An Eccentric Tycoon Left a Fortune to the Winner of a Baby-Making Contest. The Great Stork Derby Divided Canadians During the Great Depression

Before his sudden death on Halloween in 1926, the wealthy Toronto lawyer and financier Charles Vance Millar built a reputation as a bachelor and a prankster. In one of his favorite practical jokes, he would place money on a sidewalk and hide nearby, roaring with laughter at people’s reactions as they contemplated their next move. Undoubtedly eccentric, Millar amassed a fortune by investing in breweries, real estate and infrastructure. He once modernized a stagecoach company in western Canada by replacing horses with automobiles.

Millar never married or had children, and he had no living relatives when he suffered a fatal heart attack at age 72. His death “proved to be the beginning of a posthumous career that eclipsed everything he had accomplished in his lifetime,” attorney and author Mark M. Orkin wrote in a 1981 book. Millar’s last will and testament contained a number of strange provisions, but the most peculiar was the one that launched the so-called Great Stork Derby.

The clause in question established a competition among Toronto mothers that would allocate a portion of Millar’s estate to the participant who gave birth to the most children over the next ten years. The bequest was valued at about 500,000 Canadian dollars—equivalent to nearly 9 million Canadian dollars today. In the case of a tie, those funds would be divided equally among the winners.

By the early 1930s, legal battles over the validity of the will and debates over the types of children included in the count had set off a frenzy of sensational media coverage, with newspapers closely following the leading contenders and building narratives around their personal lives. The derby, often portrayed in the press as a spectacle, ultimately ignited public scrutiny and controversy across Depression-era Canada, where birth control was illegal but large families were a hot-button issue.

“It has a lot to teach us about Toronto and Canada and probably the whole Western world at the time,” says Adam Bunch, author of The Toronto Book of Love, a nonfiction account of romance, marriage and lust in the Canadian city. “It does tie into these big historical forces that are at play—debates around morality and class and race and culture and the future of the city and the country.”

A prankster in life and death

During the Roaring Twenties, Toronto was “an incredibly British and incredibly conservative city,” Bunch says. Canada had become a self-governing dominion within the British Empire nearly six decades earlier but wouldn’t gain full legal independence until 1931. Attitudes about contraceptives were still strongly influenced by British Protestant and Victorian values; birth control wouldn’t be decriminalized in the country until the late 1960s.

Millar died at a time when prevailing attitudes tended to view large families as ignorant or immoral. Immigration to Canada, predominantly from Europe, was steadily rising after a postwar decline. Against this backdrop, the eugenics movement shaped debates about the nation’s changing population. An unethical, thoroughly debunked ideology, eugenics argued that too many children born to the “unfit,” including poor people and certain racial minorities, threatened the biological quality of the human race.

“There was definitely backlash against Catholic immigrants in particular, who were seen as having too many children,” says Mariana Valverde, an emeritus criminologist at the University of Toronto and the author of a journal article about the stork derby. As birth-control advocacy groups started emerging in Canada in the 1920s, “the whole business of having a lot of kids [became] very controversial,” Valverde adds.

Millar’s exact intentions for initiating the derby remain unclear, but he apparently believed that birth control shouldn’t be a taboo topic. “It could have been a satirical comment on that, or the absurdity of the judicial system—that it would uphold this strange will he was leaving behind—or poking fun at people at how far they were willing to go for money,” Bunch says.

Millar himself described his will as “necessarily uncommon and capricious.” In it, he left brewery shares to seven Protestant ministers who supported Prohibition; joint ownership of a vacation home in Jamaica to three local lawyers who detested one another; and shares in the Ontario Jockey Club to a few of the city’s most steadfast opponents of horse racing. In the final clause of his will, Millar promised the remainder of his fortune to the mother who “has since my death given birth in Toronto to the greatest number of children, as shown by the registrations under the Vital Statistics Act,” a measure mandating the uniform recording of births, deaths and marriages in Ontario.

“The thread that seemed to link them all is that there’s some kind of test for people,” says Chris Bateman, a historian at Heritage Toronto. “Would they stick to their morals and reject the benefit of the will? Or would they find a way to compromise on their morals to accept his money?”

Although some of Millar’s close associates called the will a “hoax” and believed that a more recent version would surface, it passed through probate on December 9, 1926, with changes made to only one clause, unrelated to the derby.

The Great Stork Derby as a “sign of the times”

The “stork derby” provision, as it later became known, didn’t immediately draw much notice from the public. By the fall of 1930—a year or so after the Great Depression first hit Canada—some of the earliest articles about leading contenders had started appearing in local newspapers. Much of the initial coverage focused on 37-year-old Toronto resident Grace Bagnato, who had reportedly just given birth to her 20th child. Bagnato claimed that five of her surviving ten children were eligible for the contest.

Amid the Depression, birthrates were falling, and fewer couples were getting married. “Then you’ve got this strange sideshow of the Great Stork Derby happening at the same time,” Bunch says.

A story published in the Toronto Daily Star (now the Toronto Star) on October 8, 1930, included interviews with Bagnato, a second-generation Italian immigrant whose husband had immigrated from Italy to marry her, and 42-year-old Florence Brown, who told the Star that she had given birth to 26 children, 13 still living and 6 since Millar’s death. Brown pointed out that she and her husband were both “native-born Canadians of the fifth generation.”

The article portrayed the two families as rival competitors in an era when discrimination against many immigrant populations, including the Italian community, was pervasive across Toronto. Brown, who was later (at 47 years old) deemed “out of the running,” told the Star that she couldn’t “let any Italian get away with that ‘leadership stuff.’” She said that she hoped more Canadians would have large families to prevent the country from being “overrun with foreigners.”

The news story “revealed some of the issues that would later become central to the discussion of the stork derby,” graduate student Elizabeth Marjorie Wilton wrote in her 1994 thesis, which is widely regarded as one of the most comprehensive accounts of the contest. (The paper aimed to “dispel the popular perception of the event as humorous,” according to Wilton, and was later used as source material for a 2002 Canadian TV movie.)

Newspaper coverage of the contest really took off in March 1932, when the Ontario legislature introduced a bill that would give the entirety of Millar’s unclaimed estate to the University of Toronto. The government argued that because this portion of Millar’s fortune was left to unknown individuals, passing such an act was “advisable on grounds of public policy.” The move sparked debate about the government’s right to interfere in an individual’s affairs, and the bill was withdrawn amid public outcry shortly thereafter.

Over the next four years, new derby contenders emerged in and disappeared from the headlines. Some came forward after reading or hearing about the contest, motivated by the prospect of a better life for their large families. Others joined only after being contacted by the press. Several used pseudonyms to avoid the limelight.

“I think it was desperation. I think it was a sign of the times,” says Marty Gervais, a Canadian author and historian who has written about the derby. “People wanted to get rich; people wanted to have money. And I think it just ignited that kind of desperation, essentially.”

“A media-created event”

For the families, the press coverage became a double-edged sword. A few secured photography and advertising contracts. But any potential financial benefits “were clouded by the invasion of privacy that happens to those in the public eye,” Wilton wrote, including bribes and threats from extortionists.

In the spring of 1932, a prominent Toronto attorney offered Bagnato and Brown 75,000 Canadian dollars each “on [the] condition that they relinquish all further claims on the [Millar] estate,” the Star reported. Bagnato noted that her home had also been besieged by “strange men” who offered her large amounts of cash. “I have refused them all,” she said.

From the beginning, the immigrants vying for Millar’s fortune faced discrimination from the press and public. A December 1926 Time magazine article asked of the derby, “What if it be won by two mental defectives, a class notoriously prolific? How many immigrants will come chasing the prize?” In August 1936, the Star reported that Bagnato had received an anonymous letter describing her children as “brats” who “had better be sent back to Mussolini.”

The fact that Millar’s will hadn’t specified which children should be included in the final count was another point of contention. Debate arose, time and again, about whether to include individuals who were stillborn or “illegitimate,” an outdated term used to refer to those born to unmarried parents. News reports discussed babies who died in utero or shortly after birth and how those situations might influence the results. For the mothers, giving birth so many times in a short period had a significant physical toll, and some of them were hospitalized for operations and blood transfusions.

Newspapers weren’t “too concerned about who’s benefiting and who’s suffering during the contest,” Bunch says. “There are all these families whose personal tragedies are getting played out on the front page. Probably more families end up trying to vie for the title at a time when they can’t all afford to feed huge families during the Great Depression.”

Identified as a potential candidate for Millar’s money, 24-year-old Pauline Mae Clarke drew public scrutiny in the derby’s later years when newspapers revealed that she’d had five of her ten children while separated—but not legally divorced—from her husband. Even as Clarke defended her actions, the New York Daily News described her relationship with one Harold Madill as an “illicit romance,” and the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that, after her separation, she’d “lost no time in supplying the deficiency by taking [him] into her home.”

The derby was, in many ways, “a media-created event,” Wilton wrote. The liberal-leaning Star, then the most popular Toronto newspaper, was locked in a circulation war with its more conservative rival, the Toronto Evening Telegram. Eager for scoops, both newspapers—and others across Canada and North America—dug into the leading candidates’ family histories and parenting abilities, repeatedly asking the women how they felt about birth control.

The Star “had progressive aims,” but the newspaper often approached these goals “in very sensationalized ways,” says Jamie Bradburn, a Toronto-based writer and historian. “The stork derby was ideal for that. They found reader interest was really strong in the story.” According to Bradburn, the newspaper sought out “dark-house candidates … potential winners that nobody had thought of.” Journalists pondered what would happen if one of the contenders unexpectedly gave birth to twins or triplets.

A 2019 article in Canada’s History magazine describes the contest as the “1930s version of reality television,” with “cheap entertainment that offered money to those willing to put themselves in the spotlight.” Ontario Premier Mitchell Hepburn mirrored this sentiment in 1936, calling the stork derby “the most revolting, disgusting exhibition ever put on in a civilized country.”

The derby ends in a four-way tie

Many of the mothers who had come forward by November 1936 to claim Millar’s fortune waited until the contest’s near end. “We’ve kept quiet till now, not caring for all the publicity,” Arthur Timleck, a Parks Department employee whose wife, Lucy, was a late contender, told the Canadian Press in late 1935.

The derby faced even more legal hurdles from some of Millar’s distant relatives. Hoping for a portion of the estate, they asked the courts to invalidate the will on the grounds that it went against the public good by encouraging unmarried couples to have children. The courts rejected those arguments.

In February 1938, the process of narrowing down the finalists got underway. Bagnato was disqualified on the grounds that she’d had two unregistered children, and the contenders were soon whittled down to six. Clarke was disqualified because several of her children were deemed “illegitimate,” as was Lillie Kenny, who’d had multiple stillborn and unregistered children.

The derby ended in a four-way tie between the Timleck, Smith, Nagle and MacLean families, each of whom had nine properly registered children in the decade after Millar’s death. Each received around 100,000 Canadian dollars (equivalent to roughly 2.1 million Canadian dollars today).

Wilton pointed out that the winners “were, for the most part, families who kept a low profile during the competition and who conformed most to white, Protestant middle-class standards.” She added, “None of the French nor the Italian families appeared in the winner’s circle.”

Once the decision was announced, Clarke and the Kenny family both appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada. They eventually received 12,500 Canadian dollars each in out-of-court settlements.

Kevin Timleck, 63, of Vancouver, British Columbia, is the grandson of Arthur and Lucy Timleck. During the Great Depression, the prize money was “life-changing” for the family, which went on to invest in various properties and businesses, Timleck says. His grandparents—along with the Nagle family—paid back the city for financial relief they’d received during the Great Depression.

Timleck, who is one of five children and has two sons of his own, says he’s “rather proud” of his grandparents’ participation in the event. “They’re part of Canadian history,” he adds.

Thomas Foster was the mayor of Toronto when Millar’s contest began, in 1926. After his death in December 1945, at age 93, Foster left behind an estate worth more than 1.1 million Canadian dollars (around 20 million Canadian dollars today). In his will, he launched four stork derby contests of his own. A small portion of his money went to the Toronto mothers who gave birth—“in lawful wedlock,” per the will—to the most children over the ten-year periods starting in December 1945, 1948, 1951 and 1954, respectively.

By then, Millar’s derby was long over. A bizarre saga in Canadian history, it now serves as a vehicle for exploring the social, cultural and moral issues of the early 20th century. “No one seems to know whether it was ridiculous or tragic,” the Associated Press reported in December 1936. “Probably it was a little bit of each.”