, “Police Court To-day,” with brief and often tongue-in-cheek entries. A typical report, under the heading “Judicious Mixture,” described how “John Keyler showed some discrimination in his thefts from the Robert Simpson Company Limited. When he took some jam and candies he also annexed a quantity of cascara and headache wafers. Sent down for fifteen days.”
Why did the city’s residents find justice so entertaining? Largely because of one man: Colonel George Taylor Denison, a tall, silver-haired character with a bony face and walrus moustache who was the police court magistrate—an office that did not require a law degree or any special training, but did imbue its holder with immense authority. Magistrates in England and Canada were often referred to as “beaks,” but in Toronto there was only one court official who was invariably called “The Beak,” and he was a favourite of the Press Gallery. Denison was the unchallenged monarch of City Hall’s police courts. One journalist had recently written that a trip to Toronto without visiting a Denison courtroom “would be like going to Rome and not seeing the Pope.”
Police Magistrate Denison stood for everything that was most British about Canada in 1915. Denisons had fought for Canada from the earliest days, and the name was synonymous with loyalty to the
British Empire, the Anglican Church, and conservative political principles. There were well over a hundred Denisons in Toronto by 1915, and there had been scarcely a single event in Toronto’s development in which a Denison hadn’t played a starring role. The Beak’s grandfather, the first Colonel George Taylor Denison, emigrated to British North America from Yorkshire in 1792 and fought under General Brock in the War of 1812. The second Colonel George Taylor Denison helped suppress the 1837–38 uprisings and founded a family cavalry regiment, Denison’s Horse, which eventually became the Governor General’s Horse Guard. Before becoming the police court magistrate, City Hall’s Colonel Denison saw service in the militia against the Fenians at Ridgeway in 1866 and the Metis and Indians during the Northwest Rebellion in 1885. He had also made himself an authority on military tactics, especially the élan of the cavalry charge: in 1877, he had travelled to Moscow to receive an award from the Russian tsar for his book
History of Cavalry
. This Colonel Denison’s most passionate commitment was to Canada’s destiny as an integral part of the British Empire: chief organizer of the United Empire Loyalists and president of the British Empire League in Canada, he crossed the Atlantic frequently to remind British politicians of the importance of Empire to Canada, and Canada to Empire.
Heydon Villa, George Denison III’s red-brick mansion on the western outskirts of Toronto, was a temple to high Victorianism. Far grander than Bert Massey’s house on Walmer Road, where Carrie Davies had worked, it was a cross between a shrine to imperialism and a stuffy gentleman’s club. The first sights to meet a visitor’s eye were the looming stuffed head of a gigantic bison and an elaborate Denison family tree that hung in the hall. The adjacent library featured a Zulu spear, a quiver of Sioux arrows from the massacre of Custer’s men at Little Bighorn, and a vast collection of military books. In the drawing room, where the Colonel entertained like-minded men, a sword he had
found at the Battle of Ridgeway did duty as a poker in the grate. In the 1880s, the house had been a gathering place for those who, like Denison, simmered with outrage about Canada’s lack of national spirit. Members of the Canada First movement (the most prominent was poet Charles Mair) railed against threats to the new nation from Riel and his followers (“traitors”) or the “wrong” kind of immigrants. Imperial crusaders from Britain, including writer Rudyard Kipling and politician Joseph Chamberlain, were regular visitors, and over port and cigars their after-dinner conversations invariably touched on the need for closer ties between Britain and its colonies—and with Canada in particular. Colonel Denison was single-minded about Canada, and most particularly, his version of Canada.
The Beak was distrustful of French Canadians and Roman Catholics and was horrified by socialist or suffragette ideas. He dismissed the notion of closer commercial ties with the United States as a dangerous slide towards continentalism, and had nothing but contempt for Americans—in his eyes, American cities like Chicago were “filled with disease, bad water and ruffians.” He belligerently defended the social order that he saw being undermined by industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. His lip curled at the thought of Toronto’s new mercantile barons, like the Masseys, and his nose wrinkled at the smell of exotic substances like garlic.
All in all, Colonel George Denison was a nineteenth-century figure increasingly at odds with the twentieth century. But he was not alone in a Toronto that, despite the city’s rapid growth, was still run by a Protestant elite of families who flaunted their British origins. Some proudly traced their arrival in Canada to the late eighteenth century, when they had fled democracy, in the shape of the American Revolution, as self-proclaimed “United Empire Loyalists.” Many (like Denison) were descendants of the Family Compact, the tight little Tory clique that ran Upper Canada in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Their names—Strachan,
Beverley Robinson, Boulton, Jarvis, Simcoe—guaranteed their social prominence from one generation to the next.
By 1915 Toronto was a metropolis that had spread far beyond its original boundaries. Ornate brownstone office buildings had replaced the brick townhouses that the old elite had built along King Street and Queen Street. But Union Jacks still fluttered off buildings, and the WASP grip on Toronto was powerful. The names of streets like Jarvis, Beverley, or Strachan were permanent reminders of old-guard influence. Social divisions were not rigid: the class system was more porous in the New World than the Old, and successful businessmen like department-store mogul Timothy Eaton or meat-packing entrepreneur Joseph Flavelle were welcomed into the top strata once they had made their fortunes. But ties between old-money families were quietly strengthened during regular encounters at St. James’ Anglican Cathedral, or at Rosedale “At Homes,” or in Toronto’s three clubs: the National Club, the Albany Club, and the Toronto Club. Almost all the men in Toronto’s overlapping business, social, and military elites belonged to at least one of these social institutions. The National Club, founded by members of the Canada First movement, was now considered the unofficial Liberal Party headquarters in the city, and despite his dinosaur views and insistence that he was not a party man, Colonel George Denison was its longtime president.
How would this martinet and roaring snob treat Carrie Davies? By the time she appeared before him, Denison had completed nearly four decades on the bench to which he had been appointed in 1877, twenty years before her birth. Carrie could expect speedy treatment, because Denison ran his court like a well-oiled machine. Boasting that he presided over “a court of justice, not a court of law,” he cantered through cases at a breathtaking pace, relying more on intuition than evidence, and flaunting his impatience with legal technicalities and procedural niceties. Denison handled an average of twenty-eight thousand cases
a year, which, according to Harry Wodson, police court reporter for the
Evening Telegram
, constituted an astonishing caseload of over five hundred a week. To the exasperation of the magistrate’s seven clerks, Denison routinely cleared his docket in a couple of hours before lunch, ordered the court adjourned, and then, stick in hand and homburg hat on head, strolled off to the handsome dining room of the National Club, at 303 Bay Street.
Perhaps Carrie, a British-born woman in the most traditional of employments, might have expected a touch of compassion. In Denison’s court, people who “knew their place” (retired soldiers, hard-working British immigrants, and the penitent) could expect leniency. In contrast, striking workers, people of Irish or African-American descent, and the
nouveaux riches
found little mercy. Admirers like Harry Wodson, who shared Denison’s outlook, thought he was a terrific fellow: “A swift thinker, a keen student of human nature, the possessor of an incisive tongue, he extinguishes academic lawyers, parries thrusts with the skill of a practiced swordsman, confounds the deadly-in-earnest barrister with a witticism, [and] scatters legal intricacies to the winds … His mind is more or less remote from the affairs of the rank and file of humanity … Just what mental process is used to make the punishment fit the crime, only the magistrate himself knows.” But Denison infuriated those who regarded him as a whip-cracking fossil, mired in the assumptions of a borrowed class system. Phillips Thompson, a journalist and labour sympathizer who worked on the publication the
Western Clarion
, excoriated the magistrate in print: “He is true as hell to the ideals of his Tory U.E. Loyalist ancestors, and holds like them that all popular notions of liberty are rank delusions and that the masses were bound to be exploited for the benefit of the ruling class.”
Denison had no interest in what drove individuals to break the law. One woman whom he regularly fined for drunkenness amused Harry Wodson by reproaching the magistrate: “The only diff’rence between
me and Lady O’Flaherty up in Rosedale is that I have no powdered flunkeys to carry me up to bed whin I’m drunk.” Denison paid no attention and sent her to the slammer.