SIX
WAR
Toronto had long been a manufacturing boomtown, and when gold, silver, and nickel were discovered in the rocky landscape of northern Ontario, it became a hub for mining finance.1 By 1910, most of the world’s nickel came from Sudbury, and the money flowed back to the stockbrokers, banks, and law firms on Bay Street. Ambrose capitalized on the mineral rush by adding theatres in northern Ontario to his network. His “money route to the west” ran through Ottawa, Renfrew, and Pembroke on the Canadian Pacific rail line, and then it was straight into mining country and the “magnificent new theatres at North Bay and Sudbury.”2
Toronto was becoming the unavoidable centre of everything.3 Toronto annexed its border communities, growing large in land and population. There were more office jobs and more women working. Each time a female citizen was spotted in an unlikely career, she was treated like a sideshow in the newspaper: Look at the policewoman: see her gentle constitution with the lowborn criminals! Observe the female truck driver: she is the prettiest of her sisters and uses her feminine wiles to escape speeding tickets! Have a gander at the latest crop of lady lawyers—who will find a man?
There were Catholic priests who watched the dawn of the “age of women” with unease. They heard stories of women who missed church on Sundays, ate meat on Fridays, stole jobs from men, visited Anglican churches for fun, apologized to their liberal friends about the Catholic Church, and—worst of all—had sex outside of marriage.4 When a group of American women asked for the Church’s blessing to create an alumni association for graduates of Catholic schools, some religious powerbrokers saw an opportunity. “With their Catholic faith and principles, our Alumnae should be able to restrict the too liberal interpretation of what is called the emancipation of women,” the archbishop of New York wrote in a congratulatory letter to the group.5
As a proud graduate of St. Joseph’s Academy, Theresa Small signed up for the International Federation of Catholic Alumnae in 1914. It was an exciting time to be a woman. In the papers, there were always stories about equality and the vote, but Theresa was usually found a few paragraphs over, giving one of her “delightful talks” about the “Charms of the East” to a woman’s group, or, with the ladies of the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, teaching immigrant children English and the merits of “British fair play and British sympathy.”6 She never made any public statements about the vote but clearly believed in empowerment through education. This Catholic women’s group, with its more modest aims, suited her perfectly.
The IFCA wanted a set of Catholic encyclopedias and Catholic newspapers in every school library, and more Braille books for the blind. More crucially, in these days of social unrest, they wanted to extend the influence of Catholic women around the world.7 Theresa signed up for the press committee and was elected governor of Ontario. It was mostly just Toronto ladies, but the title was nice.
The group’s annual conventions were lavish affairs at the fanciest hotels of the Midwestern U.S. and the eastern seaboard.8 The guest speakers were usually men who congratulated the women on their achievements but reminded them about the evil seduction of “progress.” As Theresa sat in those twinkling ballrooms, she was told that her most important role was keeping the home safe and her family happy. The speakers were important types—politicians and judges—and they railed against the latest salvos in the culture war, the titillating legs in the “beach bathing” pictures, the indecent photos in newspapers, the crimes committed by the “motherless.” At the St. Louis convention, one feisty politician told the ladies that the movies were now the fifth-largest industry in the United States, after steel, and the world’s morality clock was set to “sex-o’clock.”9
“You women should know that it is only the women who have been made the subject of lure in these pictures, frilled up and made more attractive than naturally they would be, with all due respect,” he said, calling for censorship.10
It was a vile, vicious, dirty world, and the women debated how they could help steer children away from the devil and his minions in Hollywood.
Did they know that Theresa’s husband was responsible for his fair share of chorus girls? (All above board of course, with minor modifications, as requested by the censor. According to volunteer censor Reverend Coburn, “Toronto for many years had the reputation of having the cleanest stage of any city of its size on the North American continent.”11) Theresa was everything a good Catholic woman should be—charitable, smart, devout—but she “never permitted her religious feelings to interfere with box-office receipts,” a Toronto Star journalist wrote in his 1974 book on the case.12
If anyone doubted her morals, she silenced them at the 1916 banquet. The Baltimore ballroom glittered with electric lights, the air was sweet with roses, and the female orchestra played “charming melodies” of the South.13 After the dinner plates were cleared away by hotel staff, Theresa was called onto the stage. The master of ceremonies told the crowd that although an age of progress was dawning, Mrs. Ambrose Small would take them all back to what truly mattered. The applause died down, and Theresa, dressed in the season’s latest fashions, looked at her audience. “The ancient world at the time of the birth of Christ was a cesspool of iniquity,”14 she said. She explained how women were the property of men, used to populate the planet or for the basest of pleasures. It was a society where theatres were “filled with the applause of indecent merriment of every variety.” It was only after Jesus was crucified that Christians embraced “the law of Charity,” she said. “Hospitals, foundling homes and refuges for the poor and aged dotted the land. They saw in the sick, the poor and the stranger the living image of the Saviour.”15
Theresa Small’s feminist hero was not a suffragette. She was “the sinless maid who mothered the Saviour,” the virgin who elevated the status of women among men. The mother of Christ made men softer through her sacrifice, she said. Domestic virtue became a form of love, an ideal to aspire to, and it was still “the guarantee and safeguard of modern society,” Theresa asserted. “When you ask me what has religion done for the world, I reply that it would take hours to answer,” she said. “Conceive, if you can, all that is beautiful in the world today.” She paused, and gazed around the ballroom. “Gaze upon it until its impression ravishes you, and I say, beautiful as it is, it is but a faint reflex of what the world owes to Religion.” The applause was so loud it received a mention in St. Joseph’s Academy’s new literary journal. She was judged to be the best speaker, a credit to her old school.16
Theresa Small’s life was an exercise in cognitive dissonance. Her parents had made their fortune in beer, which allowed Theresa to attend a school where she learned how to be smart and pious. Sin paid for salvation. Her husband ignored the Bible with a great flourish. The spoils of entertainment and the racetrack had paid for the Rosedale mansion—and her train tickets to the religious conference. She treasured the virtues of domesticity, but she had a staff that cooked her meals and cleaned her house.
As the Ontario governor on the executive, she sat through hours of meetings, doing her best to explain why it was necessary to approach Quebec alumnae in French. “It is a long story,” she said.17 “The French in our country are afraid of anything that the English people intend to do.” When the other ladies debated what city would host the next conference, Theresa encouraged a quick decision—“Why not finish this meeting tonight?” she asked.18 When the women decided whether they should spend $200 a year to support a blind orphan, Theresa was practical, even a little brusque: “I don’t think the Federation should do that sort of thing,” she said. “The individual Alumnae can do that.”19
When war came to Toronto, many citizens treated the conflict as a chance to prove their loyalty to Britain. It all felt a little surreal in 1914. Germany, a country that had once been a cultural darling of the continent, had marched through Belgium as if international treaties meant nothing. The war’s origins were complicated. Too much nationalism, too much patriotism, too much brinkmanship. But if Canada was being called to defend the motherland, Toronto would answer.
Many of Toronto’s Catholics saw enlistment and patriotism as ways to prove themselves. French Canadians had been vilified for their low enlistment numbers, but in Toronto, “The Catholic Register boasted that its city’s parishes had raised over three thousand men, enough to outfit three battalions.”20 They handed over parish halls, formed sock-knitting committees, and Archbishop Neil McNeil appealed for tolerance: as they faced the common enemy in Germany, the city’s Protestants and Catholics needed to come together. Most of the men thought they’d be home in a few months, but that illusion was waning by Christmas. The Sisters of St. Joseph called it the “most awful of all wars in history,” and guessed that it would last for at least three or four years. “Every day we pray for peace,” they wrote.21
In the spring of 1915, the Germans released poison gas into the fields of Ypres, and it drifted towards the Canadian soldiers in a menacing yellow cloud, choking and killing men who couldn’t escape. The Western Front became stagnant, and battles came with enormous death tolls. The telegrams from “somewhere in France” shattered lives: We regret to inform you that your son is missing in action. We regret to inform you that your husband was injured in a shrapnel blast. We regret to inform you that your father, gallant in his actions, died as a result of his injuries.
As the war dragged on, replacements were needed. D’Arcy Hinds, a legal clerk at Osgoode Hall, thought it would be a good idea to raise another Irish battalion in Toronto in 1916 to represent the “fighting brotherhood of undivided Ireland.”22 Most Irish didn’t need a “specialty battalion that pandered to their Irishness,” but Hinds thought it worth pursuing in the winter of 1916.23 He asked Theresa Small for fundraising help. Theresa was involved in all kinds of charitable work but was most prominent as the regent of her local chapter of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire.
The IODE ladies hosted luncheons to raise money for Belgian relief and consumptive children. They were well connected and used their privileged status to lobby politicians with polite but firm telegrams.24 The group was loyal to the idea of a British Canada. Their yearly magazine featured articles such as “Canadianize the Aliens,” where the author noted that open-door immigration policies “tend to disintegrate” national life.25 At one point during the war, the idea of expelling IODE ladies of German and Austrian origin was proposed, but it didn’t get enough votes. (That was good news for Theresa. She was born in Canada, but her roots were Franco-German.)
As the leader of her chapter, Theresa ensured that her ladies sent 2,143 pairs of socks to the trenches. She was honoured with a fancy cake at a reception, where her portrait was revealed as an electric sign flickered to life, spelling “OUR REGENT.”26 She was a fundraising wizard, and industrial warfare required those skills. It cost an average of $20,000 to recruit a battalion of 1,160 men,27 and Theresa was pleased to help. The battalion gave her an office, just down the block from the Grand, and she was at her desk every morning with a “spring in her step,” managing a staff of ten with an accuracy and thoroughness “that any bank manager might envy.”28
Theresa’s team enticed the men to war in all kinds of creative ways. She created a “guess how many beans” contest for new recruits, with a new car as the grand prize. For their first recruitment drive, they called all the downtown factories and asked them to ring every whistle at 10 a.m. to make a ruckus that would capture people’s attention.29 On the city’s busiest corners, they parked cars, draped them in green, and had pretty “Irish colleens” handing out shamrocks to the men heading in for a shift, asking if they might want to clock in on the Western Front instead. 1916 was a difficult time to recruit. The war industry was humming along, and there were good jobs in Toronto that didn’t involve the brutality of the trenches.30 At the outset of the war, married men needed a permission note from their wives, but that stipulation was gone by 1916.31 The Canadian government wasn’t ready for conscription—but they desperately needed volunteers.
Theresa organized a fundraising concert at Massey Hall on St. Patrick’s Day, and there was a big night at the Grand Opera House too, with a military play called Watch Your Step. Theresa gave the battalion $5,000 to help fund the recruitment drive, and a photographer came to capture the big moment, a crowd of soldiers radiating around her as she handed over the cheque, the extravagant plume of her hat blocking the face of at least one man in the back row. The men began to regard her as their fairy godmother. The local newspapers took notice, and her friends at St. Joseph’s Academy proudly cut out the articles and glued them into a scrapbook. Their former pupil was flourishing in a world at war.
The same wasn’t true for Ambrose. In 1914, he had hoped the “war excitement” would blow over, but the men were digging into the mud of Flanders for the long haul.32 The travelling show had already been in decline before the war. In 1904, there had been more than four hundred companies travelling North America, but toward the end of the war, there were only forty.33 The battles between the Shuberts and the Syndicate had created bloated circuits, and there weren’t enough shows to go around. The audience wasn’t willing to pay for mediocrity, especially with the rise of the moving picture.34 It wasn’t just Ambrose who was struggling. “As I thought, business in Toronto went to pieces,” J.J. Shubert wrote to Lol Solman at the Royal Alex in the opening month of the war. “I’m afraid we are going to suffer a great deal with all our attractions in Canada.”35
Some of the theatres played more films; others went with a cheaper local stock company. Patriotic war musicals and revue shows were reliable, but it was difficult to entice the best ones into Canada. “They are afraid to take any chances,” Shubert wrote.36 The war was challenging for the box office, and things weren’t much better on the home front. In 1916, Theresa found out about Clara Smith. Clara wasn’t a one-night stand who’d fallen for her husband’s blue eyes and boxes of chocolate. She was a mistress with staying power.
Clara Smith looked a bit like Theresa, with a round face and curly brown hair. She was fiery. Jealous. Prone to calamity. A lover of Veuve Clicquot. His “ever-loving Clare,” as she signed all her letters. They had started seeing each other in 1914, when Clara was nineteen and Ambrose was almost fifty. Clara loved the dresses, the gifts, and the comfort that Ambrose provided. He had arranged a pied-à-terre in Rosedale, ten minutes away from his mansion. Living there in 1916, she told Ambrose she would die for him, her “most idolized boy in the world.”
Her love letters swirled with anxiety and her near constant apologies for being a “little jealous fool.”37 Clara was from the Grimsby area, and she ran with a fast crowd, which was how she met Ambrose. She was married to a soldier, but Ambrose helped her secure her divorce in 1917.38 They had an intense, passionate relationship. One night, Clara smacked Ambrose during an argument, and the next day she sneaked into his office, posing as an advertising agent, to write him an apology letter: “I was crazy,” she said, asking for forgiveness.39
It wasn’t just fur coats and fancy dinners, and Theresa couldn’t ignore it. She told Ambrose that Clara had to leave the city, and eventually, she got her way. But in the spring of 1917, before her 208th Battalion sailed across the Atlantic, the accusations of infidelity ricocheted back at Theresa. Ambrose accused her of having an affair with a high-ranking member of the battalion. Was there anything to his suspicion, or was it just a strategic act of revenge? The soldier in question was a few years shy of forty, tall and handsome in a bookish way. He was married with a son, a pillar of his community, and beloved in the battalion. “In every sense of the word he is a soldier, a scholar, and a gentleman,” the 208th wrote in their commemorative newspaper.40
Clara Smith sent this photo of herself to Ambrose Small. Clara and Ambrose were an item from 1914 through 1919, on-and-off.
Ambrose knew that the best melodramas relied on dramatic timing. When the battalion was about to leave for England in May 1917, he wrote a letter to Theresa’s alleged lover, outlining the dates and times the pair had been seen together. One of Ambrose’s cronies gave it to his cousin, who was an officer in the same battalion, telling him to deliver it when they were at least “one day on the high seas.”41 In May 1917, the soldier stood on the deck of the Justicia—a beautiful ocean liner outfitted for war—and read the accusatory dispatch. Then he ripped it up, and scattered the pieces in the ocean.42