Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast

coming to you from the QI offices in Covert Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anich Zinsky, James Harkin and Andy Murray.

And once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the

last seven days and in a particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in 1921, the news of the world offered a free tea tray

to any mother on the birth of her tenth child.

Hmm, nice.

Why was it doing that?

Well, the reason was it had just been the war.

And also there was contraception widespreadly available now, which there wasn't before.

The newspapers had a bit of a kind of moral crisis about the being not enough children in

the UK.

And so they wanted to encourage children.

The daily express, for instance, had a Britain's largest family competition at the same time.

But the idea of the news of the world was that a woman would genuinely be induced to think,

actually I won't stop at three.

I'll go all the way up to ten children because once I get to ten, I'll get a tea tray.

It's interesting, isn't it?

What stage?

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