Free The Massey Murder by Charlotte Gray Page B

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    Hart Massey and his wife, American-born Eliza Phelps, would have four sons (a fifth died as an infant) and a daughter. Their eldest child, Charles Albert (Bert’s father), was born in 1848. The Masseys had retained close links with family and business interests in the United States, and when Charles was a lanky, lantern-jawed twenty-three-year-old, his father left him in charge of the family’s Newcastle factory and moved to Cleveland, Ohio, for health reasons.
    Charles Massey had inherited from his grandfather and father their entrepreneurial flair and appetite for work. However, he was also a gentler character, with a sweet smile and a passion for music: he began playing the organ at services in Newcastle’s Methodist Church when he was only thirteen. He and his pretty American wife, Jessie, lived next door to the Newcastle works in a white clapboard house. Their first surviving child, Winona Grace, was born in 1872; four more babies would follow. Jessie reported to her own mother that her husband would frequently come home during the day to visit his growing family: “Charley plays with [the baby] so much, she cries for him now when he goes out and wants to stay with him all the time heis in the house.” But Charles did not neglect the foundry. Under his shrewd management, business increased 50 percent in the eight years after his father’s departure.
    In 1878, the Massey Manufacturing Company introduced its first machine of wholly Canadian design, the Massey Harvester. Plans called for two hundred of these reapers to be made the first year: more than five hundred orders flowed in. Business boomed. By 1879, the company had outgrown the Newcastle premises and Charles took the bold decision to move it to Toronto. He commissioned “the largest and best equipped factory ever built in Canada” on a six-acre site on King Street West, sandwiched between railway tracks (it had its own spur line) on the outskirts of the city. The main plant consisted of a huge four-storey building of solid red brick, lit by gas and safeguarded from fire by an automatic sprinkler system. A couple of years later, the company opened a branch plant in Winnipeg just as immigrants began to pour into Manitoba. By 1883, the Massey Manufacturing Company’s aggregate business was a million dollars, more than ten times the amount done in 1870, the year of its incorporation. With seven hundred employees, it was Toronto’s largest factory.
    Charles, Bert’s father, worked like a dog through these years, keeping the Newcastle plant running while building the new Toronto works, then switching production to Toronto and ramping up to meet increased demand. As general manager, he ran the works and was responsible for all the advertising, wages, hiring, stock purchases, banking, and correspondence—he wrote as many as a hundred and fifty letters a day. He and Jessie left their modest Newcastle home and moved to a town house in Clarence Square, at the southern end of Toronto’s Spadina Avenue, that was a ten-minute drive, in a horse-drawn carriage down tree-lined dirt roads, to the new Massey factory. Their fourth child, and second son, Charles Albert (“Bert”), was born here in August 1880. A year later, Bessie Irene completed the family.
    Charles was popular with Massey employees because he remembered names and promoted social activities. His love of music prompted the formation of the Massey Band, String Orchestra, and Glee Club, as well as the Massey Cornet Band, which was in constant demand at provincial fall fairs and at skating rinks throughout the winter. But he was seriously overworked, and by 1882 his father, Hart, now in robust health, had returned to Canada and resumed control of the company. His management style was a great deal harsher than his son’s, but Charles was too incapacitated to dilute his father’s iron rule.
    Massey fortunes surged and Hart purchased a twenty-five-room mansion—an architectural frenzy of turrets and