Free The Massey Murder by Charlotte Gray Page A

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    But there was another side to Hart Almerrin Massey, and one that Charles Albert Massey knew well. Bert was sixteen years old when his grandfather died, aged seventy-three, and he had clear memories of the tall, gaunt, frock-coated figure with the white beard, gimlet eyes, and forbidding demeanour of an Old Testament prophet. For the first few years of his life, Bert and his siblings had been the darlings of their grandparents’ eyes. Abruptly, when Bert was about ten, Hart had pushed them all to the margins of the Massey empire. The Massey name was an ambiguous inheritance.
    Massey family history has all the characteristics that Canadians once relished—log cabin beginnings, devotion to duty, efforts rewarded.
    However, the first Masseys to set foot in British North America arrived for commercial reasons rather than through loyalty to the Crown or imperial ambition. The Masseys were Yankee Methodists who came up from Vermont in 1802. Hart Massey, Bert’s grandfather, had archetypal pioneer beginnings: he started life in 1823 on a hardscrabblefamily farm north of Lake Ontario, close to the little port of Cobourg. These were years when Canadian agriculture consisted of an annual cycle of backbreaking drudgery: land-clearing, rock removal, plowing, seeding, scything, and threshing—all done by hand. Land was cheap, but the work was brutal and monotonous. The hardships prompted the English immigrant Susanna Moodie to write, in Roughing It in the Bush , “My love for Canada was a feeling very nearly allied to that which the condemned criminal entertains for his cell.” Subsistence farmers like the Moodies and Masseys scratched a living from primitive farms on the harsh Canadian Shield and struggled to feed their families. They seized on any primitive labour-saving device, such as patented stump-pullers and improved harrows, that local blacksmiths hammered into existence. By the time he was six, Hart Massey knew all about rising at dawn to fetch water, feed chickens, collect eggs, harness horses, and gather kindling.
    But Massey men shared a valuable talent: an aptitude for fiddling around with bits of metal. Hart’s father, Daniel, was fascinated by mechanical inventions and acquired a workshop in nearby Newcastle. From an early age, Hart too had demonstrated primitive engineering skills, and in 1851 he took over the Newcastle works, which was now a solid local foundry. Hart had vision, and an intuitive understanding of market forces, and the family foundry’s reputation rapidly spread beyond the rock-strewn farms around Newcastle. Hart geared the “Newcastle Foundry and Machine Manufactory” to the production of mechanical mowers and reapers. His machines made farmers’ lives incomparably easier, and Massey products were soon winning prizes at agricultural shows. In 1867, the year of Canada’s Confederation, Hart Massey’s combined reaper and mower won a gold medal at an international exposition in France. The foundry expanded, profusely illustrated Massey catalogues were widely distributed, and Hart Massey was on the road to becoming one of Canada’s first self-made millionaires.
    Some of the Massey success was due to Massey mechanical and marketing skills, but much was due to the larger national context. Massey machines appeared when there was a scarcity of farm labour, increasing demand for wheat production, and (thanks to the U.S. Civil War) little competition from the States. Massey machines continued to win international prizes as Canada expanded westwards and the population grew. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were over six million Canadians, and the most popular image of Canada for decades to come was of acres of golden wheat, waving in the prairie breeze, awaiting the Massey thresher. Massey reapers had helped transform Canada from a handful of sparsely populated colonies (with a population of less than a million when Hart was born) into the breadbasket of the