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That lawyer was Charles Vance Millar, an eccentric trickster fascinated with human nature. Before he was struck down by a heart attack that October day, Millar had planned his greatest prank yet, hidden within his last will and testament, to be triggered on the day of his death.

Millar, who died a bachelor, devoted his considerable estate to what were essentially elaborate social experiments — including, most infamously, a vast sum of wealth to the º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøfamily who had the most babies within a decade of his death.

Reporters would later dub this baby-making competition the “Great Stork Derby.”

The childless Millar probably found it humorously ironic that his death would kick off a baby boom. He likely didn’t foresee the eugenics-driven moral panic his competition would spark. Nor could he have known that an unprecedented, global economic disaster was just around the corner — and that what he saw as a harmless prank would drive numerous families into further destitution.

“The way it worked out timewise, he put a lot of women in an uncomfortable situation,” said Chris Bateman, a historian with Heritage Toronto. “You could easily say that some people were motivated by the money to participate.”

The strange will of Charles Vance Millar

Millar was a bit of an oddball with a perverse sense of humour.

He was a prominent lawyer in Toronto, but most of his substantial wealth came from long-shot investments, from purchasing interest in an Ontario silver mine to the land that would later house the Detroit-Windsor tunnel.

Millar was convinced that every person had their price, and devoted himself to proving it. He had a hobby of leaving dollars on the sidewalk, hiding himself and watching with joy as passersby scrambled to pick up the cash.

His “necessarily uncommon and capricious” will, as he called it himself, reflected that. “A lot of the stipulations in his will were sort of moral challenges,” Bateman said — he wanted to test whether people’s greed would win out over their principles.

Millar bequeathed one share of a Catholic brewery to every practising Protestant minister and Orange Lodge in Toronto. His Jamaican vacation home was to be split between three lawyers who hated each other. His valuable Ontario Jockey Club shares were left to two vocal opponents to racetrack betting — and one shady character whose reputation would have barred them from ever joining the prestigious club.

But the biggest chunk of his wealth — the residue of his estate worth around $500,000 (nearly $9 million today) — would be left to “the mother who has since my death given birth in º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøto the greatest number of children as shown by the registrations under the Vital Statistics Act,” his will reads.

‘Communism in the raw’

Millar’s will passed through probate that December, with few alterations. For a little while, Torontonians were entertained by its zany clauses, but soon got bored of the whole thing. Clause 10 of his will, the Stork Derby clause, would be largely forgotten for the next few years.

But then something unforeseen happened. The Roaring Twenties suddenly died down to a whimper, and the Great Depression began to rear its head.

Over the Dirty Thirties, unemployment across Canada surged to 30 per cent, wages dropped by as much as 60 per cent and many º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøfamilies survived on government relief.

“Suddenly, there are a lot more people in º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøwho are living in poverty,” Bateman said, “and the idea of being rewarded for having children — perhaps something you were planning to do already or were going to do anyway — seemed a lot more appealing.”

At the same time, Millar’s will leapt back into the public eye. In 1932, the Ontario legislature tried to escheat Millar’s will money to the University of Toronto — and people were ²Ô´Ç³ÙÌýhappy.

The action was seemingly prompted by an attempt to expatriate the money to the States, as well as the difficulty in determining a winner. Whatever the reason, politicians, women’s groups and the general public were outraged at the perceived government overreach.

“The government is not only abusing the wishes of the deceased, it is cheating the children of one or more º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøwomen,” The president of Toronto’s Ward 3 Liberal Riding Association told The Globe. The editor of the Star was more boisterous, slamming it as “communism in the raw.” 

Faced with overwhelming backlash, the province soon reversed course. But ironically, many of the people who fought for the Stork Derby’s continuation would soon be calling for its cancellation once they learned who was participating.

Eugenics, kidnappings and a media circus

After the escheatment attempt, media coverage of the derby rose to a fever pitch. Reporters swarmed the homes of any woman with a large family, prying into the births and deaths of their babies.

Slowly, as residents realized the bulk of the participating mothers were impoverished members of the working class, the public sentiment turned from support to condemnation.

In the 1930s, the idea of “race suicide” — or the death of the white, protestant middle class — was gaining in popularity, bolstered by a wave of mass migrations in the preceding decade, a drop in the nation’s birth rate and the desperation of the Great Depression, wrote Elizabeth Marjorie Wilton, a graduate student at Dalhousie University,  on the Stork Derby.

“Eugenicists and birth control advocates focused people’s attention on the growth in numbers of individuals deemed as ‘feeble-minded,’” Wilton noted, and media accounts of the derby’s destitute participants only fanned the flames.

Letters to newspapers gave a peek into what Ontarians thought of the contest. “In the Fascist countries of Europe, where human beings are bred largely for cannon fodder, one could understand the encouragement of maternity marathons, but in the new world democracies … such revolting spectacles have no place,” one reader wrote to the Star in 1936.

Even Ontario Premier Mitchell Hepburn weighed in, telling the Star the competition was “the most disgusting, revolting exhibition ever put on in a civilized country.”

Many such critics condemned the participants for their perceived greed and vanity, ignorant of the poverty that drove them to compete in the first place, Bateman said.

On top of the public condemnation, some families caught in the limelight faced threats and extortion attempts. The Kenny family, who lived in abject poverty, nearly lost their five-year-old daughter to a kidnapping attempt as she walked home from school. “You’re the half million-dollar kid: get into the car or we’ll kill you,” her assailants reportedly said.

Later, in 1936, when a child went missing in Detroit, police decided to search the homes of the leading Stork Derby families — under the suspicion they may have kidnapped the child to add to their family total.

That’s not to mention the desperate circumstances many of the families were living in. Numerous contestants spoke of their homes being overrun by rats; in 1934, the Kenny family’s three-month-old infant died after being “bitten badly in the face” by a rat, and three other children were “badly bitten,” Pictorial Review Magazine reported two years later.

In the end, after all the suffering, threats, public scorn and humiliation, few families were left with anything to show for their efforts. The rest were left with more mouths to feed in the height of the Great Depression.

The fallout and a legal fiasco

As the derby drew to a close, lawyers and the leading contestants readied themselves for a fight for the fortune. All the leading families (except the Kennys) actually wanted to split the money between them. But their lawyers disagreed, arguing that such an action could invalidate the whole will.

So it was that, in November of 1936, a decade after Millar’s death, 32 lawyers marched into the courtroom of Justice William Middleton for an initial hearing. These were quickly pared down to just six lawyers, representing 15 mothers and two sets of Millar’s relatives.

The leading families weren’t just fighting one another for the winnings — they were wrestling with Millar’s distant family.

The latter fought to invalidate the Stork Derby clause, arguing that it was against the “public good” by promoting immoral behaviour, encouraging illegitimate births, endangering mothers and leading to stillbirths.

The issue made it all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada by appeal, where it was eventually dropped in 1938.

Regarding the competing families, Middleton immediately knocked out anyone with fewer than nine kids born in Toronto, eventually whittling down the finalists to just six families. Of these, yet more mothers were wiped out on technicalities; Pauline Clarke, who had 10 kids within the timeline, was eliminated because half her children were from another man she lived with after her husband left her. They never married because her husband refused to get divorced.

For Middleton, apparently, illegitimate children did not count.

Kenny, too, was eliminated, despite birthing 11 kids, as three were stillborn. “A child born dead is not in truth a child,” Middleton wrote. 

In the end, the Clarkes and Kennys would walk away with $12,500 each (around $260,000 today) after a legal battle.

After two years of legal wrangling, the verdict was finally in. The pot would split between four families, who each had nine children: the Timlecks, the Nagles, the Smiths and the MacLeans. Each received approximately $100,000 (around $2 million today) for their efforts.

“These women and the families didn’t pursue a public life afterwards,” Bateman said. “A lot of them just sort of retreated, went back to their families and continued on their lives.

“There was this criticism levelled at the women involved, like, ‘Oh, they’re … doing it for attention and for money.’ But that didn’t really play out later on.”