In May 1938, four women in Toronto came into more money than their husbands could have earned in a century and a half of sixty-hour weeks. Three of them were handed a bill by the city almost immediately. They had spent the Depression on relief, and now that they were solvent, the City of Toronto wanted its money back.

That is the part that usually gets left out, and it is the part that tells you what the previous ten years had actually been about.

The method

Charles Vance Millar was a Toronto lawyer and financier who died in 1926, having spent a good deal of his life building jokes with one particular shape. Each worked by offering someone something valuable that they could only accept by publicly abandoning a principle they had made a career of holding.

He left brewery shares to prominent teetotal Protestant ministers, on the condition that they help run the place and collect the dividends. He left jockey club stock to men who had campaigned against horse racing. He left a vacation house in Jamaica to three men who detested one another, on the condition that they live in it together, indefinitely.

These are good jokes. They are also, all three, jokes about hypocrisy, and every one of them is aimed upward — at clergy, at campaigners, at men wealthy enough to hold the kind of grudge that lasts years. Millar was not punching down. He was testing whether principle survives contact with money, and he was testing it on people who had made a great deal of noise about principle.

Then there was clause nine.

The clause

The residue of the estate — everything left after the other bequests — would go to the woman in Toronto who gave birth to the most children in the ten years following his death.

Same joke, new target. He expected greed. He expected the spectacle of women having children for money, and he expected the rest of the city to watch, and be appalled, and enjoy being appalled. In this he was an excellent judge of newspapers and a poor judge of everybody else.

He also had no clear idea how much money he was putting on the table. A large part of what he left was stock in the Windsor–Detroit tunnel, carried at close to nothing when he died and worth a great deal by the time the decade ran out. The estate grew while everyone argued about it. So did the Depression.

The decade

Eleven families entered. The newspapers ran box scores, as though it were baseball. People placed bets.

Millar's second cousins and more distant relatives hired lawyers and set about having the clause struck down. Their argument was that it encouraged immorality and was contrary to public policy — an argument advanced, it is worth noticing, by the people who stood to inherit if it succeeded.

The courts kept finding for what one account of the period calls the unknown mother: the woman, whoever she turned out to be, whom Millar had never met. The Supreme Court of Canada settled the validity of the clause, and in settling it had to answer a question nobody had put to it before, which was what a child is.

It held that the clause did not cover children born out of wedlock, and did not cover the stillborn.

What that sentence cost

Read it slowly, because two women lost on it.

Pauline Mae Clarke had ten births in the period; five of the children were not her husband's. Lillian Kenny also had ten, of whom four were stillborn. Under the rule as drawn, neither woman could be counted at her full number, and both were out. Each took twelve and a half thousand dollars out of court to drop her appeal.

So a machine built to expose greed in poor women ended with the country's highest court drawing the line that decided Lillian Kenny had given birth six times rather than ten.

Seven of the eleven families fell away on questions of this kind: births registered the wrong way, arguments over what counted as Toronto, children who had not lived.

The four

Annie Katherine Smith. Kathleen Ellen Nagle. Lucy Alice Timleck. Isabel Mary Maclean. Nine children each, inside ten years, all of them living and properly registered.

The sums are reported differently in different places — a hundred and ten thousand dollars in some accounts, a hundred and twenty-five in others — and the disagreement matters less than the wage it should be measured against. The minimum at the time was twelve dollars fifty for a sixty-hour week. Either figure is more than a century and a half of full-time work, arriving in a single payment, to households that had spent the decade on relief.

Which is when the City of Toronto asked three of the four for the relief back.

They paid it. Then, by every later account, they did something entirely unremarkable with the rest: houses, businesses, securities, cars. Then they stopped talking to reporters. The families withdrew from public view and stayed there.

The joke that missed

Here is what those ten years actually produced, ordered by who behaved strangely.

The relatives argued in court that poor women having children was a moral emergency, while trying to take the money themselves. The newspapers printed league tables of childbirth. Bettors laid odds on them. A court was obliged to rule on whether a stillborn child is a child. A municipal government waited until four families were solvent for the first time in their lives, and then invoiced them.

And the women had children, raised them, buried some of them, filled in the registration forms correctly, and at the end of it bought houses.

A joke needs somebody to be foolish. Millar aimed clause nine at the poor and hit almost everyone else — which is the risk you run when you build an instrument to measure human greed and then leave it running for ten years with nobody supervising it. It found a great deal. It simply did not find it where he had pointed.

The best line in the whole business belongs to one of the winners. Having had her last baby in the summer of 1936 and secured her share, Mrs. Timleck let it be known that she was done, and that from here on she intended to practise birth control, and to preach it.

Millar never met her. He would almost certainly have enjoyed that more than anything else the decade turned up, because it is the only response in the entire record with his own shape in it: take the money, and then say the thing out loud.