The Great Stork Derby

In 1926, a Toronto lawyer known for elaborate practical jokes wrote one final prank into his will: his fortune would go to whichever woman in the city had the most babies in the next ten years. He never expected anyone to actually try.

On October 31, 1926, a 72-year-old Toronto lawyer named Charles Vance Millar sat down at his desk, suffered a stroke, and died. He left no wife, no children, and no close relatives. What he left instead was a will — four short paragraphs that would occupy the Supreme Court of Canada, obsess the city’s newspapers, and quietly rearrange the lives of a handful of Depression-era families for the next twelve years.

Millar had spent his life as a man who found other people’s greed hilarious. He was a lawyer, a stockbroker, part-owner of a brewery, and an inveterate practical joker with, by every account, a genuine gift for making a joke last. His will was his masterpiece: a document engineered to put respectable people in impossible, self-incriminating positions, for his own posthumous amusement. Its final clause was the strangest of all. It promised his residual fortune to the woman in Toronto who had the most babies in the decade after his death. Nobody who read it thought it was serious. Almost everyone was wrong.

A lawyer who liked watching people squirm

Millar was born in 1854 in Aylmer, Ontario, and by most measures had a conventional, successful career: a University of Toronto law degree, a call to the bar in 1884, a thriving practice, a stake in the O’Keefe Brewery, and part ownership of a stagecoach and mail company in British Columbia’s Cariboo region. He owned racehorses — one of them, Tartarean, won Canada’s King’s Plate in 1915. He never married. Colleagues described him as sharp, private, and endlessly entertained by watching people’s principles collapse in the presence of money.

That amusement is the only real key to his will. Rather than leave his estate to charity or to distant cousins, Millar used it to construct a series of traps, each one built around a target’s own stated values. To three prominent Toronto lawyers who were known to despise one another, he left joint lifetime use of his vacation home in Jamaica — forcing men who couldn’t stand to be in the same room to co-own a house. To every Protestant minister in Toronto and every local Orange Lodge — pillars of the temperance movement, publicly opposed to alcohol — he left shares in the O’Keefe Brewery, the Catholic-owned beermaker he himself partly controlled, in the apparent hope of watching men who preached against drink quietly decide whether to cash a dividend check funded by beer sales. To every ordained minister in three Ontario towns who also happened to draw a salary, he left a single share in the Kenilworth Jockey Club — stock in a horse-racing track, an institution the clergy of the era routinely condemned as a den of gambling and vice.

None of these bequests were large enough to be worth much on their own. A single share of brewery stock or racetrack stock was a token, not a windfall. That was the point: Millar wasn’t trying to enrich anyone. He was trying to force a choice. Each recipient would have to decide, in public, whether principle was worth more than a small check — and Millar, dead, would never have to watch them squirm, but all of Toronto would get to.

Each bequest was small in dollar terms and enormous in the moral discomfort it was designed to produce. And then came the will’s fourth clause, aimed not at a handful of clergymen but at the entire city.

The clause

Millar’s will directed that the remainder of his estate — after the specific bequests were paid out — be converted into a trust. Nine years and ten months after his death, that trust would be paid out in full to whichever woman had, in the ten years following his death, given birth in the city of Toronto to the greatest number of children, as recorded by birth registrations. The children had to be legitimate — born within a marriage — and stillbirths would not count.

At the time, this read as one more piece of theater, arguably the cruelest joke of the bunch: a mock bequest built on the presumption that no one would actually reorganize their family and their body around a dead man’s punchline, and that the courts would strike it down as offensive to public policy before a single dollar changed hands anyway. Millar’s own estate was modest by the standards of Toronto’s wealthy elite — reports of its value at his death range from roughly $100,000 to $1 million, reflecting how much of it sat in stocks whose worth was still being sorted out. Nobody, including Millar’s executors, seems to have expected it to become worth fighting over.

They were wrong on both counts. The estate’s stock holdings performed well through the years that followed, and by the time the ten-year clock ran down, the fund had grown to more than $750,000 — a genuinely life-changing sum, especially set against the backdrop of what those ten years turned out to be.

A joke lands in the middle of the Depression

Millar died three years before the stock market crash of 1929. The ten-year countdown on his will therefore played out almost exactly across the Great Depression, when unemployment in Canada climbed past 25 percent and working-class family incomes in Toronto often fell below $1,000 a year. For a comfortable clause aimed at embarrassing the pious, the timing turned out to be devastating in a different way: for women already raising large families in poverty, on the edge of losing a breadwinner’s job or already having lost one, a fortune tied to childbirth was not an abstraction to laugh about. It was a lifeline, dangled in front of households that were already having children and already struggling to feed them.

By the early 1930s, Toronto newspapers had noticed. The contest — which the press nicknamed the “Great Stork Derby” — became a running feature. The Toronto Daily Star reportedly assigned a reporter specifically to track pregnant contestants around the city, aiming to sign them to exclusive agreements so rival papers couldn’t print their stories first. Families under consideration were profiled, their homes described, their children counted in print like standings in a sports league. It was tabloid spectacle laid directly over real hardship: women delivering babies in quick succession, in cramped housing, during the worst economic collapse in the country’s history, while the city read along.

For many of the families in contention, this wasn’t a windfall they stumbled into — it was a decade already defined by large families and precarious work, onto which a fortune had suddenly, unexpectedly, been mapped. Lillian Kenny’s household was typical of the kind of family the derby drew in: her husband, Matthew, had lost his job at a tire factory, and the family had been getting by on little ever since. For a household like that, watching a newspaper turn your children’s birth certificates into a running scoreboard wasn’t an indignity worth objecting to. It was the closest thing to a lottery ticket a family with no savings and no security was ever going to hold.

The mismatch between the will’s origins as a joke about human vanity and its real-world consequences for desperately poor families did not go unnoticed by the people with the power to intervene.

The establishment tries to kill it — twice

By 1932, with the derby roughly two-thirds through its run and public discomfort rising, the Ontario legislature considered a bill that would have redirected the unclaimed portion of Millar’s estate to the University of Toronto instead of letting the will’s terms play out. Public backlash — the derby had, by then, plenty of sympathetic press and popular attention as an underdog story of poor mothers chasing a life-changing sum — helped force the government to abandon the proposal.

The second challenge came from Millar’s own bloodline: distant relatives who had inherited nothing under the will’s terms sued to have the stork-derby clause thrown out entirely. Their argument was that a bequest conditioned on having the most children encouraged reckless childbearing and offended public policy, and should be struck down by the courts regardless of what Millar had intended. The case worked its way up to the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled on December 22, 1937, formally recorded as Re Millar Estate. The court upheld the will. Millar’s clause, however strange, was legally valid and had to be honored — with one clarification the court insisted on: the estate could only be split among mothers of children conceived and born within marriage, and stillbirths would not be counted toward anyone’s total, exactly as the will’s original wording had specified.

With the legislature defeated and the relatives defeated, the money was going to be paid out. The only question left was who, exactly, had won.

The finish line

Roughly eleven families had stayed in serious contention as the ten-year window closed in the autumn of 1936. Two of them appeared, briefly, to be running away with it — and both were disqualified in ways that made the contest’s cruelty explicit.

Lillian Kenny, whose family had fallen into poverty after her husband lost his job at a tire factory, had given birth twelve times during the qualifying decade — more than any other contestant. But four of her twelve children had been stillborn. Under the terms of the will, and under the ruling that had just come down from the country’s highest court, those four did not count. The presiding judge, Justice William Middleton, was blunt about it in his ruling: a child born dead, he held, was not “in truth a child” for the purposes of the bequest. Kenny’s total dropped from twelve to eight — one short of the winning number.

Pauline Mae Clarke also appeared to be a contender, with ten children born during the period. But an investigation into her family found that five of them had been born out of wedlock, and some had been born outside Toronto’s city limits — disqualifying grounds on two separate counts under the will’s language.

That left four women tied at nine children apiece, each of whom met every condition of the will: Annie Katherine Smith, Kathleen Ellen Nagle, Lucy Alice Timleck, and Isabel Mary Maclean. In 1938, each of the four was awarded $125,000 — an enormous sum for a working-class Toronto family in the tail end of the Depression, equivalent to well over a million dollars today. Kenny and Clarke, disqualified but clearly having borne the same physical toll as the winners without qualifying for the prize, were each ultimately given a $12,500 settlement rather than face further litigation over their claims.

What the joke actually cost

It’s worth sitting with what the ten years of the Great Stork Derby actually asked of the people who competed in it. This was not a lottery where entrants bought a ticket and waited. It was a contest whose only currency was childbirth itself — repeated pregnancy and delivery, in an era before reliable prenatal care for poor families, conducted in full view of a press corps eager to print every detail. The women who “won” did so by giving birth to nine children apiece inside a single decade, an outcome the press treated as an amusing derby but that involved, for each of them, years of pregnancy, delivery, and infant care layered on top of a decade of mass unemployment and economic collapse.

Charles Vance Millar built his will as an act of theater about other people’s hypocrisy and greed — a set of traps sprung on ministers who’d have to decide whether to cash a brewery dividend, on lawyers forced to share a house they didn’t want to share. The stork derby clause was very likely conceived in that same spirit: a jab at how far people would go for money, expected to be either struck down by the courts or ignored by anyone with self-respect. Instead, it became something else entirely once poverty entered the equation. The families who pursued it, for the most part, weren’t chasing a punchline. They were chasing rent money and grocery money in the middle of the worst economic disaster Canada had ever experienced, using the only asset a dead man’s joke had put a price on.

The case is still taught in Canadian law schools today, cited whenever a court has to weigh whether an eccentric condition in a will crosses the line into violating public policy. Millar meant it, by every account, as his best and cruelest joke. It’s remembered instead as a strange, uncomfortable window into exactly how much desperation the Depression was capable of extracting from a punchline.