Byrne Hope Sanders

Minnie O'Byrne Hope Sanders (22 May 1902 – 24 June 1981) was a South African-born Canadian journalist. She was the editor of Chatelaine magazine from 1926 to 1952.

Early life Sanders was born in Port Alfred, South Africa, on 22 May 1902. Port Alfred was in what was then known as the Cape Colony, or the Cape of Good Hope, after which she was partially named; O’Byrne came from her mother’s Irish heritage.

Sanders' father, Harry Sanders (1872-1952) had immigrated to South Africa as a tutor to his brother-in-law’s family. There, he met and married Lucy Emma May Bing (1875-1947), South-African born but Irish in ancestry, temperament, and musical ability, according to her daughter’s Reminiscences. created financial hardship that the family could not overcome, they emigrated, moving first to England, where they stayed for a time with Charles Higham, the brother-in-law who had first employed Harry in South Africa. Finding no work in England, the family moved in 1912 to Canada, where Sanders continued an education begun in the Church school in Liverpool. and “prepared for her Ontario College of Music exams and wrote young people’s columns for the Mail & Empire and Toronto Weekly Star.” wrote for the Toronto Sunday World, In 1923, she and her sister Dora May Sanders shared an apartment on College Street in Toronto; they both held jobs at the T. Eaton company, where they earned $25 a week. Sanders kept her job after her marriage on the condition that she “not have children” and that she retain her maiden name as her byline, “keeping the wedding highly secret.” In January 1952, she and her brother Wilfrid, a director for the Canadian Institute of Public Opinion (which provided data for the Gallup Poll) founded Sanders Marketing Research. They then bought a majority share of Canadian Institute of Public Opinion, which Byrne Hope Sanders ran from 1958 until the company was sold in 1973.

Byrne Hope Sanders died in 1981 in Toronto.

Publications

Emily Murphy, Crusader ("Janey Canuck") (Toronto: Macmillan, 1945) Famous Women: Carr, Hind, Gullen, Murphy (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1958) Hey, Ma! I Did It (Toronto: Clarke, 1953) by Margaret Aitken, with Byrne Hope Sanders