Beryl Markham

British-Kenyan · 1902 to 1986

Born Beryl Clutterbuck on October 26, 1902, in Ashwell, Rutland, England, she was taken to British East Africa at four, when her father, Charles Baldwin Clutterbuck, left to start a horse farm at Njoro on the edge of the Great Rift Valley. Her mother returned to England soon after, and Beryl grew up largely without her, running with Nandi and Kipsigis boys, learning to hunt, and absorbing her father's feel for horses at his side. When he departed for Peru in financial trouble, she stayed on and, still a teenager, took over his stable, becoming one of Kenya's first licensed woman racehorse trainers and training horses into her eighties. In her late twenties she learned to fly under the aviator Tom Campbell Black and turned the skill into a livelihood as a bush pilot, scouting elephant herds from the air for safari clients, among them Denys Finch Hatton, with whom she had a documented love affair. On September 4, 1936, she took off from Abingdon, England, in a Percival Vega Gull named The Messenger, attempting the first solo, nonstop flight across the Atlantic from east to west. Ice choked her fuel line over Nova Scotia and she put the plane down nose first in a bog at Baleine Cove, but she had done it, the harder westward crossing, alone. She married three times, to Jock Purves, to Mansfield Markham, with whom she had her only son, Gervase, and to the writer Raoul Schumacher, and in 1942 she published West with the Night, her memoir of the Kenyan childhood and flying life behind her. It sold modestly and went out of print until Ernest Hemingway's private praise of it surfaced decades later in his published letters, prompting a 1983 reissue that turned her, at eighty, into a literary celebrity for the first time in her life. She died on August 3, 1986, in Nairobi, Kenya.