Beryl Markham

Beryl Markham (26 October 1902 – 3 August 1986) was a British-born Kenyan aviator (one of the first bush pilots), adventurer, racehorse trainer and author. During the pioneer days of aviation, she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. She is now primarily remembered as the author of the memoir West with the Night.

Early years

She was born Beryl Clutterbuck in the village of Ashwell, in the county of Rutland, England, the daughter of Charles Baldwin Clutterbuck, an accomplished horse trainer, and Clara Agnes (Alexander) Clutterbuck (1878–1952). She had an older brother, Richard Alexander Clutterbuck (1900–1942). When she was four years old, her father moved the family to Kenya, which was then colonial British East Africa. He purchased a farm in Njoro near the Great Rift Valley from, and worked for Hugh Cholmondeley. Although her mother disliked the isolation and promptly returned to England, Beryl stayed in Kenya with her father, where she spent an adventurous childhood learning, playing, and hunting with the natives. On her family's farm, she developed a knowledge of and love for horses. As a young adult, she became the first licensed female horse trainer in Kenya.

Impetuous, single-minded and beautiful, Markham was admired and described as a noted non-conformist, even in a colony known for its colourful eccentrics. She was married three times, taking the name "Markham" from her second husband Mansfield Markham, by whom she had a son. She is alleged to have had an unconcealed 1929 affair with the Duke of Gloucester, the son of George V. The Windsors allegedly cut the romance short. Hubert Broad had an affair with Beryl Markham and he was named by Mansfield Markham as her accomplice in the divorce. After her Atlantic crossing, she returned to be with Broad. He was also a great influence in her flying career.

She befriended the Danish writer Karen Blixen during the years that Baroness Blixen was managing her family's coffee farm in the Ngong hills outside Nairobi. When Blixen's romantic connection with the hunter and pilot Denys Finch Hatton was winding down, Markham started her own affair with him. He invited her to tour game lands on what turned out to be his fatal flight, but Markham supposedly declined because of a premonition from her flight instructor, Tom Campbell Black. Sara Wheeler, in her biography of Finch Hatton, notes that she believes stories that Markham was pregnant by him at the time of his crash.

Largely inspired by the British pilot Tom Campbell Black, with whom she had a long-term affair, she took up flying. She worked for some time as a bush pilot, spotting game animals from the air and signalling their locations to safaris on the ground. She also mingled with the notorious Happy Valley set.

Record flight

Beryl Markham was the first woman to successfully fly across the Atlantic from east to west. She is often incorrectly described as "the first person" to fly the Atlantic east to west in a solo non-stop flight, but that record belongs to Scottish pilot Jim Mollison, who tried to fly from Dublin, Ireland, to New York City in 1932. Low visibility forced Mollison down in New Brunswick, Canada, but he still could claim the first solo Atlantic east-to-west record (a westbound flight requires more endurance, fuel, and time than the eastward journey, because the craft must fly against the prevailing Atlantic winds).

When Markham decided to take on the Atlantic crossing, no pilot had yet flown non-stop from Europe to New York, and no woman had made the westward flight solo, though several had died trying. Markham hoped to claim both records. On 4 September 1936, she took off from Abingdon, England. After a 20-hour flight, her Vega Gull, The Messenger, suffered fuel starvation due to icing of the fuel tank vents, and she crash-landed at Baleine Cove on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada (her flight was, in all likelihood, almost identical in length to Mollison's). In spite of falling short of her goal, Markham had become the first woman to cross the Atlantic east-to-west solo, and the first person to make it from England to North America non-stop from east to west. She was celebrated as an aviation pioneer.

Markham chronicled her many adventures in her memoir, West with the Night, published in 1942. Despite strong reviews in the press, the book sold modestly, and then quickly went out of print. After living for many years in the United States, Markham moved back to Kenya in 1952, becoming for a time the most successful horse trainer in the country.

Rediscovery

Markham's memoir lingered in obscurity until 1982, when California restaurateur George Gutekunst read a collection of Ernest Hemingway's letters, including one in which Hemingway lavishly praised Markham's writing (and attacked her character):

“"Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West with the Night? ...She has written so well, and marvellously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But this girl, who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a high-grade bitch, can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book."”

Intrigued, Gutekunst read West with the Night and became so enamored of Markham's prose that he helped persuade a California publisher, North Point Press, to re-issue the book in 1983. The re-release of the book launched a remarkable final chapter in the life of the eighty-year-old Markham, who was lauded for her three final years as a great author as well as flyer.

When found in Kenya by AP East Africa correspondent Barry Shlachter, Markham was living in poverty. She had recently been badly beaten in a burglary at her house near the Nairobi racetrack, where she still trained thoroughbreds.

The success of the re-issue of West with the Night provided enough income for Markham to finish her life in relative comfort. Earlier, she had been supported by a circle of friends and owners of race horses she trained into her 80s. The book became a surprising best-seller, spurred by the 1986 broadcast of a public television documentary about Markham's life, World Without Walls: Beryl Markham's African Memoir, produced by Gutekunst, Shlachter, Joan Saffa, Stephen Talbot and Judy Flannery in collaboration with KQED-TV in San Francisco. Gutekunst and Shlachter had approached the station to co-operate on the documentary, directed by Andrew Maxwell-Hyslop. British actress Diana Quick was the voice of Markham in readings from her memoir and Shlachter conducted the interviews. CNN Africa correspondent Gary Streiker did the filming for the well-reviewed, award-winning PBS program.

Markham died in Nairobi in 1986. Her short stories were posthumously collected in The Splendid Outcast, with an introduction by Mary S. Lovell. A tale from West with the Night was excerpted and illustrated by Don Brown as a children's book, The Good Lion. In 1988, CBS aired the biographical miniseries, Beryl Markham: A Shadow on the Sun, with Stefanie Powers in the title role.

Authorship controversy

Over time, critics raised questions as to whether Markham was the true, or sole author of West with the Night, not least because she never repeated her accomplishment with a second book of similar length, scope or beauty. The writing style has been linked with various writings by Thomas Baker, a contemporary writer also rumored to be her lover. During the rest of her life, she completed only a handful of short stories, collected and published posthumously.

According to Errol Trzebinski in his biography, The Lives of Beryl Markham (1993), her memoir was written by her third husband Raoul Schumacher, a ghost writer and journalist. Trzebinski said that Markham later had an advance from Houghton Mifflin to write a biography about the famous international jockey Tod Sloan, which she and Schumacher intended that he would write. Apparently Schumacher never did, and she was forced to go it alone. The publisher purportedly rejected her manuscript, saying that it was not from the same person who had written West with the Night. But, when interviewed by Shlachter for the 1986 PBS documentary about Markham, Trzebinski had insisted on camera that only a woman could have written her memoir.

Author Mary S. Lovell visited Markham in Nairobi and interviewed her extensively shortly before Markham's death, in preparation for her biography, Straight On Till Morning (1987). She disputes the claim that Schumacher made substantive contributions to West with the Night. From her research, Lovell concluded that Markham was the sole author, although Schumacher edited the manuscript. Instead, Lovell credits Antoine de Saint Exupéry, another of Markham's lovers, with having inspired Markham's clear, elegant language and storytelling style.