This would be the perfect time to segue into a talk about MacKenzie’s former home on Bond St., just north and across the road from St Michael’s Cathedral, but not this time. I’ll leave its ghosts for another day.
We are now going to move a little to the west and forward several more decades in time to Adelaide St. slightly west of Yonge. This is the site of Toronto’s Grand Opera House. It opened in 1874 here, on Adelaide just west of Yonge street. For a few decades it was a respectable place, replete with the more highbrow entertainment of the period. Sarah Bernhardt sang here, as did many other top singers of the age. Among the guest lecturers who came for the education and edification of the people of Toronto was Oscar Wilde. During its opening, respectable years, the House was run by Charlotte Morrison, a former actress, who was said to be the driving force behind the Toronto theatre scene in that period.
The house was also known for having fires- gas lights, costumes, wood and plaster structure- and one, in 1879, killed a carpenter, as well as his wife and their infant child. Thought the house was reopened after each fire, it gradually fell into neglect and was being eclipsed in the early nineteen hundreds by the more popular vaudeville acts, and the newer theatres built specifically to house those acts, such as the Elgin and Winter Gardens, which is still with us to this day.
At some point in this period, the House was acquired by Canadian theatre magnate Ambrose Small. In addition to the Grand Opera House in Toronto, he also owned the Grand Opera House in Kingston and the Grand Theatre in London and theatres in at least four other cities, as well as 62 other buildings. He was a self made millionaire, known to be a gambler, and also as a womanizer. As far as his theatres went, he tended to book less reputable, more titillating shows rather the more respectable and highbrow material performed in the Grand Opera House’s earlier years.
On December 1, 1919, Small sold all his theatre holdings for a profit of 1.7 million Canadian dollars. The next day, his lawyer met with him in his office at the Grand Opera House, and left him there at about 5:30 pm. As it turned out, the lawyer is the last known person to see Ambrose Small.
Small’s disappearance was not noticed for several weeks. Because he was known to womanize and carouse, and was known to vanish for weeks at a time, no one who knew him thought anything of his sudden disappearance and absence. However, in January 1920, his wife and lawyer began to worry about his unusually prolonged absence, and they contacted police. Small’s wife offered a $50,000 reward for any information regarding his disappearance.
The police investigation became a sensation for Toronto newspapers, and for weeks every detail was reported. And there were many salacious details to be told. It turns out Small had a secret room with its own entrance off his office at the Grand Opera House. The purpose of the room was for the settling of gambling debts, but also a place to carry out his many affairs with actresses and female employees of the Grand Opera House.
No motive for the disappearance could be found. He did not take any money with him, he did not have any motive to leave, no ransom note was ever delivered, and no trace of Small was ever found. His wife claimed he was in the hands of a ‘designing woman’, but none was ever located- or perhaps the investigators couldn’t narrow it down to merely one. The police carefully studied the plot and storyline of the play that was being performed at the time of Small’s disappearance, to see if Small was leaving cryptic clues. (I believe the phrase ‘grasping at straws’ may be appropriate for this.) None were found. There were some reports of him being sighted after his disappearance, including a watchman of the Grand Theatre in London who swore he saw Small enter the building in late December, but none of these sightings could be confirmed, and the police found reasons to discount them- usually claiming that the witness was simply trying to cash in on the notoriety surrounding the case. Small was declared officially dead in 1924.
The investigation was reopened from time to time over the years. A man was found in the US who claimed to have been Small. He was believed to be insane. Small’s secretary also disappeared in December of 1919, but he was quickly located in the US with about $100,000 in bonds, presumable taken from Small. He was tried and convicted of theft of the bonds, but he could not be connected to Small’s disappearance. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was consulted on the case, but he declined investigating it himself.
In 1936, a new investigation concluded Small’s wife may have been the prime mover in the disappearance, but she was already dead by that time. After her death, a letter was found by her sister among her possessions, which contained a confession to Small’s murder. The letter said that Small’s trunk had been buried in the Rosedale Ravine, and the rest of him thrown into the Grand Opera House’s furnace. It was signed by ‘Reuters’. The police discounted the letter.
And that is all that is known about the mysterious and unexplained disappearance of Ambrose Small. I’ll give the last word to American author Charles Fort, who compared the disappearance of Ambrose Small in 1919 with the disappearance of American author Ambrose Bierce in 1914 and asked the question: ‘Was someone collecting Ambroses?’
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