Beryl Markham

Beryl Markham (1936)

Beryl Markham (born October 26, 1902 in Leicester , Leicestershire , † August 3, 1986 in Nairobi , Kenya ; born Beryl Clutterbuck ) was a British aviation pioneer , racehorse trainer and author . In 1936 she was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic in an east-west direction; it was also the first non-stop flight in an east-west direction from England to America.

Life

Early years

Beryl Markham was born Beryl Clutterbuck in the village of Ashwell, Rutland , England . Her parents were the horse breeder Charles Baldwin Clutterbuck and his wife Clara Agnes (née Alexander). The family moved to British East Africa when Beryl was four years old and she grew up in Njoro , Kenya . In 1919, at the age of 16, she married a certain Jock Purves in Nairobi. The couple divorced three years later.

When she was 17 years old, her father had to sell his farm and horses. He went to Peru to start a new life. Beryl stayed in East Africa. She was the first woman in Kenya to acquire a license to train racehorses according to the rules of the English Jockey Club. The horses she trained ran fairly successful races in Nairobi, and she became a well-known figure in the local horse racing scene.

In 1927 Beryl married the Englishman Mansfield Markham. The couple moved to England, where they gave birth to a son in 1929. However, the marriage soon failed. Beryl Markham took care of her child with his grandparents and returned to Kenya.

As a bush pilot in East Africa

Mainly inspired by Tom Campbell Black , with whom she also had a long affair, Markham took up aviation. Black became her flight instructor. She then became the first woman in East Africa to take the professional pilot exam . From Wilson Airport in Nairobi, she worked with her Avro Avian as a bush pilot, accompanied safaris, flew rich farmers, for the postal service, for ambulance services and as a scout for big game hunters.

In Nairobi she became a good friend of Karen Blixen , Bror von Blixen-Finecke and Denys Finch Hatton . It is unclear whether she had a relationship with the two men.

Solo from Nairobi to London

Barely a year after her flight test, she flew solo from Nairobi to England in April / May 1932. Due to technical problems, the flight lasted 23 days. Your plane had no radio or navigation equipment except a compass. The machine didn't even have a speedometer. From Nairobi she flew towards Juba in Sudan , but had to make an emergency landing shortly before her destination due to a sand storm and engine problems. The next day she flew to Malakal on the Nile and wanted to reach Khartoum the next day . She had to make an emergency landing three times for repairs to the engine. In Khartoum it turned out that a cylinder head gasket was damaged. Because she could not find the spare parts she needed in Khartoum, she flew on to Atbara , where she was finally able to replace the cylinder and the seal. She had technical problems again due to another sandstorm near Cairo . This time she had the machine repaired and checked by the British Royal Air Force before it flew across the Mediterranean to Europe. Despite the bad weather, she reached London without any further technical problems.

Transatlantic flight in an east-west direction

In the mid-30s, prizes were repeatedly advertised for special flying services. After working as a bush pilot for years, Markham returned to England. After the successes of Lindbergh and Earhart , the possibility of a direct airline between London and New York was discussed in Europe and the USA and a high prize money was offered for the pilot who flew this route non-stop first. The difficulty of this flight was that the pilot had to approach against strong wind currents. Before her, Jim Mollison had already made the Atlantic crossing from Ireland to Canada in August 1932 , the second was John Grierso , who flew the route London – New York in six weeks in 1934 with stopovers.

In a borrowed Percival Vega Gull with a 200 hp engine, equipped with additional tanks and navigation instruments (but no radio equipment), Markham set off from London on September 4, 1936 at 8 p.m. At 10:30 p.m. she flew over Ireland. The next day at 2 pm she was sighted by a ship in the Atlantic and at 4:30 pm someone was watching her over Newfoundland before she "disappeared". Her call from the fishing village of Baleine in Nova Scotia caused great relief and cheers: Beryl Markham had crash-landed, her plane stuck nose first in a peat cut . Markham had already had problems with a gas tank when he was across the Atlantic because the gas line had frozen and the engine failed. Just before she hit the water, she got it going again and flew on. The same thing happened in Nova Scotia and eventually led to the crash.

Beryl Markham was disappointed because she thought the flight would be considered a failure because of the crash. She was amazed when she was picked up by a US Coast Guard plane and taken to New York, where she was received as a heroine. After the hype, she retired to Leicester.

Next life

In 1939 Beryl Markham moved to California, where she ran an avocado ranch with her third husband. In 1942 she published - already divorced - her book Westwärts mit der Nacht (in the original West with the Night ), which became a bestseller. The book describes her childhood, her career as a bush pilot and her transatlantic flight.

In 1952 Markham returned from California to Kenya and was able to establish herself again successfully as a trainer of racehorses. When Westwärts was reissued with the night at the beginning of the 80s, it became famous again for a short time. Markham died of pneumonia in 1986.

Post fame

In 1986 George Gutekunst made a documentary entitled World without Walls . In 1988 the three-hour television film Africa, my life with Stefanie Powers in the lead role was broadcast.

Publications

• West with the Night . Reprint of the 1942 edition. Martino Fine Books, Fort Wayne 2010, ISBN 978-1578989539 .
  • Westward with the night: my life as a pilot in Africa . Translated by Günter Panske . Piper Taschenbuch, Munich 2001, ISBN 978-3492232920 .
• The Splendid Outcast. Beryl Markham's African Stories . ed. v. Mary S. Lovell. 3rd ed. North Point Press, San Francisco 1987, ISBN 0-86547-301-3.
  • Rivals of the desert and other tales from Africa . Translated by Christa Seibicke. Nymphenburger Verlag , Munich 1988, ISBN 9783485005708 .

literature

• Mary S. Lovell: Straight On Till Morning. The Life of Beryl Markham . Abacus, 2009, ISBN 978-0349121758 .
  • Mary S. Lovell: Beryl Markham. Life for africa . Nymphenburger Verlag, Munich 1989, ISBN 9783485005876 .
• Denis Boyles: African Lives. White Lies, Tropical Truth, Darkest Gossip, and Rumblings of Rumor from Chinese Gordon to Beryl Markham, and Beyond. Ballantine Books , New York 1989, ISBN 978-0345356666 .
• Gertrud Pfister: Flying - her life: the first female pilots . Orlanda Frauenverlag , Berlin 1989, ISBN 978-3922166498 .
• Errol Trzebinski: The Lives of Beryl Markham . WW Norton & Company, New York, London 1994, ISBN 978-0393312522 .
• Catherine Gourley: Beryl Markham. Never turn back . Conari, Berkeley 1997, ISBN 978-1573240734 .
• Margo McLoone, Jacquelyn L. Beyer: Women explorers of the air - Harriet Quimby, Bessie Coleman, Amelia Earhart, Beryl Markham, Jacqueline Cochran . Capstone Books, Mankato (Minnesota) 2000, ISBN 978-0736803106 .
• Jacqueline McLean, Jacqueline A. Kolosov: Women with Wings . Oliver Press, Minneapolis 2001, ISBN 978-1881508700.
• Ernst Probst: Beryl Markham. The first female professional pilot in East Africa . 4th edition Grin Verlag, Munich and Ravensburg 2014, ISBN 978-3656851639 .

Web links

Commons : Beryl Markham  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Literature by and about Beryl Markham in the catalog of the German National Library
• Linda G. Donelson: Karen Blixen and Beryl Markham, Jan. 1, 2011

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Andrea Schweers: Beryl Markham. In: fembio.org. Institute for Women's Biography Research Hanover / Boston, accessed on August 30, 2021 . 
2. ↑ Gavin Mortimer: Beryl Markham: Britain's Amelia Earhart. In: telegraph.co.uk/. November 27, 2009, accessed August 30, 2021 . 
3. ^ Forgotten record of aviatrix Beryl Markham. In: news.bbc.co.uk. September 8, 2010, accessed August 30, 2021 . 
4. ^ GW Johnston: Alone across the Atlantic , in: Airplane Monthly, September 1982, pp. 481-484
5. ↑ Christoph Gunkel: Beryl Markham: England's forgotten flight pioneer. In: spiegel.de. September 5, 2016, accessed August 30, 2021 . 
6. ↑ Beryl Markham: A Shadow on the Sun (TV Movie 1988) - IMDb. Retrieved August 30, 2021 (American English).