An Overlooked Aviatrix
Kenyan aviatrix Beryl Markham lead a life of adventure, punctuated with passionate encounters and daring feats. Yet sadly, few know who this pioneering woman was, let alone the paths she blazed for other adventurous women.
Fame often comes down to nothing more than timing and a little luck. Take Martha E. Wagenfuhrer for example. She hoped to gain fame and fortune by becoming the first woman to shoot the Niagara Falls rapids in a barrel. Although she succeeded (just), the hordes of press she expected to meet her were instead diverted across the river to Buffalo, New York, where US President William McKinley had just been assassinated. As a result, her feat went largely unreported.
Kenyan aviatrix and adventurer Beryl Markham seems to have befallen a similar fate. She is recorded in the annals of history due to her flying firsts. However, another aviatrix, Amelia Earhart, is far more readily recognised. Her book West with the Night eventually became a best seller, but Out of Africa by Karen Blixen (the girlfriend of Markham’s one time lover) is far more well known. But with the wildly adventurous life Markham lived, she certainly deserves a lot more fame and notoriety than she ever received.
Born Beryl Clutterbuck in England in 1902, her parents’ decision to immigrate to Kenya in 1905 was instrumental in shaping the adventurous young woman Beryl was to become. Although they lived a comfortable colonial life in the Kenyan Highlands, Markham had an exciting childhood growing up on the family horse farm, learning to ride and hunt and speak several African languages. She also survived an attack by a “pet” lion and put paid to another one by killing a deadly black mamba snake that came across her path.
No doubt due to her tomboy-like youth, Beryl grew up to be a fiercely independent woman, who preferred the seemingly more interesting company and pursuits of men, as opposed to the ladylike dictates of her gender. As a result, she quickly became one of the most successful horse trainers in Kenya. With her witty banter and statuesque blonde Germanic looks, she was also a popular addition to the Nairobi social scene.
In 1927, she married Mansfield Markham, and bore him a son. But motherhood was not her forte, and instead she left the child in England in the care of his grandparents and returned to her life in Kenya. Alone, marriage seemingly not really being her forte either. Despite this, she married three times during her life, all of which ended in disaster, each husband divorcing her on the grounds of infidelity. Like the men Beryl surrounded herself with, she was known to be wildly promiscuous – both during and in between her marriages – and clocked up such famous lovers as the son of Lord Delamere and Prince Henry, the Duke of Gloucester… until Queen Mary put a swift end to the affair.
Karen Blixen, the author of Out of Africa, probably felt the sting of Markham’s sexual pursuits more keenly than others. Markham not only invaded Blixen’s marital bed by shacking up with her husband Bror Blixen, but later – and even more painful – pursued an affair with adventurer and big game hunter, Denys Finch Hutton. He was the love of Blixen’s life, made famous by Robert Redford in the film version of Out of Africa. In the end, Blixen got her own back by being the more famous author of the two, but it has been surmised that it was in fact Finch Hatton, himself a pilot, who first inspired Markham to take up flying.
As with all her other adventurous pursuits, Markham took to flying easily and soon obtained her pilot’s license. She celebrated this feat by undertaking a daring solo flight to England in an airplane with no speedometer, radio or direction-finding equipment. Despite numerous unscheduled stops (due to plane malfunctions), she eventually reached London 23 days later, and then after a quick visit to her young son, headed straight back to Kenya.
The flying bug had definitely bitten her, and soon Markham became the first woman in Kenya to obtain her commercial pilot’s license. She joined a small aviation company (run by ex-Royal Air Force member Tom Campbell Black), and spent the next three years flying all over Kenya carrying mail to remote locations and flying hunters into the bush. During this time she also fell madly in love with Campbell Black, whose no-nonsense approach to her sexual exploits even saw her turn down the opportunity for a tryst with Ernest Hemingway.
This uncharacteristic fidelity went unrewarded, however, when Campbell Black turned the tables on Markham by marrying British actress Florence Desmond in 1935. Though heartbroken, Markham saw marriage as no major deterrent and set out to win him back. With Charles Lindbergh’s first non-stop flight across the Atlantic, followed soon after by Amelia Earhart’s, flying feats were all the rage. Some also offered huge purses to successful candidates. Lured by the adventure, and the hope that a grand flying feat could capture Campbell Black’s attention (himself the co-winner of the London to Melbourne aviation race), Markham headed back to England.
On 4th September 1936, Markham piloted a single-engine Vega Gull airplane from London west towards the USA. Her aim was to become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from west to east, and the first person to do so from England to America non-stop. The crossing was difficult (it was always expected to be as it would mean flying against the prevailing winds), but after 21 hours in the air, Markham eventually spotted land. A suspected frozen fuel line, however, put paid to a graceful landing and instead she crashed unceremoniously into a peat bog. She sustained a gash to her forehead, but was otherwise relatively unscathed. She was later rescued by two fishermen, who informed her that she had not in fact landed in New York (as she had planned), but rather in Nova Scotia in Canada.
Despite this, the flight was deemed a success and she was met with a rapturous reception in New York, huge media coverage and – the only praise she truly craved – excited congratulations from Campbell Black himself. Markham was truly on top of the world. She had achieved her record breaking feat and had possibly won back the affection of her one true love. But just two weeks later, she was devastated to learn that Campbell Black had been killed in an air crash. Heartbroken, Markham never flew competitively again.
She spent several years in England and America, where she published her memoir West with the Night in 1942, but it went largely unnoticed amid the furore of war. She eventually returned to Africa where she retained her reputation as a highly successful horse trainer, and remained so well into her eighties. Her book was republished in the early 1980’s – this time to much acclaim – but fame eventually came to Markham too little, too late.
For a woman who pushed the boundaries of public opinion and the constraints of her gender; who lived a life of adventure and passion, Markham deserves to be as famous as Blixen or Earhart. But no one ever said fame was fair.
Story by Nicky Furniss
