TWENTY

 

BEHOLD THE MAN OF GOD

 

TORONTO, 1929

At five cents a pop, tabloid newspapers—gutter sheets as they were often called—sold well in Toronto between the wars. In 1926, Patrick Sullivan—private investigator, troublemaker, ex-policeman—became the owner of one such publication.¹ “The Thunderer Tells the Truth,” the masthead read, and by 1929, the main editorial purpose of the “fearless independent weekly” seemed to be the destruction of Theresa Small. The tabloid dealt in conspiracies, and there was none bigger than the Ambrose Small case—“one of the most horrifying stories ever heard since the dawn of Christianity,” according to Sullivan, who promised, “The Thunderer will prove before this battle is over, that you, government of Ontario, are not even as honourable as the maggots that crawl and creep in the scruff and dandruff that cover the cuticle of Mother Earth.”²

The Thunderer was so popular that Sullivan had advertisements for legitimate businesses like “W.S. Fife picture framing” and “Ed’s Radio and Electric Service,” and a half page of classifieds for local homes, orchards, and missing persons.^*1 The colourful tone of tabloids like Jack Canuck and the Thunderer made them stand out from daily newspapers like the Globe and the Star. No two such papers were alike. Some, like Jack Canuck, investigated issues like public health reform, while others, like Hush, went after the upper class, armed with gossip from Rosedale and the Granite Club: “Each new venture bore the indelible mark of its editor/publisher, each of whom was assailed widely for publishing ‘scurrilous’ and ‘corrupting’ material,” historian Susan Houston notes.³ They poked fun at the elites, and were popular, because “Schadenfreude can be addictive.”⁴

Sullivan was a natural. He occasionally raised legitimate concerns about the Small case, but it was impossible for authorities to take him seriously when he attacked the Catholic Church in an all-caps screed: “AND NOW THE VENGEANCE OF GOD IS UPON YOU, YOU COWARDLY BEASTS, YOU FILTHY BRUTES!”⁵ Sullivan railed against the public menace of “puss doctors,” Queen’s Park sugar daddies, aluminum utensils, organized religion, gambling, and the corruption of the “vile” King government,⁶ but his choicest turns of phrase were reserved for the Small mystery. “It is safe to say that the spiders of imbecility have long since weaved their webs in every corner of the brains of Toronto’s Detective Department,” he wrote.⁷

The tabloid was on the radar of the authorities, but nobody wanted to shut it down, because they knew Sullivan would relish the martyrdom.⁸ But as the ten-year anniversary of Small’s disappearance loomed and Sullivan began to make “terrible disclosures” the paper became harder to ignore.

In November 1929, Sullivan wrote an article claiming that Theresa Small’s maid came to his home to warn him that he had been probing too deeply and Theresa’s Italian friends were plotting to kill him. Or, as Sullivan reported it, the maid told him: “You are going to be in the soup.”⁹ (When police visited Rosedale to investigate, the maid was asleep, but she later denied everything he had alleged. “I would not care if anyone had made a plot on his life,” she said.¹⁰) Sullivan persisted. In the Thunderer he wrote an article claiming that the publisher of a local Italian newspaper was involved in the plot. Sullivan accused his would-be assassin of gangsterism and immigration schemes, and was eventually charged with criminal libel (a “frame up,” he spat in the pages of his paper.)¹¹

Patrick Sullivan appears on the cover of the February 8, 1930 issue of his tabloid. Sullivan was in the midst of several legal battles over material that was deemed libelous and obscene by the courts.

In early January 1930, with his libel trial a few weeks away, the Thunderer published another exposé, claiming that Theresa Small’s alleged wartime lover Mr. X was the battalion chaplain and United Church minister Bruce Hunter. (“Behold, the man of God,” the Thunderer headline screamed.¹²)

Hunter was a popular minister and decorated war veteran who was awarded the Military Cross during the final months of the war, when he was attached to the 85th Battalion: “He not only dressed the wounded but repeatedly and under fire assisted in carrying wounded men back to safety,” the official citation read.¹³ He had been a Methodist minister at that time, but the church no longer existed. In the middle of the 1920s, the Methodist Church had been folded into the newly formed United Church of Canada. Hunter now lived in London, Ontario, where he was minister of London’s Metropolitan Church, a congregation that included the city’s “foremost citizens.”¹⁴ (It was just around the corner from that city’s Grand Opera House.)

In the midst of Sullivan’s latest “disclosures,” the attorney general’s office told the police to watch him “from the time he gets up in the morning until he goes to bed at night.”¹⁵ At the first day of his libel trial in January, one of Toronto’s morality cops handcuffed Sullivan as he left the courthouse.¹⁶ The police officer explained to the reporters nearby that there had been a complaint about an article in the Thunderer “involving an alleged statement made against the characters of Rev. Bruce Hunter and Mrs. Ambrose J. Small.” Sullivan was charged with publishing obscene literature—“intending to corrupt morals.”¹⁷ The police raided the printing press that Sullivan used and tore through his Brunswick Avenue home. Bail was set at $25,000:^*2 “You would think he had committed murder,” the Small sisters said.

Bail was reduced and Sullivan’s friends cobbled together $10,000 to free him from the Don. Not long after, a fresh issue of the Thunderer hit the streets: “Oh! The Scandal!” the January 11 edition read.¹⁸ Inside there was a summary of a 1922 affidavit, purportedly from Clara Smith. According to the document, Clara had seen “Old Theresa” dining at the Queen’s Hotel with Hunter in the spring of 1917. Clara called Ambrose and they returned to Rosedale, where they climbed a ladder and spied on the alleged lovers through a window into the first-floor music room.¹⁹ Ambrose then sent accusatory letters to Bruce and Theresa. According to the affidavit, Bruce received his letter on his way to war, and Theresa was in New York visiting her sister. “We thought she would jump in the Hudson, but instead she landed back here on the next train,” Clara said. Theresa, she claimed, was so furious that she threatened to strangle Ambrose in his sleep, and tried to kill herself. “He was afraid she would do it. He really thought her insane,” Clara declared.²⁰ There was no other evidence to link Bruce and Theresa—only this affidavit from a less than objective “witness.” It had never been tested in court, and Clara, who was nowhere to be found, had her own motivations as the mistress of Ambrose. The authorities figured it was a fake, but when they found the lawyer listed in Sullivan’s story, he confirmed that he’d recorded Clara’s account in the proper legal manner.²¹

An older preacher noticed Hunter’s face on the front of the tabloid as he walked up Yonge Street. The reverend didn’t believe a word of the filth, and wrote to Hunter to tell him so. “I phoned to the Honorable W.H. Price, the Attorney General, whom I know fairly well, giving him only a brief statement of what the article contained but telling what kind of man you were and what position you hold in the Church in the City of London,” he reassured his friend.²² “I suggested to Mr. Price, that if no law existed today on the Statute Books to prevent a scavenger-monger making his living out of digging into the cess pools and casting up its filth to the disgust of the better citizenship, there should be.”²³

As the gossip in the Thunderer spread, the church leadership was supportive. They knew Hunter had been dealing with this nonsense since the war, when Ambrose Small had dragged Hunter into his drama in a bid to tarnish Theresa’s name and divorce her.²⁴ Hunter had told them that there was no truth to it.²⁵ The church elders were completely on his side. So were the people in the pews. Carry on and hold your head high, they wrote to him by the dozens.²⁶ Even though he walked through the valley of the shadow of death, he should fear no evil. “I admired your pluck amazingly for carrying on through the day,” read one of the letters he received. “Life plays some rather wry jokes on us at times.”²⁷ One legion branch in London had seven hundred men ready to support Hunter in a lawsuit, but lawyers had advised against any publicity.²⁸ “I am sure you all can appreciate the embarrassing position in which I find myself,” Hunter told the London Rotary Club, who had given him “three cheers” of support at a recent meeting. “During my service as chaplain of the battalion, I always conducted myself as a Christian should.”²⁹

The Thunderer viewed similar articles from what it called London’s “Sheep Faced Methodist Press” with disgust. “Hunter is all we say and worse! Get it! Come out you bible whacking hypocrites! Come out and fight PAT SULLIVAN!”³⁰

Hunter ignored the Thunderer dispatches, but his church steward sent telegrams to the attorney general: “THUNDERER AGAIN ATTACKING REVEREND BRUCE HUNTER…HAVE POLICE STOP SALE.”³¹ The attorney general didn’t want to create any sympathy for Sullivan so close to his libel trial. The courts would be the best place to sort this out, the attorney general’s office said, trying to soothe the anger in London. And sure enough, Sullivan was found guilty in both the libel case and the obscenity matter: “I have some doubt to his sanity, which was not raised as an issue at the trial—and I respectfully suggest that he be submitted to a mental examination,” the judge ruled in the obscenity case.³²

With Sullivan locked up, Hunter wrote letters to his supporters and thanked staff at the attorney general’s office. Hunter went back to his busy life, his honour restored. “While this attack was no doubt distressing, it neither slowed Dr. Hunter down nor discredited him,” one of the books in the church library states. His reputation “was enhanced rather than diminished.”³³

^*1 Historian Susan E. Houston notes that many of the tabloid papers that flourished between the wars were “ephemeral” creatures. Sustained runs of these papers are not easily found, and very few business records survive.

^*2 About $374,000 in 2019 dollars, according to the Bank of Canada’s inflation calculator.