1902-1986

English Aviator

Beryl Markham, an aviation pioneer, was the first person to make a solo, non-stop, transatlantic flight from England to the American continent. Markham's memoirs of the flight were published in her book, West With the Night, which also described her childhood and life in east Africa during the early twentieth century.

Markham was born Beryl Clutterbuck in 1902 in Leicester, England. Barely four years old, Markham moved to the African highlands in Kenya in 1906 (then under British rule), where her father established a farm. Markham received only basic formal education in Kenya, but delighted in learning to speak Swahili and several African dialects that she learned from the children of families her father employed. As a child Markham played with the local Murani children, and joined the young boys armed with spears hunting animals in the African bush.

When her father turned his interests...