Markham, Beryl, 1902-1986

Beryl Markham (born Clutterbuck; 26 October 1902 – 3 August 1986) was a Kenyan aviator born in England (one of the first bush pilots), adventurer, racehorse trainer and author. She was the first person to fly solo, non-stop across the Atlantic from Britain to North America. She wrote about her adventures in her memoir, West with the Night.

Early years
Markham was born in the village of Ashwell, in the county of Rutland, England, the daughter of Charles Baldwin Clutterbuck, a horse trainer, and Clara Agnes (née Alexander) (1878–1952).[1] She had an older brother, Richard Alexander "Dickie" Clutterbuck (1900–1927).

When she was four years old, she moved with her father to Kenya, which was then colonial British East Africa. He built a horse racing farm in Njoro, near the Great Rift Valley between the Mau Escarpment and the Rongai Valley. Markham spent an adventurous childhood learning, playing, and hunting with the local children of all races. On her family's farm, she developed her knowledge of and love for horses, establishing herself as a trainer at the age of 17, after her father left for Peru.[2]

Markham was married three times, taking the name Markham from her second husband, the wealthy Mansfield Markham, with whom she had a son, Gervase.

In 1928, while pregnant with Gervase, she entered into an affair with Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester – known informally as Harry – the son of George V, who became besotted with her during his trip to Kenya.[3] It is said that Beryl also simultaneously had an affair with Harry's older brother, Edward, Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) during this time.[4]

Returning to England, Harry installed Beryl as his mistress in the Grosvenor House Hotel, a few minutes' walk from Buckingham Palace. George V attempted to end the affair by sending Harry on a royal visit to Japan, but the affair resumed on his return to England. Historian Jane Ridley notes that Beryl "was spotted running barefoot along the corridors of Buckingham Palace". Mansfield later threatened to divorce Beryl and cite Harry as a co-respondent.[4] Though Mansfield and his brother Charles were vociferously warned against "citing a prince of the blood in a divorce petition" by Queen Mary, the Palace agreed to pay up in the face of the brother's blackmail attempts. £15,000 was placed in a trust fund, providing Beryl with an annuity of £500 (around £32,000 in 2021).[4]

Beryl also had an affair with Hubert Broad, who was later named by Mansfield Markham as a co-respondent in his 1937 divorce from Markham.[5] After her Atlantic crossing, she returned to be with Broad, who was also an influence in her flying career.

She befriended the Danish writer Karen Blixen during the years that 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 of her flight instructor, British pilot Tom Campbell Black.[6]

Inspired and coached by Tom Campbell Black, Markham learned to fly. She worked for some time as a bush pilot, spotting game animals from the air and signalling their locations to safaris on the ground.[2]: 166–168 

Record flight
Beryl Markham, circa 1930.
Beryl Markham, c. 1930
In 1936, Markham made a solo flight across the Atlantic, from England to North America.[2]: 166, 205  When she decided to take on the Atlantic crossing, no pilot had yet flown non-stop from Europe to New York. On 4 September 1936, she took off from Abingdon, southern England. After a 20-hour flight, her Percival Vega Gull, VP-KCC named "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. She became the first person to make it from England to North America non-stop from east to west, and was celebrated as an aviation pioneer.[7][8]

Markham chronicled many of her 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.[9] After living for many years in the United States, Markham moved back to Kenya in 1952.

Rediscovery
Markham's memoir lingered in obscurity until 1982, when California restaurateur George Gutekunst read a collection of Ernest Hemingway's letters,[10] including one in which Hemingway praised Markham's writing:

Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West with the Night? ... She has written so well, and marvelously 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 enamoured 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 led to praise for the 80-year-old Markham as a great author as well as flyer.[10]

When found in Kenya by AP East Africa correspondent Barry Shlachter, Markham was living in poverty. She had recently been badly beaten during a burglary at her house near the Nairobi racetrack, where she still trained thoroughbreds.[11] 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 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.[12]

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.

Both West with the Night and Splendid Outcast appeared on the New York Times best-seller list of hardcover fiction.[13]