The Massey Murder Read Online Free PDF

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 hadfound 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