Beryl Markham
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 to horse breeding and training, Markham became his apprentice. She soon discovered a love of horses, and a talent for handling them. At age 18 Markham was the first woman in Africa to earn a racehorse trainer's license. Europeans in colonial Kenya enjoyed gathering at the races in Nairobi, and Markham earned local celebrity when her horses won prestigious prizes. After a brief first marriage, Markham remarried in 1927 to a wealthy young Englishman, Mansfield Markham, whose name she would keep throughout her life. The couple returned to England, where their son was born in 1929. Shortly afterwards, however, the two separated and Beryl Markham returned to Kenya alone.
In 1931 Markham began flying lessons after a mesmerizing ride in the airplane of friend Dennis Finch Hatton, an English adventurer and big-game hunter living in Africa. Markham earned her pilot's license, then embarked upon a flying career after becoming the first woman in Africa to earn a commercial pilot's license. Markham flew airmail to remote regions of the Sudan, Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Kenya, and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). She flew missions to remote areas of the African bush to deliver supplies or rescue injured hunters or miners. Markham frequently scouted elephants and other big game from the air for wealthy hunting parties.
Markham made her mark in aviation history in 1936, when she set off to capture a prize offered for the first non-stop flight from London to New York City. Due to prevailing headwinds encountered by westbound travelers, this route was considered more difficult than that taken by American aviator Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974) during his previous Atlantic crossing. Markham believed the crossing was not only possible, but essential in order to encourage commercial transatlantic flight. Markham took off from London on September 4, 1936, in an airplane modified to carry extra fuel, but with meager instrumentation—notably, without a radio. Though successfully crossing the Atlantic, she did not make it to New York, as she was forced to crash-land her airplane in a peat bog in Nova Scotia. Markham survived the crash and achieved instant celebrity. Commercial air service between England and the United States began three years after Markham's famous flight.
Markham moved to the United States in 1939, settling in California where she began to write about her experiences in aviation and Africa. West With the Night was published in1942. Hailed as a literary and commercial success, the book received praise from American writer Ernest Hemingway, who also spent considerable time in the African bush. Speculation that the book was written, at least in part, by Markham's third husband, American journalist Raoul Schumacher, was never confirmed.
Beryl Markham. (The Granger Collection Ltd. Reproduced with permission.)In 1952 Markham returned to Kenya to resume raising and training horses. Markham's horses won the Kenya Derby six times during the next 20 years. Markham spent the remainder of her life in Africa, and died in Kenya at age 84.
During Markham's last years, popular interest in the history of the late colonial period in Africa and the lives and relationships between famous Europeans and Americans who lived there was rekindled. West With the Night was republished in 1983, and became an international bestseller.
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