Free The Massey Murder by Charlotte Gray

Toronto: among those buried in its two hundred and five carefully groomed acres of graves and memorials were Sir Oliver Mowat, the former premier of the province, and both of the men who had revolutionized the Dominion’s retail business: department store kings Timothy Eaton and Robert Simpson. One of the cemetery’s most lavish memorials was the massive Massey mausoleum, designed by architect Edward J. Lennox. Lennox had also designed City Hall, where Colonel Denison held sway in the Police Courts, and the architect had used the same heavy Gothic hand to memorialize the Massey family’s illustrious forebear, Hart Almerrin Massey. The monument, a shrine to Massey muscle, was a solid lump of rusticated masonry encrusted with every excrescence imaginable—steps, windows, gables, pillars, and a turret. It was topped by a life-size statue of a hefty woman standing on a small Greek temple, gazing westward and radiating a grim power.
    When the Hopkins hearse drew up outside the Arthur Massey residence, there were a couple of reporters loitering outside, hands thrustinto the pockets of their wool coats as the February wind whipped the bare branches of the trees along Admiral Road. They watched the coffin carried through the front door, followed by an Anglican minister, the Reverend Mr. James of Bloor Street’s Church of the Redeemer, who arrived to conduct the service. Mary Ethel Massey had imported Anglicanism into this branch of the family. The reporters were still there when, less than an hour later, the black-clad mourners straggled out for the drive to the cemetery. “Many beautiful floral tributes testified to the popularity and esteem in which the late Mr. Massey was held by a host of friends and acquaintances,” the reporter from the Star noted respectfully. The paper listed Bert’s friends who acted as pallbearers by name: “Messrs. James McFadden, H. H. McNamara, Kenneth Zimmerman, John L. Hynes, Howard Frederick Massey, Arthur A. Allan.” It was left to readers to wonder why Frederick Massey, a distant cousin, was the only pallbearer related to the dead man. Bert’s twenty-seven-year-old first cousin Vincent Massey, then a member of the University of Toronto’s History Department, attended the service. (He noted in his diary, “Went to Bert Massey’s funeral from Arthur Massey’s house.”) But he had darted out early because he had more pressing priorities. He had already been obliged to miss a lecture on musketry at the university. That evening, former U.S. president William Taft was scheduled to speak at the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall, and the ambitious Vincent had wangled for himself the honour of being an usher.
    From Admiral Road, the funeral cortege drove slowly up Yonge Street into Mount Pleasant Cemetery. By now, the press had lost interest. Had a reporter from the Star or Evening Telegram followed the cortege, he would have watched the sad little straggle of mourners skirt the Massey mausoleum and head towards a snow-covered, treeless southern corner of the cemetery. The procession finally stopped in an area of modest memorials and unmarked graves close to the cemetery wall. The undertakers swiftly lowered Bert’s coffin into a hole in the ground;equally swiftly, the handful of mourners dispersed. There would be no grave marker for half a century.
    The physical distance between Hart Massey’s mausoleum and Bert Massey’s grave reflected a bigger gulf—the distance between a hard-nosed entrepreneur and his less-favoured descendants.
    Of all the industrialists who helped lay the foundations for the Dominion’s wealth, Bert Massey’s grandfather was the best known inside and outside Canada. By 1915, he had been dead almost two decades, but the Massey name was stamped on Toronto’s largest factory, on millions of pieces of agricultural machinery, and on buildings dotted around Toronto. His fame and philanthropy guaranteed that his grandson’s untimely death would become a