Catherine Steele, a businesswoman who died on March 6, 2022, at the age of 91.Courtesy of the Family
Catherine Steele, an astute businesswoman who died in St. John’s on March 6 at the age of 91, built the first of her family’s successful businesses, a diverse collection of enterprises on land, at sea and in the air, including transportation and media companies. Her husband, Harry Steele, who died in January, was known as one of Atlantic Canada’s leading entrepreneurs, and she was as responsible for his success as he was, according to her family. Mrs. Steele’s early forays into real estate, along with her husband’s success in the stock market, paved the way for their joint business success.
While she was raising her children in Dartmouth and her husband was away at sea with the navy, Mrs. Steele came up with the idea of buying distressed residential properties.
“I was looking for houses that were in bankruptcy so I could buy them, fix them up and hopefully make some money,” Mrs. Steele once told this reporter in an interview. “I studied music at university, but I found that I had an affinity for business and I enjoyed it.”
She purchased, refurbished and then sold three houses in Dartmouth that were in foreclosure. When her husband was posted to command the Canadian Forces base at Gander in Newfoundland, she started to look for similar opportunities there. But Gander was a much smaller place, with a lot of government-owned housing connected to the air base. There was not a large pool of housing to choose from, never mind trying to find a property in foreclosure.
The bank Mrs. Steele dealt with did have one interesting property, but it was not a house; it was the Albatross Hotel, a rather apt name given the disastrous financial health it was in. Mrs. Steele transformed the Albatross from 48 rooms, one cook and two waitresses into a hotel with 113 rooms, five cooks and 12 waitresses. The hotel’s success was the foundation of her husband’s business career after he left the military.
Courtesy of the Family
“My mother and father were a team, I know that’s a cliché with a lot of people, but with them, it’s very true. Besides being husband and wife, from the business point of view, they had very complimentary but different skill sets. They put those to work as a team to make the Albatross successful,” said Peter Steele, the couple’s oldest son.
“The Albatross wasn’t a fascinating place, but as soon as I got it I went to the library in Gander, and I found a book entitled Every Customer is my Guest,” Mrs. Steele said. “I read that, and I met with the staff, and I would discuss things with them and what they felt would make their jobs a lot better. I will never forget one of the girls said to me, ‘Mrs. Steele, could we possibly have a pocket in our uniform to keep our tips in?’ I hadn’t thought of that, but I remember that to this day.”
Every Customer is my Guest is a 112-page book put out by the Department of Tourism of Nova Scotia in 1964 and reprinted several times. Its object was to help the owners of small hotels and restaurants run their businesses successfully.
Added to the book’s advice was Mrs. Steele’s common sense.
“I knew how I would like to be treated and I felt that I wanted people to feel as if they had come to my house. They don’t leave saying ‘well I’ve been there twice, the first and the last time.’ [I hoped] that they would enjoy their visit and want to come back. That was precisely the way I wanted people to feel.”
Under Mrs. Steele’s management, the Albatross Hotel was an immediate success. While she ran the hotel, her husband would drum up business by speaking to airline crews landing at Gander.
“Mum ran the hotel organizing the menus and all that stuff while dad was busy in the navy but trying to drum up some business for the hotel,” their son Rob Steele said. “Eastern Provincial Airways was based here in Gander at the time, and the Crosby family owned it, and the flight crews would all stay at a competing hotel. So, my father called on the airline to try to get them to redirect that business to his hotel. That’s how he struck up an acquaintance with Keith Miller, who was then president of EPA.”
Harry Steele would later buy EPA from the Crosby family, mortgaging the Albatross and using his stock market gains and all the family’s assets to finance it.
Gander was a refuelling stop on the way to Europe; planes flying from Russia to Cuba couldn’t enter U.S. airspace, so they too had to stop there, coming and going.
At one stage rooms at the Albatross were in such demand that they would be meticulously cleaned and rented again on the same day after a flight crew had taken a short kip during a stopover. All transatlantic flight paths led to Gander.
Janet Catherine Thornhill was born into a prominent family on April 30, 1930, in Grand Bank, N.L. The village of Grand Bank, on the southern tip of the Burin Peninsula, is one of the warmest spots in Newfoundland, with a harbour that is ice-free year round, one of the reasons it was the centre of the fishery.
Catherine’s father, Arch Thornhill, was a legendary deep-sea fishing captain. Around 1918, he started fishing offshore in a dory, often with his brother or his cousin. Mr. Thornhill’s life was chronicled by author Raoul Andersen in Voyage to the Grand Banks, the Saga of Arch Thornhill. Mr. Thornhill was quoted in the book saying that in the early 1920s he made just $300 one year. But he was determined to succeed.
“I never gave up once in my life,” he said. He said that as a young man he fished in a dory for 72 hours straight without sleep. That determination passed down to his children: Catherine, whose business acumen helped build a fortune; and her brother, Roland Thornhill, a successful stockbroker who once served as deputy premier of Nova Scotia.
When Catherine was 10, her father surprised her with a piano that he bought with a load of fish he landed from the Grand Banks. She took piano lessons and decided she wanted to be a music teacher.
More than one voyage left his family worried; there were no radios to call home while the schooner rode out a storm.
“I swore I would never marry anyone who went to sea because my dad went to sea and I saw how my mum worried.” She remembered a time when her father was gone for those seven days, and no one knew if he was alive or dead. He was sailing from the Grand Banks to Burin, on the south coast of Newfoundland.”
But she went on to marry a seafaring man anyway. She was 24 when she wed the naval officer Harry Steele on his 25th birthday.
Catherine studied music at Mount Allison University, in Sackville, N.B., which was quite an achievement for a young woman from Grand Bank in the 1940s, when even the journey getting there was arduous.
“When I went to Mount A, I was living in Grand Bank, so I got a taxi to take me to the centre of the island, and from there I got the train to Port-aux-Basques where I got the boat over to Sydney. In Sydney I got a train to take me to Mount Allison. That was how I got to university. I don’t remember now, but in those days, it seemed endless. Travel was terrible, but it was worth it.”
She met Mr. Steele when she returned to Newfoundland with her music degree and started to teach. The couple became acquainted at a church dance, a chaperoned affair designed to allow young people to get to know each other.
“I started dating him when he was going to Memorial University and I was teaching at Prince of Wales,” she said. She loved teaching even though not all of her students were born to music.
Mrs. Steele left teaching soon after they married when her husband was transferred to England. She loved living there. It was a few postings later, in Gander, when at the age of 45, he gave up the navy and went into business full time.
“I was very happy about that because I loved business. I like people. I loved the hotel business and working with the staff because I was learning as they were learning,” she said.
Mrs. Steele leaves her sister, Florence; brother, Roland; three sons, Peter, Rob and John; as well as seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.