Beatrice White poses in the starkness of an empty lot, surrounded by fly traps in 1912. She is a smirking teenager, her Edwardian pompadour topped with a big bow, the traps around her swarming with flies. This was the summer when the common housefly was perceived as both a vessel of disease and a get-rich-quick scheme, and Beatrice was the “it” girl, famous for her gruesome contribution to the city’s well-being.

It may seem unusual to send children and teenagers on a slaughtering spree, but the “Swat the fly” contest was a joint crusade by Toronto’s medical health department and the Toronto Daily Star to help rid the city of illness spread by flies.

“The only way for the city to be uniformly safe is to carry on a vigorous war of extermination,” the Star reported that July, adding some bait of its own: $200 in prizes to be split by the top participants.

By the end of the six-week contest, White had killed more than half a million flies. Now, she is a footnote in Toronto history, an obscure folk hero who appears to be buried in a common grave.

Winged menace

“The fly is the greatest of disease carriers,” the Star reported in July 1912. “Flies bathe in milk and skate in butter. Flies are responsible for most of the disease of children. Flies are wholesale murderers. Why should they be tolerated?”

The city’s current medical officer of health, Dr. David McKeown, notes there are indeed a variety of illnesses that can be transmitted by flies. (The 1912 Star preferred to call these “the dread afflictions.”)

“I’m not sure if flies were as big a problem as they thought they were, but they certainly were playing a role,” McKeown says. “A fly that lands on excrement or waste or garbage and then lands on your food is capable certainly of transmitting bacteria, including typhoid.”

At the first “counting up,” contestants (all of them under the age of 16) arrived with biscuit boxes, cigar boxes and mustard tins brimming with dead flies. Charles Hastings, then the city’s chief medical officer, sat in his office and measured the victims by the pint, recording 3,200 flies for every full glass. There was a special cash reward for a half-pint of flies on the first day. Cue the whining from the losers: their flies had “shrank.”

“Bring them in while they are fresh,” Hastings admonished.

But not too fresh. On July 17, contestant Russell McCallister brought his flies in alive. Hastings took the lid off the boy’s cardboard box and a “pint of the most lively specimens” tried to escape. He quickly slammed it shut.

“How am I going to measure live flies?” he demanded.

He told Russell he’d have to “dose them with something” but warned that wet flies wouldn’t measure as well as dry ones.

“Couldn’t you dry them out again?” the boy asked.

“What, with a towel?” Hastings asked.

“Naw, in the oven,” Russell replied.

As in the first season of Survivor, the contestants hadn’t yet developed the strategy that would later define their obscure trade: at the outset, they were using swatters and their bare hands.

Hastings advised them to use traps like the one an alderman had brought back from Texas — the size of a small barrel, made of wood and wire, and with a funnel entrance from which a fly could not escape.

Fifteen-year-old Beatrice (“Beattie”) White, who dreamed of spending the prize money on music lessons, was paying attention.

Beatrice was one of 10 children, born to Henry White, a British dockworker, and Hattie Lawlor, who was born in Quebec. Henry and Hattie had married in Barrie and moved to Toronto, where they lived near the Don Valley, moving often. In 1912, they were living on Regent St., east of Parliament. “They didn’t have much money,” says Beatrice’s niece Betty Tracy, 85.

A few days after the contest began, Beatrice showed up at city hall with a box. When the white-haired Dr. Hastings took off the lid, he shouted his surprise. Great Scott! Beatrice had thousands of carcasses.

By the end of July, many on Regent St. were basking in the glow of the local celebrity and the luxury of being able to leave their windows open. Every morning, Beatrice set out her traps and placed a piece of liver underneath. In the evening, she’d bring the flies inside, place a cloth over the traps and squirt insect powder into them. The next morning she’d harvest the dead flies in a box and start all over again.

The competition looked like a sure thing, save for the wild card. The girl in second place, Elva Baill, lived near a 90-metre-long manure heap that had been sitting at Fort York for three years, awaiting shipment on the rail lines. It was “one of the worst breeding places” for flies in the city, according to the Star. If only 7-year-old Elva could harness its terrifying power.

As Beatrice’s exploits continued to capture headlines, her father, Henry, received a warning from a mystery man who lived a few blocks away.

“It seems he heard some big fellows planning to raid Beattie’s trap and let the flies all out,” said Henry, then 52 years old.

Beatrice’s father had served with government forces in the 1885 North-West Rebellion. In 1916, he would be shaving a dozen years from his age to fight in the First World War.

In the summer of 1912, Henry’s war was in the backyard and he and his daughter were sentries against man and critter.

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When the Star arrived at the home in August, Beatrice was out delivering a message for her mother, but her father was in back, “busy as a gardener,” walking around the yard with a small stick and stirring up the flies “clustered on the saucer under the trap.” The insects rose in a swarm, buzzing up the funnel and into the traps that were scattered in the yard, the lane, and an empty lot nearby.

“If we didn’t stir them up once in a while, many of them would never go up into the trap,” he said. “Beattie keeps after them. She deserves to win first prize all right.”

Amid the daily reports, there would be a few lines of advice: put screens on your doors and clean your stables; bury waste in a pit and keep it covered; clean up the backyard.

At the final count in August, 3.5 million flies had been killed. Beatrice White was in first place, responsible for 543,360 of them. Elva Baill of the manure heap was the runner-up with 234,400 flies.

Hastings called Beatrice’s name in the city hall courtyard. She blushed and smiled and walked to the desk where the prizes were kept. “You have surprised me, and you have surprised everybody,” Hastings told her, handing her an envelope with her name on the front, and $50 inside.

Breeding ground

In 1912, horses were a good way to get around Toronto, and stables were as common as gas stations. Flies were enchanted with garbage and manure, and they fell hard for Toronto’s slums, where heaps of “indescribable rubbish” were piled in the yards, according to a 1911 report from Dr. Charles Hastings. (The flies also loved Montreal and Washington, two other cities where children were unleashed to kill the insects in public health contests that year.)

Hastings took the job as Toronto’s top doctor in 1910. The obstetrician and gynecologist had planned to retire, but a typhoid outbreak in Toronto changed his mind, says public health historian Heather MacDougall. His daughter had died after drinking bad milk at the turn of the century, and Hastings had served on the provincial and national milk commissions in 1908 and 1909. He was a crusader for cleanliness — someone who saw the link between poverty and poor health. Hastings would introduce pasteurization and a research-based, preventive approach to public health. White-haired and genial, he was a favourite with the press, and harnessed the platform to spread his message, MacDougall says.

While many stereotyped the slums as dens of iniquity, Hastings presented them for what they were in a 1911 study: the only option for newcomers, overpriced and overcrowded but close to work, a place where “man’s inhumanity to man confronts one at every turn.”

“The reason I took this position,” Hastings told the Star in 1911, “was because I saw opportunities for improving conditions in Toronto’s slums.”

Through the use of photography, Hastings showed the conditions that destroyed “both body and soul” — the filthy yards where garbage was piled as high as the roof by people who had no indoor plumbing, the rooms where entire families slept, the cracks that let in the rain and snow, the outhouses that attracted flies.

“What we want is prevention, not cure,” he wrote, calling for housing bylaws, suburban garden cities with rapid transit and a proper scheme of city planning.

The poor health in the slums was expressed in the rates of communicable disease such as typhoid and tuberculosis.

“He wanted to draw the attention of policy-makers to the health impacts of the living conditions of many people,” says McKeown. “Of course, flies were a part of it.”

Hastings was educated in the sanitarian era when medical types believed that environment was linked to health — that people needed clean water and had to get rid of garbage and manure. “They were right, for the wrong reasons,” says MacDougall. When germ theory emerged in the late 19th century (the time when Hastings was practising), doctors were able to identify disease-causing bacteria under a microscope, but there was still the lingering question — now what?

“They’re looking around for things that will transmit disease, which is why they focus on flies,” she says. “What Hastings is doing is combining modern scientific knowledge about disease transmission with the 19th-century drive for urban cleanliness, but in a campaign that reflects what Hastings really represented: health education.”

Swatter sports

In the midst of the competition, on Aug. 2, the Star noted that it had received several letters from women who appreciated the vigorous exercise of fly swatting. The paper published the letters as part of its coverage:

“Regarding the Fly-Swatting Contest — in swatting the fly I have found the ideal form of physical culture of all the methods I have tried. It beats lawn tennis, swimming, and all the others combined. Let all our young ladies try it. I take a long stick — a broom handle will do, and tied to the end of it, I fix a paper flour bag about two feet long. Then I open the windows and commence bounding and leaping after the flies — first the right arm and then the left, as one arm must not be exercised more than another … If you leap lightly from the floor when you swat the ceiling you will be surprised what a fine glow and a healthy feeling it will give you,” one anonymous lady wrote.

Another similar letter was published:

Reader H.F. Strickland wrote a more skeptical letter to the editor published the next day.

“If an ordinary musca domestica or fly carries around about 5,000 germs on its hind leg, how does it affect the children who catch these flies? Children paw these creatures all day long, and often eat out of their hands before washing. A child who has handled or fondled one hundred flies before supper has also smeared five million assorted germs over his hands and spread them all around. We assume in accordance with the germ fad we can expect to hear of little Willie contracting scarlet fever, whooping cough, consumption, brain fever and housemaids’ knee at an early date. — H.F. Strickland”

The buzz wears off

By the second instalment of the contest in 1913, Beatrice White was out of the running, busy with a suitor, but her sister Mildred was declared a “worthy successor.”

The 1913 competition was notable for its lack of flies, “which is only natural following last year’s swatting,” the Star wrote. The final count was just under 200,000 flies killed, and Mildred won $20 for second place with 54,720.

In 1914, Beatrice married Harold Lawrence Efner in Toronto. The couple moved to Michigan, but Beatrice filed for divorce in 1925, citing desertion. Beatrice’s niece, Betty Tracy, didn’t know about Efner — she always thought her aunt’s first husband was Theodore Russell.

“We always called him Uncle Teddy,” she says from her home in Florida, noting that she is “one of the last ones that would know anything” about her aunt’s life.

Tracy recalls Aunt Beattie as pretty and fun. She and Teddy lived in Toronto and in those Depression years, Teddy had a job and they always seemed to do just fine.

Tracy remembers a child who died young. “When I went to the house she had a picture of (the baby) on the wall in the coffin and it always used to bother me.”

Beatrice and Teddy adopted two children, but Tracy lost track of them over the years. She remembers the little girl could read newspaper headlines at 3, and Beattie was proud of her.

After Teddy died, Beatrice didn’t have the same financial support. She remarried, eventually becoming Beatrice Abbey. In 1968, she was again in the press: “The queen of fly-killers found alive,” the Star headline read.

“We’re very proud of you,” Alderman Horace Brown told her then, giving her a can of insecticide as a better late-than-never thank you for her services.

By this time, Beatrice was widowed and living in Lambert Lodge, the city’s home for the aged on Christie St. “I was swatting them all the time,” she said of the contest at city hall. “I don’t know how many fly swatters I wore out.”

Her memory was starting to go, and lost in the haze were the liver traps and nightly poisonings. But she did remember that her father had taken the prize money.

Had he spent it on the family? “Just on him,” she said.

Artist’s muse

In 1980, the National Film Board produced The Angel of Death, a short film about Beatrice and the contest.

The same year, artist Harold Town completed his Painting for Beatrice White — Winner of the 1912 Fly-Killing Contest with a Score [of] 543,360 Dead Insects, a colourful canvas featuring two girls waving fly swatters with the same grace as fairies waving magic wands. The canvas — measuring 2.2 by 1.9 metres — is now valued at $100,000 and stored by the artist’s estate in Toronto.

In 1981, a Globe and Mail art critic called the painting of White a “grandly operatic tribute, in the manner of a Medici tomb.” It was exhibited alongside some of Town’s similarly eccentric works, including Where Do the Bums Go When They Leave Their Pants in the Rosedale Valley Ravine? and Charles K. Ogden Changes the Underdrawers on the Mummified Body of the English Philosopher Jeremy Bentham.

“Why was everybody having a fly-killing contest?” asks David Silcox, a friend of Town and a trustee of his estate. “The numbers are absolutely mind-boggling … she must have had a fly swatter in each hand, and where did she live? On top of the dump or something? Who knows. It must have been quite an infestation.”

Plight of the humble Bea

By the time Harold Town’s painting was unveiled, Beatrice had slipped away from the world, seemingly without notice. There is no record of her at St. John’s of Norway, in the east end, where her parents are buried, or at Prospect Cemetery on St. Clair Ave. W., where several of her siblings are interred. The Mount Pleasant group of cemeteries has no listings. Beatrice last appears in voting records in the mid-1970s; after that, there is no trace.

St. James Cemetery, off Parliament St., has a record of a Beatrice Abbey buried in a common-ground plot along with 63 others in the spring of 1980. There is no date of death in the cemetery file, no next of kin. The only information is that the urn came from Austin J. Mack funeral home, a Beaches business that closed in 1980.

When St. James Cemetery manager Robert Turvey started in 1985, he was told that when that funeral home closed, the unclaimed cremated remains were buried in common ground in case family ever came looking.

“It sounds like she just died with no money,” says Beatrice’s niece Tracy. “She wasn’t buried, nobody claimed her body. I’m so sad when I think of it.”

On a summer day, a groundskeeper nudges the earth off a small flat stone with his workboot. The grass that borders marker C-85 is still wet from a morning rain. There is nothing on the stone about 1912 or the life that followed. The engraving is filled with dirt, grass and ants. There are no flies in sight.