Beryl Markham

(1902 – 1986)

Biographical Sketch

Beryl Markham (Ashwell, Rutland, UK, October 26, 1902 – Nairobi, Kenya, August 3, 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 her memoir, West with the Night.

Markham was the daughter of Charles Baldwin Clutterbuck, an accomplished horse trainer. 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. Although her mother disliked the isolation there and promptly returned to England, Beryl stayed in Kenya with her father, where she spent an adventurous childhood learning, playing, and hunting with the local children. On her family’s farm, she developed her knowledge of and love for horses. Barely 19 years old, in 1921 she became the first licensed female racehorse trainer in Kenya and, after having beaten the odds to score a win at the prestigious St. Leger with the mare Wise Child only weeks after having taken over her training (1926), rapidly became a successful and renowned figure among the racing community of 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, the wealthy Mansfield Markham, with whom she had a son, Gervase. She is believed to have had an openly public and unconcealed affair in 1929 with Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, the son of George V, but the Windsors allegedly cut the romance short. – She befriended the Danish writer Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen) 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 of her flight instructor, British pilot Tom Campbell Black (later pilot to the Prince of Wales). Largely inspired by Campbell Black, with whom she also had a long-term affair, Markham had taken 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.

Beryl Markham was the first woman to successfully fly across the Atlantic from east to west. 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 September 4, 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. 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. During her best season, in 1963/64, she trained a total of forty-six winners, including those of four of the country’s great classic races (most notably, the East African Derby, which she won as a trainer no less than six times).

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 (if not Markham herself, whom he loathed as a person):

“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 enamored of Markham’s prose that he helped persuade a California publisher, North Point Press, to re-issue the book in 1983. The success of the re-issue of West with the Night eventually provided enough income for Markham, who at that time had fallen into financially rather dire straits, to finish her life in relative comfort. Markham died in Nairobi in 1986. Her short stories were posthumously collected in The Splendid Outcast, with an introduction by her biographer Mary S. Lovell.

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. During the rest of her life, she completed only a handful of short stories, collected and published posthumously. According to Errol Trzebinski in her biography, The Lives of Beryl Markham (1993), her memoir was written by her third husband Raoul Schumacher, a ghost writer and journalist. When interviewed for a 1986 PBS documentary about Markham, however, Trzebinski had still 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.

Major Awards and Honors

Jockey Club of Kenya

1960: Silver Plate – leading trainer
1961: Silver Plate – leading trainer
1962: Silver Plate – leading trainer
1963: Silver Plate – leading trainer
1964: Silver Plate – leading trainer
1965: Silver Plate – leading trainer
1966: Silver Plate – leading trainer

Kenya Triple Crown of Horse Racing:

1959/60 Season: Trainer of the Triple Crown winning horse Niagara
1971/72 Season: Trainer of the Triple Crown winning horse Heron

East African Derby

1959/60 Season: Trainer of the winning horse Niagara
1961/62 Season: Trainer of the winning horse Speed Trial
1962/63 Season: Trainer of the winning horse Cutlass
1963/64 Season: Trainer of the winning horse Lone Eagle
1964/65 Season: Trainer of the winning horse Athi
1971/72 Season: Trainer of the winning horse Heron

Kenya St. Leger

1926: Trainer of the winning horse Wise Child
1958/59 Season: Trainer of the winning horse Little Dancer
1959/60 Season: Trainer of the winning horse Niagara
1964/65 Season: Trainer of the winning horse Athi
1971/72 Season: Trainer of the winning horse Heron
1978/79 Season: Trainer of the winning horse Sailor Beware

Kenya Guineas

1959/60 Season: Trainer of the winning horse Niagara
1961/62 Season: Trainer of the winning horse Rio Grande
1963/64 Season: Trainer of the winning horse Fair Realm
1971/72 Season: Trainer of the winning horse Heron

Other Kenyan Horse Racing Classics:

Kenya Okas

1963/64 Season: Trainer of the winning horse Blue Streak

Champagne Stakes

1958/59 Season: Trainer of the winning horse Niagara
1960/61 Season: Trainer of the winning horse Speed Trial
1962/63 Season: Trainer of the winning horse Mountie
1963/64 Season: Trainer of the winning horse Spike
1971/72 Season: Trainer of the winning horse The Sultan

Breeding Futurity Stakes

1971/72 Season: Trainer of the winning horse The Sultan

International Astronomical Union

1994: Nomination of Markham impact crater on Venus (latitude 4.1S / longitude 155.6E; diameter: 69 kms)

Bibliography

Short Stories

The Splendid Outcast (1987)
Stories first published individually in magazines in the 1940s.

Memoir

West With the Night (1942)

A Selection of Quotes

West With the Night

“We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup. I learned to watch, to put my trust in other hands than mine. And I learned to wander. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know – that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.”

“To venture … close [to a lion] on foot … would mean the sudden shattering of any kindly belief that the similarity of the lion and the pussy cat goes much beyond their whiskers. But then, since men still live by the sword, it’s a little optimistic to expect the lion to withdraw his claws, handicapped as he is by his inability to read our better effusions about the immorality of bloodshed.”

“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”

“There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.”

“If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.”

“The way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down.”

“To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told – that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.”

“We fly, but we have not ‘conquered’ the air. Nature presides in all her dignity, permitting us the study and the use of such of her forces as we may understand. It is when we presume to intimacy, having been granted only tolerance, that the harsh stick fall across our impudent knuckles and we rub the pain, staring upward, startled by our ignorance.”

“To an eagle or to an owl or to a rabbit, man must seem a masterful and yet a forlorn animal; he has but two friends. In his almost universal unpopularity he points out, with pride, that these two are the dog and the horse. He believes, with an innocence peculiar to himself, that they are equally proud of this alleged confraternity. He says, ‘Look at my two noble friends – they are dumb, but they are loyal.’ I have for years suspected that they are only tolerant.”

“Elephant, beyond the fact that their size and conformation are aesthetically more suited to the treading of this earth than our angular informity, have an average intelligence comparable to our own. Of course they are less agile and physically less adaptable than ourselves – nature having developed their bodies in one direction and their brains in another, while human beings, on the other hand, drew from Mr. Darwin’s lottery of evolution both the winning ticket and the stub to match it. This, I suppose, is why we are so wonderful and can make movies and electric razors and wireless sets – and guns with which to shoot the elephant, the hare, clay pigeons, and each other.”

“What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker’s rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta (the same boy grown to manhood), who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together.”

“There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa – and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else’s, but likely to be haugthily disagreed with by all those who believed in some other Africa. … Being thus all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers.
Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer’s paradise, a hunter’s Valhalla, an escapist’s Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just ‘home.”

“One day the stars will be as familiar to each man as the landmarks, the curves, and the hills on the road that leads to his door, and one day this will be an airborne life. But by then men will have forgotten how to fly; they will be passengers on machines whose conductors are carefully promoted to a familiarity with labelled buttons, and in whose minds knowledge of the sky and the wind and the way of weather will be extraneous as passing fiction.”

“Still, not to be English is hardly regarded as a fatal deficiency even by the English, though grave enough to warrant sympathy.”

[On WWI:]
“A man of importance had been shot at a place I could not pronounce in Swahili or in English, and, because of this shooting, whole countries were at war. It seemed a laborious method of retribution, but that was the way it was being done. …
A messenger came to the farm with a story to tell. It was not a story that meant much as stories went in those days. It was about how the war progressed in German East Africa and about a tall young man who was killed in it. … It was an ordinary story, but Kibii and I, who knew him well, thought there was no story like it, or one as sad, and we think so now.
The young man tied his shuka on his shoulder one day and took his shield and his spear and went to war. He thought war was made of spears and shields and courage, and he brought them all.
But they gave him a gun, so he left the spear and the shield behind him and took the courage, and went where they sent him because they said this was his duty and he believed in duty. …
He took the gun and held it the way they had told him to hold it, and walked where they told him to walk, smiling a little and looking for another man to fight.
He was shot and killed by the other man, who also believed in duty, and he was buried where he fell. It was so simple and so unimportant.
But of course it meant something to Kibii and me, because the tall young man was Kibii’s father and my most special friend. Arab Maina died on the field of action in the service of the King. But some said it was because he had forsaken his spear.”

“The Old Days, the Lost Days – in the half-closed eyes of memory (and in fact) they never marched across a calendar; they huddled round a burning log, leaned on a certain table, or listened to those certain songs.”

“The only disadvantage in surviving a dangerous experience lies in the fact that your story of it tends to be anticlimactic. You can never carry on right through the point where whatever it is that threatens your life actually takes it – and get anybody to believe you. The world is full of sceptics.”

“Denys [Finch-Hatton] has been written about before and he will be written about again. If someone has not already said it, someone will say that he was a great man who never achieved greatness, and this will not only be trite, but wrong; he was a great man who never achieved arrogance.”

[On Baron von Blixen:]
“Six feet of amiable Swede and, to my knowledge, the toughest, most durable White Hunter ever to snicker at the fanfare of safari or to shoot a charging buffalo between the eyes while debating whether his sundown drink will be gin or whisky.”

“I suppose if there were a part of the world in which mastodon still lived, somebody would design a new gun, and men, in their eternal impudence, would hunt mastodon as they now hunt elephant. Impudence seems to be the word. At least David and Goliath were of the same species, but, to an elephant, a man can only be a midge with a deathly sting.”

“It is amazing what a lot of insect life goes on under your nose when you have got it an inch from the earth. I suppose it goes on in any case, but if you are proceeding on your stomach, dragging your body along by your fingernails, entomology presents itself very forcibly as a thoroughly justified science.”

“It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy; it is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf the whole of mankind without disturbing the domestic life of a single catfish.

“Like night, the desert is boundless, comfortless and infinite. Like night, it intrigues the mind and leads it to futility. When you have flown halfway across a desert, you experience the desperation of a sleepless man waiting for dawn which only comes when the importance of it’s coming is lost. You fly forever, weary with an invariable scene, and when you are at last released from its monotony, you remember nothing of it because there was nothing there.”

[Quoting her friend Tom Black on an amateur hunter’s injury:]
“Lion, rifles – and stupidity.”

“None of the characters in (the story) were distinguished ones – not even the lion.
He was an old lion, prepared from birth to lose his life rather than to leave it. But he had the dignity of all free creatures, and so he was allowed his moment. It was hardly a glorious moment.
The two men who shot him were indifferent as men go, or perhaps they were less than that. At least they shot him without killing him, and then turned the unsconscionable eye of a camera upon his agony. It was a small, a stupid, but a callous crime.”

“You could expect many things of God at night when the campfire burned before the tents. You could look through and beyond the veils of scarlet and see shadows of the world as God first made it and hear the voices of the beasts He put there. It was a world as old as Time, but as new as Creation’s hour had left it.
In a sense it was formless. When the low stars shone over it and the moon clothed it in silver fog, it was the way the firmament must have been when the waters had gone and the night of the Fifth Day had fallen on creatures still bewildered by the wonder of their being. It was an empty world because no man had yet joined sticks to make a house or scratched the earth to make a road or embedded the transient symbols of his artifice in the clean horizon. But it was not a sterile world. It held the genesis of life and lay deep and anticipant under the sky.”

“It seemed that the printers of the African maps had a slightly malicious habit of including, in large letters, the names of towns, junctions, and villages which, while most of them did exist in fact, as a group of thatched huts may exist or a water hole, they were usually so inconsequential as completely to escape discovery from the cockpit.”

“[This place] presumed to be a town then, but was hardly more than a word under a tin roof.”

“[This town] doesn’t look like anything; it isn’t anything. Its five tin-roofed huts cling to the skinny tracks of the Uganda Railway like parasites on a vine.”

[On vultures:]
“… those false but democratic mourners at every casual bier …”

“It was … disconcerting to examine your charts before a proposed flight only to find that in many cases the bulk of the terrain over which you had to fly was bluntly marked: ‘UNSURVEYED.’
It was as if the mapmakers had said, ‘We are aware that between this spot and that one, there are several hundred thousands of acres, but until you make a forced landing there, we won’t know whether it is mud, desert, or jungle – and the chances are we won’t know then!

“From the time I arrived in British East Africa at the indifferent age of four and went through the barefoot stage of early youth hunting wild pig with the Nandi, later training racehorses for a living, and still later scouting Tanganyika and the waterless bush country between the Tana and Athi Rivers, by aeroplane, for elephant, I remained so happily provincial I was unable to discuss the boredom of being alive with any intelligence until I had gone to London and lived there for a year. Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic.”

Find more quotes by Beryl Markham on Goodreads.

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