Authors: Charlotte Gray
However, there were flaws in both the system and its author. Pumped by success, Bertillon also claimed to be a handwriting expert. In the 1890s he had testified for the prosecution in the explosive Dreyfus affair, when a Jewish officer in the French army was wrongly accused of being a German spy. Bertillon’s rambling evidence helped condemn the innocent Captain Alfred Dreyfus to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Moreover, Bertillonage was fallible: different officers could make their measurement in different ways, while two individuals with the same measurements could be confused. In 1903, two men—one named Will West and the second William West—were convicted in Kansas for different crimes, yet were found to possess the same Bertillon measurements.
The decline in Bertillon’s credibility was as rapid as his rise, after another set of unchanging human characteristics, fingerprints, was shown to be more reliable. By the early 1900s, police departments in Britain and the United States were switching over to a fingerprint classification system developed by Commissioner Edward Henry of Scotland Yard. Fingerprinting offered odds of 67 billion to one of any two individuals having identical prints. Alphonse Bertillon died in 1914, a year before Carrie faced the calipers. By then, the Toronto Police Department was one of the few forces still laboriously measuring lobes, noses, and feet. Judging by the skimpy records in its leather-bound Bertillon Register, it did so with dwindling conviction of its usefulness.
Toronto’s police department was old-fashioned and struggled to keep up with its British equivalent, the Metropolitan Police Force in London’s Scotland Yard. The man in charge of Toronto’s police, Colonel Henry Grasett, was a contemporary of Colonel Denison’s who shared the Beak’s militaristic pretensions and patrician attitudes. The
two men saw each other regularly at the Toronto Club. A militia officer born into a prominent Toronto family (his father was rector of St. James’ Cathedral, bastion of elite Anglicanism), Colonel Grasett had fought alongside Denison against Fenian invaders in 1866 and had led operations against Chief Big Bear in the Northwest Rebellion in 1885. The chief constable believed in spit-and-polish discipline and parade ground drills, but he was not a dinosaur. Interested in progressive policing, he tried to keep abreast of modern policing trends.
When Grasett had become chief constable in 1886, there were only 172 police officers in the city and the force’s toughest challenges were vagrancy, burglary, and fistfights. Now there were over six hundred police officers, the majority of them British (particularly Protestant Irish) immigrants, with a far greater range of rules to enforce. Not only were they dealing with street traffic, insurance frauds, and violent crimes, they were also responsible for regulating parades, processions, dance halls, gambling, liquor laws, censorship, Sabbath-breaking, the ages of newsboys, and any new forms of “immorality” that came to police attention. As reporter Harry M. Wodson observed, Toronto had become a city of “shall nots,” where it was more important for citizens to memorize six thousand bylaws than the Ten Commandments. In 1902, Chief Constable Grasett was elected vice-president of the Police Chiefs Association of the United States and Canada, in recognition of the growing muscle of the Toronto boys in blue. But police resources were stretched—by the city’s dramatic growth, by the loss of many constables to the army in 1914, and by the city fathers’ determination to impose their morality on the working classes.
Grasett had replaced an informal “rogues’ gallery” of photographs of criminals with the Bertillon system after a visit to the state-of-the-art Chicago Police Department in 1897. But technological innovations like the telegraph and telephone cost money, and Toronto was slow to adopt them because City Council was not always sympathetic.
Grasett finally managed to establish a motorcycle squad in 1911 to enforce the new fifteen-mile-per-hour speed limit on city streets. (Riders often wore business suits so that speeders would not realize they were being monitored.) Nonetheless, in 1914 the Toronto force was still using horse-drawn police wagons: it was another three years before the department acquired motor cars. Although the Dominion Police, with its headquarters in Ottawa, abandoned Bertillonage soon after the turn of the century (partly because many of its technicians had dropped their calipers and joined the stampede to the Klondike goldfields in 1898–99), the Toronto Police Force continued to take Bertillon measurements until 1915, although they also began fingerprinting suspects in 1906.
Carrie Davies’s Bertillon measurements would never be used, but the process was part of the intimidating ordeal of arrest. After she had been Bertillonaged, Carrie was escorted downstairs by Miss Minty, and then driven off in a police wagon to Toronto Jail, three and a half kilometres away on the other side of the Don River. There, she stepped out of the paddy wagon at the intersection of Gerrard Street and Broadview Avenue and looked up at the monstrous building in which she was to be incarcerated. Constructed of cold grey stone and black iron, with small barred windows set high in its walls, it was one of the largest jails in North America and often described as the “Riverdale Bastille.” Built half a century earlier to hold about three hundred prisoners, it had recently been condemned by the provincial inspector of prisons as “over-crowded, ill-ventilated and unsanitary, a fire-trap, and the worst jail on the continent of America.” Conditions for women were especially disgusting. The
Toronto Star
had recently revealed that a woman confined to the punishment cell there had killed seventy-three rats and thirteen mice. A group of women visitors had discovered that women inmates were not supplied with underwear or socks (male prisoners got both) and had no access to books. A particular disgrace was that “the
night toilet pails [do] day duty for scrubbing. [This is] neither sanitary or modern. As many of these women are victims of social diseases, it stands to reason in the light of modern bacteriology that this state of affairs should desist.”
There was little chance that the current governor of the jail would take any action on these complaints: he was as ineffective as he was well meaning, and he had no idea how to run a large, complex institution. The Reverend Dr. Andrew B. Chambers, vice-president of the Upper Canada Bible Society, had got the governor’s job solely on the grounds of his Conservative Party links, and in the words of a contemporary, he “simply wanted to be a friend to everybody, especially those in trouble.” Most people, including the chief turnkey and the guards, took advantage of him.
But Dr. Chambers’s soft heart did save Carrie from exposure to the Don’s toughest elements. He decided that this woebegone young woman was far too feeble to be locked up with the other women prisoners, many of whom were delusional, violent, or worse. Since Carrie’s days on this earth seemed likely to be numbered, they should be as comfortable as possible. He sent her up to the prison hospital and put her in the charge of Mrs. Sinclair, superintendent of the Women’s Department. For the rest of the day, Carrie refused to eat or speak: she just stared around her in fear.
Oblivious to Carrie’s lonely journey, the Local Council of Women delegation was still busy on the second floor, protesting to Mayor Church and the Board of Control against a proposal to move the Women’s Court out of City Hall.
The number and range of Toronto’s women’s organizations in 1915 were truly startling. A middle-class Toronto woman could spend every
afternoon or evening attending the Women’s Conservative Club’s knitting circle, the sale of homemade dainties by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a knitting tea sponsored by the Political Equality League, or the Toronto Women’s Patriotic League’s collection drive for mufflers, socks, and wristlets for soldiers. The Heliconian Club ran regular sessions on literature, travel, and music for its members. In addition, there were church-sponsored groups, arts-focused clubs, and other get-togethers that allowed the wives of Toronto’s swelling professional classes to meet each other.
All this activity stood in dramatic contrast to the way that the wives of Toronto’s elite, or those who aspired to join it, had conducted themselves until recently. The cornerstone of sociability in the late Victorian era was the “At Home,” an elaborate and suffocating ritual that might include a few intimates or a cast of hundreds, and took place in private houses during the afternoon. The rules were set by the wives and daughters of Toronto’s most patrician families, who shared their husbands’ stout belief that moral superiority sprang from good breeding and lots of money.
An At Home event was rigidly formal. It began with a stiff white card, engraved with the holder’s name and address, and with a handwritten note of a weekday on the lower left-hand corner. The card was an invitation to join the holder for a tea on the day prescribed: it would be left with a maidservant at a door—but only
after
the hostess and her prospective guest had been formally introduced. Each society hostess had her At Home on a particular day, and over the years the occasions had grown increasingly competitive. Should the hostess offer a rose tea, a strawberry tea, a tea-and-talk, or a five o’clock tea?
The city’s
grandes dames
slowly patrolled the drawing rooms of their social equals, sipping from bone china cups and making small talk. Their daughters dutifully handed around dainty sandwiches and
petits fours
and displayed their fathers’ or husbands’ wealth in the form of
sable collars and diamond brooches. Grace Denison, niece by marriage of the police magistrate, wrote a society column about them in
Saturday Night
magazine, under the sobriquet Lady Gay. Over time, these afternoon receptions had become increasingly crowded, arduous, and competitive, as hostesses scheduled their teas on the same day so that guests had to rush between them. Lady Gay regularly complained about “the crush,” in which she risked being “trodden upon, prodded in the ribs, squeezed, smeared and rent.” For women whose waists and ribcages were already uncomfortably squeezed into unnatural shapes by whalebone corsets, At Homes could be purgatory. A
Saturday Night
article in 1906 had bemoaned the monotony of “the same decorative mums and roses, the same orchestral accompaniment, the same women, in the same frocks, the same suffocation in the tea-room.”
Such events were still going strong in 1915, but with the new century, fashions and rituals began to change. Even the corsets loosened up—the new Tango model, made by the Dominion Corset Company of Toronto, claimed to “mould the figure, enhancing nature’s charms without strain or compression.” Most of the wives and daughters of Toronto’s middle and upper classes did not expect to go to university or to look for paid employment. Only a few years earlier, the widely circulated medical journal
Canada Lancet
had belittled educated women as “withered, shrunken-shanked girls” with “stooping gait and … spectacles on nose.” Who wanted to look like that? But many younger women did want to do something more useful than pass around Royal Doulton teacups.
As the city expanded, so did the options for women to escape from crowded parlours and the accumulation of social debts. Public tearooms, like McConkey’s on King Street or the Savoy on Yonge Street, became fashionable meeting places where women could gather without having to disrupt their own households. Sometimes it was the same small talk in these commercial establishments as it had been in Rosedale drawing rooms, but frequently women gathered to talk about larger national
issues and shared projects. Concern for public welfare, the campaign to eliminate alcohol from public life, women’s right to vote—in tearooms, churches, and Women’s Institutes, women in unprecedented numbers at different social levels were discussing these topics. Clubs, committees, groups, and associations were formed at a rapid rate to exchange information and opinions. The daughters of Yonge Street, Forest Hill, and Annex families showed the same enthusiasm for taking initiatives as Manitoba farm wives. The activities of the McConkey’s set inspired some pejorative comment about “clubwomen” who had nothing better to do. While they sat discussing the vote, women like Carrie Davies were scrubbing their floors, cooking their dinners, and polishing their silver. But even if these women did not question some aspects of the status quo, they were genuinely concerned with improving conditions for the poor and exploited. And with the outbreak of war, a whole new range of challenges—from fundraising and knitting to encouraging enlistment—had opened up for them.
Seventy-two of these women’s groups belonged to Toronto’s Local Council of Women, the federation of early feminists that had successfully lobbied for the Women’s Court. LCW membership was almost entirely Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, and middle or upper class; nevertheless, it represented a wide range of opinions and priorities. Some groups operated exclusively in their own neighbourhoods; others monitored provincial and federal politics. Some focused on philanthropy, others on educating their members. Some groups passionately supported female suffrage, particularly now that women out west were close to winning the right to vote in provincial elections; others felt that women didn’t “need” the vote and shouldn’t be demanding it while the nation was at war. The LCW maintained cohesion by focusing on maternal feminist goals: fresh from its success getting the Women’s Court off the ground, it was now lobbying for safe milk, clean water, mothers’ pensions, and children’s playgrounds. The organization’s philosophy was that “women
and particularly mothers had the capacity to infuse social institutions and political life with superior moral virtue and maternal qualities.”
No one worked harder to infuse Toronto with superior moral virtue than the LCW’s president, Florence Gooderham Hamilton Huestis, who led today’s delegation to see Mayor Church. Mrs. Huestis had social status. She was married to Archibald Morrison Huestis, a sweet-natured but retiring man from a Nova Scotia United Empire Loyalist family who worked at Toronto’s Methodist Book Room—but Florence’s status didn’t derive from Archie (relatives referred to him as the “Prince Consort,” because he was overshadowed in every way). Florence Huestis cut a swath through Toronto because of her two middle names. Florence’s grandfather was William Hamilton, a wealthy Toronto industrialist whose fortune came from ironworks and toolmaking: his foundry produced the ornate iron fence that encircled Osgoode Hall. She was also part of the Gooderham dynasty, founded by William Gooderham, who with his nephew and partner James Worts had built a massive whisky distillery in the city’s east end that by 1861 was the world’s largest, producing 7,500 gallons of spirits a day. Flush with whisky profits, Gooderham had gone on to amass a fortune from railways, livestock, and banking. Mrs. Huestis had a gold-plated Toronto pedigree and sufficient family wealth that Mayor Church, for one, would be foolish to ignore.