Born: 26 October 1902, United Kingdom
Died: 3 August 1986
Country most active: Kenya
Also known as: Beryl Clutterbuck
British-Kenyan aviator, explorer, racehorse trainer and author Beryl Markham was the first person to fly solo, non-stop across the Atlantic from Britain to North America, in 1936. Although her memoir, West with the Night, did not sell well when it was first published in 1942, its re-release in 1983 brought new attention to the then-octogenarian Markham.
Although born in England, she moved to Njoro, Kenya – then occupied by the British – with her father, a horse trainer, when she was four. Growing up on the family horse racing farm, she established herself as a trainer when she was 17, after her father left to move to Peru.
Markham also befriended Danish writer Karen Blixen, who was managing her own family’s coffee farm near Nairobi, even dating Blixen’s paramour Denys Finch Hatton. Markham would marry three times, keeping the name of her second husband with whom she had a son. While pregnant with that son in 1928, she began an affair with Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester and son of King George V, with rumors that she had an affair with his brother, the future King Edward VIII, at the same time. She moved back to England, where Henry installed her as his mistress at the Grosvenor House Hotel near Buckingham Palace. Her husband threatened to divorce her and name Henry as a co-respondent, blackmailing £15,000 from the royal family, with a £500 annuity for Markham herself. Her husband would not actually divorce her until 1937, when he named another of her lovers, Hubert Broad, as a co-respondant instead.
Broad was a well-known pilot himself who shared Markham’s love for flying, which she had learned years earlier in Kenya. Although she moved to the United States to live with him, she returned to Kenya in 1952.
Markham’s return to public awareness was sparked by a compliment in an old Ernest Hemingway letter, where he wrote:
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.
When California restaurateur George Gutekunst read this, he decided to read the memoir himself, and loved it so much he helped convince North Point Press to re-issue it in 1983, more than 40 years after its initial publication in 1942. The Associated Press sent a correspondent to track down Markham, now living in poverty She was also recovering from a beating during a burglary at her home near the Nairobi racetrack, where she still trained thoroughbreds into her 80s. The newfound success of West with the Night meant she was able to live out the remainder of her life in relative comfort, and an award-winning PBS documentary (co-produced by Gutekunst) aired in 1986 called World Without Walls: Beryl Markham’s African Memoir. She died the same year, and a collection of her short stories, The Splendid Outcast, was published posthumously – like West with the Night, it was a New York Times best-seller. CBS broadcast a biographical miniseries, Beryl Markham: A Shadow on the Sun, in 1988.