The Massey Murder Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 casesa 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 betweenme 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.
    Only a sense of humour softened Denison’s paternal Toryism and patrician bias. He filled scrapbooks with cartoons of himself (he was easy to caricature), and Harry Wodson enjoyed watching the Beak suppress a chuckle at the cheeky remarks from court regulars. Dodson suggested that his genial manner endeared him to most defendants who appeared before him. A 1913 cartoon pictured a tattered husband and wife jostling