There was something suspicious happening at the oyster shop. Long after it closed up for the day, customers continued to arrive. It was still busy deep into the night, carriages pulling up until two in the morning, the sound of their horses’ hooves ringing out as they trotted down King Street and stopped outside. One after another, carriage drivers would descend from their cabs — Thornton Blackburn presumably among them on occasion — and approach the entrance, even though it was well after hours. They would knock on the door with their whip and, in response, it would crack open to admit their passengers, some undoubtably boisterous and already more than a little drunk. The whole process made for quite a disruption in the quiet night, and loud arguments could sometimes be heard coming from inside. It was getting to be annoying. Grumpy neighbours were kept awake into the wee hours.
They all knew exactly what was going on: they lived next door to Daniel Bloxsom’s brothel.
This was the spring of 1847. Toronto was growing quickly. Twenty thousand people now lived in the city; new immigrants were arriving all the time. But in a lot of ways, it was still a rowdy frontier town. Toronto wasn’t exactly living up to Simcoe’s dream of a thoroughly respectable British capital. It had plenty of sin; moralizing leaders were horrified by the drunkenness, violence, and adultery that could be found in every corner of their city. By 1850, there were a hundred and fifty taverns in Toronto — more than one for every three hundred residents — and two hundred beer shops on top of that. Blood was spilled in the streets on a regular basis thanks to riots and brawls. And brothels like Bloxsom’s could be found across the city, too — shadowy establishments where lustful passions were indulged behind closed doors.
It’s hard to know exactly how many of these “Palaces of Sin” were operating in Toronto at the time. Sex work was illegal, so the industry was forced to operate in secrecy. Seemingly respectable businesses like hotels, boarding houses, restaurants, and laundries acted as fronts. To escape detection, many brothel keepers adopted aliases and changed locations. The wonderfully named Mary Anne Trebilcock, for instance, ran a number of Toronto brothels over the years, each with a different address, and she used at least three different names. But records of court proceedings suggest there were, at least, dozens of “bawdy houses” operating in the city. Of the hundreds of charges laid against women for various offences during a typical year, the vast majority would be laid under laws generally used to prosecute sex workers.
But even those police raids did little to slow the industry down. Brothel keepers who ran prosperous establishments could easily afford to pay a fine, avoid prison time, and return to work that very same day. Trebilcock was arrested more than a dozen times, often brought down by an informant who spied on her for the police, but it clearly didn’t stop her. Some bawdy houses were even tipped off before raids. Getting a brothel shut down for good wasn’t easy.
The exhausted residents of King Street East must have known that going to the police was unlikely to provide a permanent solution to the problem of the oyster shop. So, they tried another approach; they talked to Bloxsom’s landlord instead. The man who owned the building just so happened to be one of the most respectable and powerful men in the city.
His name was William Henry Boulton. He was the mayor of Toronto.
Boulton had been born into power. His grandfather was a chiefjustice. His uncle was John Beverley Robinson. He grew up in one of the most splendid mansions in the city: the Grange is now a National Historic Site and part of the Art Gallery of Ontario. He would eventually inherit the distinguished house himself, taking his place among the leaders of the Family Compact. As a successful Tory politician, he opposed Robert Baldwin in the Legislative Assembly and had also been elected to city council, chosen by his fellow councillors and aldermen to serve as mayor for the last three years in a row.
The oyster shop’s neighbours approached him with their problem, explaining the situation: the carousing at all hours, the restless nights, their long suffering. As a respectable Conservative, he would surely be shocked by the depravity being unleashed at one of his own properties. He would have to leap into action and shut it down. Then they would finally be able to get a good night’s sleep.
But it wouldn’t be so easy. It was powerful landlords like Boulton who stood to gain the most from sex work. They charged brothel keepers like Daniel Bloxsom inflated rents and rarely faced any consequences. Even if the police did raid the property, the landlords could plausibly deny they’d known anything untoward was happening, letting more vulnerable people take the fall.
When it came to sex work in Toronto, it was often those from marginalized communities who bore the brunt of society’s disapproval. For a while, Canadian law would specifically target Indigenous sex workers and those who hired them, imposing stricter limits and higher penalties in their cases. Black brothel keepers like Daniel Bloxsom seem to have been more likely to face repercussions, too. And when one of Thornton Blackburn’s properties in The Ward was found to house a brothel, he was charged in a situation where most landlords went unnamed.
Most often, it was the sex workers themselves who paid the cost. They couldn’t always afford to buy their way out of jail. It was often poverty that had driven them into sex work in the first place. They were usually young — nearly half of those arrested in 1845, for instance, were under the age of nineteen — and recent immigrants. In fact, the vast majority came from one country in particular.
At the very same time the oyster house was kicking up a racket on King Street, the Great Famine was ravaging Ireland. As a potato blight devastated the island’s staple crop, typhoid fever swept through the weakened population. Half-hearted British relief efforts did little to help, while British landlords evicted starving tenants. The Great Famine would claim a million lives and drive another 2.5 million to flee the country, many of them heading to the Canadian colonies. That summer, nearly forty thousand Irish refugees arrived in Toronto, twice the city’s population. Many of them were sick and dying, taken to temporary fever sheds on King Street. And even those who somehow survived the crossing in relatively good health were in desperate need of work, having left their livelihoods behind in Ireland.
Some Torontonians welcomed the new arrivals with open arms. But others were dead set against them. The Family Compact wasn’t the only formidable group of Protestant Tories in the city. Toronto was a stronghold for the Orange Order, too.
The organization had been founded in Northern Ireland. It was named after William of Orange, the Protestant king who seized the British throne from the Catholic king. The Orange Order was proudly British and violently anti-Catholic. And it found fertile ground in the thoroughly Protestant metropolis of Toronto.
By the middle of the 1800s, the Orange Order had been part of life in the city for decades, but as the Family Compact began to wane, the organization was securing its own stranglehold on power — sometimes by force. Riots between Protestants and Catholics became a regular occurrence in Toronto’s streets. Things got so bloody, the St. Patrick’s Day parade was banned for more than a century, all the way up to 1988. The annual Orange Parade on the twelfth of July was practically an official holiday: Protestants got the day off work to celebrate, while Catholics hid inside. Orangemen would come to dominate city hall, the civil service, the fire brigades, and the police force. Catholics had a hard time getting any good job at all. The Orangemen running the city weren’t about to help those refugees get settled in their new home.
Many of the Irish women arriving in the city must have had little choice but to work in the sex industry. (And some men, too, though in much lower numbers.) Even twenty years after the famine the vast majority of women arrested on sex work–related charges were Irish. Most of them were Catholics. They were dragged into the courthouse on Adelaide Street (it’s an Italian restaurant today) where, if they couldn’t pay their fines, they were sentenced to a month of hard labour.
Some would spend their entire lives bouncing back and forth between brothel beds and the Toronto Gaol. Catherine O’Hem, for instance, was arrested for the first time at the age of nineteen. Over the next twenty-five years, she would serve seventy-seven sentences in that jail, and her daughter would follow in her footsteps.
Her customers, on the other hand, had little to worry about. Men were barely ever arrested in the raids on Toronto brothels. While hundreds of sex work–related charges might be laid against women during a typical year, only about a dozen charges would be laid against the men who availed themselves of their services. Never mind the men who profited off the industry from behind the scenes — like William Henry Boulton.
Mayor Boulton knew perfectly well that the police weren’t about to give him any trouble over the oyster shop. It wasn’t just that he was a leader of the Family Compact, or a powerful Tory, or even the mayor. He was also a leading Orangeman, on his way to becoming deputy grand master of the entire Canadian Orange Order — an impressive feat in a country that at one point boasted more Orange lodges than all of Northern Ireland. It was his support within the order that helped him get elected in the first place; he was an Orange hero for helping to overturn a ban on the political parades where Orange mobs clashed with Catholics and Reformers.
Since the police were Orangemen, too, Mayor Boulton knew he had nothing to worry about. They had a proven history of looking the other way when their fellow Orangemen committed crimes. When the residents of King Street came to him complaining about the noise at the oyster shop, Boulton turned them away. Over and over again. He could do what he liked, he told them.
In the end, they felt they had only one option left. They would go public with his name, hoping to embarrass him into shutting the brothel down.
When the news broke, it sparked a scandal. “Utterly disgraceful,” the Globe called it. Reformers on city council took up the cause, pressuring Boulton to respond. Eventually, the police were forced to act. But, of course, it wasn’t the mayor who would pay the price; it was Daniel Bloxsom who was arrested. His trial was far from fair. The judge was Boulton’s own uncle, John Beverley Robinson, and Boulton himself was there sitting next to him as his associate. They fined Bloxsom ten dollars. “We confess [the trial was] the most indecent thing we have seen yet in Canada,” the Globe complained.
Boulton does seem to have suffered a bit of fallout. He wouldn’t be chosen as mayor for a fourth term the following year. But he was re-elected to the Legislative Assembly and, a decade later, he was back in the mayor’s office once again. It would take a clash with another influential Orangeman to finally bring him down.
Samuel Sherwood was the chief of police, a proud Orangeman with a history of violence. Years earlier, he’d helped organize an attack on a Reform Party parade; one Reformer was shot and killed. His fervour and loyalty were eventually rewarded when he was put in charge of the city’s police force. He was a fairly lax leader: his men didn’t wear uniforms, were known to be “slovenly,” and tended to join the riots they were sent to quell. Now, Sherwood was embroiled in his own sex work–related scandal.
One summer night in 1855, some clowns from a visiting circus headed to Mary Ann Armstrong’s brothel at King and John Streets. They were, by all accounts, a pretty tough crew. And while they were there, they got into a brawl with some other customers: a group of fire-fighters from the Hook & Ladder Firefighting Company.
While the clowns won that night’s battle, leaving two firefighters seriously injured, they’d picked the wrong fight on the wrong night. In those days, there was no central, public, government-run fire department. When a blaze broke out, all the nearby brigades rushed to the scene with their horse-drawn engines to call dibs. Just a couple of weeks earlier, the Hook & Ladders had arrived at a fire on Church Street at the same time as another brigade. The two crews battled in the street as the building burned. The firefighters were no strangers to violence.
They were also Orangemen. They’d been at the brothel that night celebrating the biggest day on the Orange calendar: the twelfth of July, the day of the big parade. So, the next day, a crowd began to gather around S.B. Howes’s Star Troupe Menagerie & Circus. An angry, Orange crowd.
When Chief Sherwood was told about the approaching trouble, he dragged his feet for as long as he could. By the time his men got there, the violence had already started. People were hurling stones at the circus performers. While the clowns, acrobats, and carnies were able to hold the mob off for a while, it couldn’t last. Eventually, the crowd overwhelmed them. And when the Hook & Ladders arrived, all hell broke loose. They stormed the circus with pikes and axes, overturned wagons, and pulled down the tents and the big top and set fire to them. They beat clowns to a pulp. Circus folk ran for their lives. Some dove into the lake for safety. It was mayhem. The mayor was eventually forced to call in the militia.
The police had done pretty much nothing. They just watched. Chief Sherwood eventually made a personal appearance but did little other than stopping the rioters from setting fire to the cages of the animals. Of the seventeen people charged in the riot, only one was ever convicted. All the police who were at the scene claimed they couldn’t remember any of the Orangemen who’d been there — just as they’d done a few weeks earlier after the Firemen’s Riot.
That cover-up wasn’t Sherwood’s last. After yet another riot between Protestants and Catholics ended with a Catholic stabbed to death with a pitchfork, Chief Sherwood’s memory was yet again suspiciously fuzzy as far as Orangemen were concerned. Not long after that, he was under fire again, for freeing a suspect who’d been accused of robbing a bank.
By then, Boulton was mayor again. And that was a bridge too far, even for him. An inquiry was called, but Sherwood refused to cooperate. Boulton responded by trying to have him fired and replaced. But when it came to a vote, city council took Sherwood’s side. Defeated and embarrassed, Boulton resigned. Without his traditional Orange support, he would lose the next election — the first in which voters picked the mayor directly.
Chief Sherwood’s days were numbered, too. For the first time in more than twenty years — since Mackenzie’s rebellion — a Reformer was elected mayor. City council called for big changes to the way the police force was run. The provincial government agreed. Another inquest was launched, and in the end, the whole system was overhauled. Every single police officer in the city was fired, and a new force was created from scratch. Thanks in part to the brothel brawl, the foundations of the modern police force had been laid.
But it was only a tiny step. Even without Boulton in office, the systems that had kept him there were still in place. The Orange Order would have a stranglehold on power for another century, ruling over the city into the middle of the 1900s. For the next hundred years, nearly every mayor of Toronto would be an Orangeman. And the police force stayed Orange, too.
Despite the overhaul, half the old constables would end up being rehired. And in the years to come, Toronto’s police force would be used more aggressively than ever before to enforce strict limits on love in the city. They would be recast as defenders of public virtue, used as a tool to crack down on drinking, sex work, homosexuality, and anything else the city’s leaders decided was a vice. The Toronto Police Morality Squad was on the way.