Beryl Markham

Beryl Clutterbuck was born on October 26, 1902, in the village of Ashwell in Rutland, England, the daughter of Charles Clutterbuck, a farmer and horseman, and his wife Clara ^[1]. When Beryl was still a small child, her father moved the family to British East Africa, later Kenya, where he established a farm and racehorse operation at Njoro on the edge of the Rift Valley ^[2]. Her mother found colonial life intolerable and returned to England within a few years, leaving the young girl in her father's care.

Her upbringing at Njoro was unlike that of most settler children. She spent her days around the farm's stables and hunted with Kipsigis and Nandi boys from neighboring communities, learning to track game and to speak Swahili and local languages ^[2]. Formal schooling barely touched her. A governess and a brief, unhappy spell at a school in Nairobi were the extent of her classroom education, and she was expelled or withdrawn after repeated rebellions ^[3].

The farm shaped her more than any tutor could. Charles Clutterbuck was a respected trainer, and his daughter absorbed the craft of conditioning thoroughbreds from childhood. When drought and falling prices ruined the Njoro operation in 1919, her father left for Peru to train horses there. Beryl, then seventeen, chose to stay in Kenya and make her own living with horses ^[1].

At eighteen Beryl received a trainer's licence from the colonial racing authorities, reportedly the first granted to a woman in Kenya ^[2]. It was a striking achievement in a sport dominated by men, and she backed it up quickly. Horses from her stable began winning on the Nairobi turf, and in 1926 her horse Wise Child took the Kenya St Leger, one of the colony's principal races ^[3].

Training gave her independence and standing in settler society, but it was demanding, itinerant work. She moved between farms and racecourses around Nakuru, Molo, and Nairobi, often living roughly and managing strings of horses for wealthy owners ^[2]. Contemporaries remembered her exceptional feel for difficult animals, a skill she credited to her childhood at Njoro.

During these years she also married for the first time. In 1919 she wed Jock Purves, a farmer and former rugby international, though the marriage collapsed within a few years ^[1]. In 1927 she married Mansfield Markham, a wealthy Englishman whose surname she kept for the rest of her life. Their son, Gervase, was born in 1929 and was raised largely in England by his paternal grandmother ^[3].

Aviation reached Kenya in the late 1920s, and Markham was drawn to it through the circle of pilots and hunters around Nairobi, among them the safari pilot Tom Campbell Black, who taught her to fly ^[2]. She proved a quick student. She earned a private licence and then, in 1933, a commercial B licence, becoming one of the first women in Africa qualified to fly for hire ^[3].

Her flying work was practical and often dangerous. She carried mail, supplies, and passengers to remote farms and mining camps, and she pioneered the practice of scouting elephant herds from the air for safari companies, radioing or dropping messages to hunters on the ground, work she did alongside the Danish hunter Bror Blixen and others ^[2]. Flights in a small biplane over the Rift Valley and the bush of Tanganyika, without radio beacons or reliable weather forecasts, demanded exactly the nerve she had.

She also flew long solo routes between Kenya and England several times in the mid 1930s, following the chain of airfields down the Nile and across the Sudan ^[3]. These journeys built the endurance and navigational confidence that made her think a far bigger flight was possible.

By 1936 the Atlantic had been flown many times from west to east, riding the prevailing winds, but no one had flown it alone from England to North America against them. Markham decided to try. On September 4, 1936, she took off from Abingdon in England in The Messenger, a Vega Gull monoplane fitted with extra fuel tanks and lent for the attempt ^[4].

The flight lasted roughly twenty hours through darkness, storm, and headwinds. Ice in a fuel line starved the engine as she neared North America, and she crash-landed nose down in a bog at Baleine Cove on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, short of her New York goal but safely across the ocean ^[4]. She climbed out with a cut forehead, and the achievement stood: the first solo east to west Atlantic crossing by a woman, and the first nonstop solo flight from England to North America ^[5].

New York gave her a ticker tape style welcome, and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic carried her story ^[4]. The triumph arrived with grief attached. Days after her landing, Tom Campbell Black, her former instructor and close companion, was killed in a ground collision at an airfield in Liverpool. Among the most cited Beryl Markham facts, the 1936 crossing remains the anchor of her reputation ^[5].

After the Atlantic flight Markham spent several years in the United States, mostly in California, where she worked briefly around the film industry and began writing about her African life ^[3]. The result was West with the Night, a memoir published by Houghton Mifflin in 1942, recounting her childhood at Njoro, her horses, her flying, and the Atlantic crossing in prose of unusual polish ^[6].

The book earned strong reviews but sold modestly in wartime and soon went out of print. Its most famous endorsement surfaced decades later: Ernest Hemingway, in a 1942 letter to his editor Maxwell Perkins, praised the book's writing in extravagant terms, and the rediscovery of that letter helped drive a 1983 reissue by North Point Press ^[6]. The republished memoir became a bestseller and made Markham, then in her eighties, an international literary figure.

The revival also revived an old dispute. Markham's third husband, the American writer Raoul Schumacher, whom she married in 1942 and divorced in the late 1940s, was said by some acquaintances to have written or heavily shaped the book. Biographers have examined the claim without settling it conclusively; manuscripts and testimony point in both directions, and the question still shadows any Beryl Markham biography ^[7]. She also published a number of short stories in American magazines during the 1940s, later collected as The Splendid Outcast ^[6].

Markham returned to Kenya in the early 1950s and went back to the work she knew best, training racehorses. The second act of her turf career was remarkable. Her stable dominated Kenyan racing through the late 1950s and 1960s, winning the Kenya Derby multiple times and taking the colony's leading trainer title season after season ^[3].

She lived her final decades in a cottage on the grounds of the Ngong Racecourse in Nairobi, provided by the Jockey Club of Kenya, increasingly hard up until royalties from the reissued memoir eased her circumstances ^[7]. Journalists and admirers who sought her out found a sharp, unsentimental woman with little patience for nostalgia.

She died in Nairobi on August 3, 1986, at the age of eighty three ^[1]. Obituaries in the British and American press recorded the arc of a life that had run from an Edwardian English village to the Kenyan highlands, across the Atlantic alone, and onto the bestseller lists in her final years ^[5].

Markham's place in aviation history rests on the 1936 crossing, still recognized as the first solo east to west transatlantic flight by a woman ^[5]. Her place in literature rests on West with the Night, which remains in print and is widely taught and anthologized as a classic of memoir and Africa writing ^[6]. Together they explain why interest in Beryl Markham achievements has never faded.

Her life has drawn steady attention from biographers and novelists. Mary S. Lovell's 1987 biography Straight on Till Morning, written with Markham's cooperation in her last years, remains the standard account ^[7]. Errol Trzebinski published a further biography in 1993, and Paula McLain's 2015 novel Circling the Sun, a fictionalized telling of her Kenyan years, brought her story to a new mass audience ^[8]. A 1986 documentary, World Without Walls, filmed shortly before her death, preserved her own late recollections.

She is often grouped with Denys Finch Hatton, Karen Blixen, and the settlers of the so called Happy Valley era, and she appears as a minor figure in Blixen's circle in accounts of colonial Kenya ^[7]. Yet her record cuts its own line: a woman who earned her livings, plural, as trainer, pilot, and author, in fields that offered women almost no entry, and who did so on three continents across eight decades ^[1].