Salina J. Wilde

HST 401

20 November 1999

She became known throughout her life as an Africanized European. "Her life was shaped by two opposing forces: the African wilderness and new Western technology."¹ She became more African than European in her thinking and attitudes, but did also acquire a veneer of European manners as she grew older. She was a true Kenyan; she could never have become what she was in any other country. Markham earned the right to hunt as an African because she was a white woman. African women were not allowed to take part in the tradition of hunting. She was allowed this ". . .extraordinary freedom not shared by black women in Africa nor by white women in Europe."² Producer Lloyd Phillips contends that Markham was "a woman who was a leader, not a follower; a woman who was one step ahead of men in a time when women were one step behind."

The Africans called the new train line the Iron Snake^.6 It was obvious from the beginning that the native people were resistant to the flooding of their land with white settlers. The Kikuyu, in particular, viewed the white newcomers as menacing invaders. They used poison-tipped arrows to drive them off their land. The Africans (96.97 percent of the colony.s population) remained mostly subsistence farmers or agricultural and domestic laborers. "They exercised little or no power on the national scene, were generally at the lower end of the income scale, and were considered by Europeans as social and cultural inferiors."⁷

Her parentage and her birthplace ought to have guaranteed Beryl Markham a life within the comfortable constraints of Edwardian society, a life in which she would have received a formal education of English literature, French grammar, painting, and needlework taught by governesses. Perhaps she would have later joined the eager throngs of debutantes, primped for her first ball, and eventually married some suitable neighboring landowner. Though it is difficult to imagine her content to spend her days in such a restrained environment.

Markham was the second child of Charles and Clara Clutterbuck, both of whom were tremendously accomplished equestrians who enjoyed fox hunting, a sport that is challenging to even the best rider. When she was only two years old, her father decided to leave England and its ruddy fox in search of a wilder place with fiercer game. In 1904, the entire Clutterbuck family: Charles, Clara, Richard (who was born in 1900) and Beryl all immigrated to British East Africa. Upon arrival, Charles Clutterbuck built a vast farm out of the forest, bush and rock.

According to biographer Errol Trzebinski, "when Beryl Markham.s feet touched African soil, it was as though that moment was her real beginning. The quiet lovely rhythms of the bush at dawn became integral to her life . . ."⁸ Markham seemed to be at one with the land and very deeply contented. The land in which Charles Clutterbuck settled had been formed by volcanic eruptions more than 15 million years ago when one continent.Africa.collided with another.Eurasia. "In the violence of that collision, the wall of the Great Rift rose thousands of feet above sea level, cradling an immense valley."⁹

Volcanic eruptions had shaped the land giving it unique characteristics.sheer, jagged cliffs and a flat floor of desert bush with scattered thorn trees. Its spine of volcanic rubble still poked through the spongy valley floor"¹⁰ and Markham, being prone to run bare foot, had long ago toughened her feet to its sharpness. At an early age, she was already a lover of all things wild and free. The highlands was her home and her home was alive with the chatter and rumble of a thousand living things. She became part of Africa and it became part of her. She always professed that "Africa was the breath and life of her childhood."

While Beryl and her father found British East Africa enchanting and a daily challenge, eventually, Clara Clutterbuck found Africa to be too difficult and returned to Britain with Richard. Markham remained on the farm at Njoro with her father and began a unique upbringing lacking traditional English conventions and restrictions, which she referred to as "a world without walls." Beryl.s father was fully occupied with the business of establishing his farm, so the child was left in the daily care of African workers, following her mother.s departure. As naturally as breathing, she learned the customs and languages of numerous tribes people who lived on the farm: Luo, Nandi, Kikuyu, even the occasional Masai herdsman. In fact, Markham.s first language was Swahili and then English. One of the native tribes, the Kipsigis, tied ". . .a cowrie shell, their symbol of the female genitalia, on a leather thong around her wrist to ward off evil spirits. . ." as they did for girls within the tribe at birth.¹¹ They dubbed her Lakweit (meaning very little girl) as a special term of endearment.

Markham.s character developed in a complex manner. For instance, without regular parental guidance her instinct led her to adopt the belief that "the end justifies the means".a basic premise in the art of survival.and this characteristic was to reveal itself noticeably as she grew older. Her extraordinary energy, zest for life and the remarkable freedom she was allowed led her into many childhood adventures which would normally have been denied to girls, whether of European or African backgrounds.¹²

In African culture, family is central to everything, a foundation that is a constant support to all. A mother would never have abandoned a normal healthy child and as Beryl grew older, she was constantly reminded of this fact. It was not that it bothered her; she did not even remember her mother, but there was a continual feeling of being deserted by a person who was too weak for survival in Africa. Beryl learned from an early age that weakness was an undesirable trait and one that could very easily mean death in the untamed wilds. She lived in a world of absolutes. You were either victim or victor. There was no middle ground, no compromising in Africa. There was no second chance at life. It was survival of the fittest at the greatest degree. Young Beryl was one of those who would survive, as a direct result of the African lessons she was taught daily. "The bush became her nursery, her playground and her school."¹³

Markham completely trusted the African families who worked on her father.s farm. These families acted as a stronghold: " I knew the natives well enough to know that they would never give me away and. . .looked upon me as one of their own children." She became particularly close to one of the native boys name Kibii. They formed a camaraderie early on that would last throughout both of their lives. It was around this time that Markham moved into an African style mud hut with a thatched roof, called a rondavel, by herself. She was very independent even as a young child.

Beryl.s teacher was Arap Maina, Kibii.s father and her classroom was the Great Rift Valley. Kibii and Beryl spent all of their time together. They swung on vines, hid in wild pig holes, wrestled with each other.games like these were more than play. They were an important part of an African child.s education. Like Kibii and the other totos, or children, Beryl played hard. The games shaped her young muscles and strengthened her senses. "She learned to read a crushed leaf and wet dung and know what wild creature.a water buffalo or a zebra.had passed."¹⁴ Had she been born "an ndito.girl or virgin of the tribe.she would never have been allowed to infringe masculine preserves. And this included hunting; it was only for boys preparing to be warriors or moran."¹⁵ Yet Markham was allowed, because she was a white woman. Beryl didn.t receive much formal schooling, but she knew how to skin a buck, how to catch moles for the money her father paid her, how to treat a snakebite. She was sent to various schools, from which she was expelled and had several governesses, whom she ignored. As Beryl and Kibii understood things, books and pencils could never protect one from predators. The emphasis on their educational process was survival.

Following Charles Clutterbuck.s many attempts at raising a number of various crops, he discovered his true talent as a horse breeder and trainer, furnishing horses for racing in Nairobi. Clutterbuck primarily trained Thoroughbreds that were owned by Lord Delamere, his closest white neighbor. "Markham was brought up in an atmosphere of horses and horsy talk: race meetings at the Nairobi course were as important a part of colonial social life as was Ascot to that of upper-class England,"¹⁶ and Markham was at the center of it during much of her childhood. During this important event, she was exposed to more "civilized" people and their ideas.the Europeans. She also became a truly remarkable equestrian as a result of the lessons her father taught her on horsemanship.

She later described Lord Delamere as "the champion of the East African settler": he felt that the opening up of new area by "genuine colonization" was to the advantage of the world. He then "balanced" his devotion to the indigenous peoples by entertaining 200 settlers with 600 bottles of champagne at a reception in 1928, while the black population was starving during a famine.¹⁷ Markham did not share the view of most of the white settlers; she had tremendous respect and admiration for African culture and customs. Her heart remained with Africa, even during a time when rifles and railroads were the white man.s idea of progress.

This "progress" had come at a price. "The tribal ways of life had been shattered by force and for profit."¹⁸ More than 1,000 Africans labored for Markham.s father, not for wages, but to satisfy a hut tax imposed on them by the protectorate government. The British money system was of little value to the Africans. Sheep and cattle, not coins, were wealth to them. Still, on payday, the Africans stood in a long line and Beryl watched as her father counted out each wage. As a child, she could not have understood what a feudal system was or that peasants toiled for a lord in exchange for the right to live on his land.¹⁹ Some of the Africans simply buried the coins they were paid. This view of money and wealth would effect Markham throughout her life.

When her father was forced out of business after honoring a milling contract in a drought, and left Kenya to make a new life in Peru, Beryl was left to support herself through her expertise with horses. The night before her father left, she asked him if he thought she could become a trainer of horses as he had been. It was not an easy question to answer. Horseracing was a man.s sport. No woman had yet received a trainer.s license under English Jockey Club rules. But then, Beryl was no ordinary woman. Arap Maina had taught her to be fearless. Kibii had taught her to be competitive. Her father had taught her to manage horses and think like them. Although she was not quite eighteen years old, she had years of valuable experience in her father.s stables.²⁰ He advised her to begin working at a stable in Molo. She was seventeen, with only her horse, Pegasus and a couple of saddle-bags containing her personal possessions, but with these, she trekked to Molo to set up as a racehorse trainer. Markham would later write in her memoirs about being a woman involved in a man.s sport:"Trainers, big chested; trainers, flat chested; all of them men. All of them older than my eighteen years. Full of being men. Confident. Cocksure. They have a right to be. They know what they know, some of which I still have to learn, but not much I think. Not much I hope. We shall see. We shall see."²¹ She applied for and received her trainer.s license under English Jockey Club rules. She was the first woman to do so, not just in East Africa but also in England. A year later, her first winner of the Nairobi St Leger guaranteed her place in the traditionally male world of horse racing^.22 Once she had been called Lakweit. Now the Africans had a new name for her: Memsahib wa Farasi, or Lady of the Horses.

After marrying and divorcing a Scottish rugby player, Jock Purves, Beryl became in 1927 the wife of Mansfield Markham, who had left the Foreign Office to breed horses in Kenya.²³ Although marriage was more than an unfortunate interruption in her life, with Markham she did enjoy a brief period of luxury, with a honeymoon in Paris and clothes from Chanel. One of Beryl.s biographers, Mary Lovell, said this about her transition into high society in London: "Undoubtedly Beryl.s ability later in life to marry into London society, her cultured manners and accent, her pleasantly high, slightly nasal speaking voice, were developed by contact with expatriate upper class Europeans in Kenya,²⁴ such as Lord and Lady Delamere.

In 1928, Markham became pregnant, a predicament that appalled her. Beryl had grown up without a mother.s care. She knew nothing about taking care of a baby. She did not welcome motherhood. A boy was born in England on February 27, 1929, with a deformity that required a number of operations. This further horrified Beryl, who in her African world of absolutes could not accept a child that was unhealthy. As her biographer Errol Trzebinski explains, "In Kipsigis culture, midwives decided the fate of any child suffering abnormality. The infant would be placed on the ground outside the hut. If the baby was meant to live, it would survive the pounding hooves as the herdsmen drove their stock out to graze, shaurie ya mungu.God.s will.and accordingly was nurtured. If it perished, that was that."²⁵ Just as Clara Clutterbuck had abandoned her daughter, Beryl seemed more than willing to relinquish her son to her mother-in-law, Lady Markham.s, care and upbringing. Beryl had no reason to believe that her sickly son stood a chance at survival in the African highlands. At least with Lady Markham, Gervase.as he was named.would have a chance at survival. Perhaps to Beryl, leaving him in England must have been no different than placing the infant on the ground outside the hut and letting God decide his fate. Gervase did survive, but he grew up not knowing his mother.

By this time, Beryl and Mansfield were well on their way to divorce. They separated as a result of their differences, but also because Beryl was carrying on an affair with the Duke of Gloucester. London society was completely taken aback by the fact that Beryl had committed blatant adultery. They called her promiscuous. But in Africa this would have been a completely normal and accepted practice. Africans attach no shame to losing virginity; the politics of sex were "overtly patriarchal and the strongest principal of the organization in the tribe affected the women of the tribe directly."²⁶ Females were taught to drop whatever they were doing in favor of sex. Such influences on Beryl cannot be passed over, since she was immersed in Kibii.s culture. She even broke the taboos of his tribe by mixing exclusively with the boys. Caught in a time warp, wedged between two disparate cultures, she experienced two different but parallel lives.²⁷

When Markham returned to Kenya, she fell deeply and madly in love with a man named Denys Finch Hatton. Denys was a pilot and also an avid hunter. He introduced Beryl to planes and to flying, but it wasn.t until Finch Hatton.s death that she became devoted to flying. In Africa, people believe that everything must be paid for. Now, almost with a vengeance, as if accepting that the price of Denys.s love had been to forfeit him, she dedicated herself to the art of flying. She gave up horses for machines and within four weeks of his funeral, made her first solo flight.

Horseracing had been a man.s game that Beryl had boldly entered and won. Flying, however, was a new field for both men and women. In the United States, in France, in England, women were donning aviation suits and goggles and taking to the skies, performing loop-the-loops and setting long distance endurance records. In Kenya, Markham climbed into the cockpit of a Gypsy Moth and entered the world of aviation.²⁸

Hour by hour, Markham gained flying experience. As a child she had thought the cedars of the Mau forest so tall "their branches brushed the sky."²⁹ Now, she was flying over them. Instead of jotting down the names and statistics of horses in a black book each night, she now recorded her flying hours and routes in a log book. Just as a horse needs to be groomed and examined for swollen tendons and cracked hooves, so too an airplane needs to be maintained. She learned how to take apart an engine, how to replace spark plugs and how to clean jets. Just as a horserace relies on strategy to beat the odds on a racetrack, a flight requires a map. Beryl learned how to read maps and to trust their lines and blots. Without a map, she said, a pilot was blind. After eighteen months and nearly one thousand flying hours to her credit, Beryl applied for her B license under British regulations. The board granted her request. She had become a commercial pilot.³⁰

Markham would claim later in life that: "A life has to move or it stagnates. Even this life, I think. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday." So she searched for excitement in a different venue, abandoning commercial flying. She found safari scouting as her new source for adventure. She became the first woman bush pilot of East Africa, but with this, she had an ambivalent attitude. Flying for elephant was a dangerous, lucrative and exciting activity, but she felt that it was absurd for a man to kill an elephant: "It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and it is certainly not easy."³² The essence of elephant hunting was, she claimed, discomfort in such lavish proportions that only the wealthy could afford it. Although air scouting was exhilarating, it was not what she wanted to spend the rest of her days doing. Her life had begun to stagnate and once again, she moved on to a more invigorating challenge.

This new challenge came in the form of a dare put forth by John Carberry, a wealthy Irishman who had bought an estate in Kenya. He made a surprising suggestion to Markham at a dinner party in London in 1936. The talk had been about various record attempts and Beryl allowed her enthusiasm to show. Carberry said that if she would attempt to fly non-stop from England to New York, he would lend her the airplane presently under construction for his entry in the Cape Race. In 1936, no one had made a successful solo non-stop crossing from England to North America, and no woman had crossed the Atlantic from east to west in a solo flight. Amelia Earhart was indeed the only woman to have flown the Atlantic solo at that time and she had done it "the easy way", landing in Ireland after a relatively short flight of just over fifteen hours.³³

Beryl blazed through her thirty-fourth year like a comet. The thrill of record-breaking flights was momentous; indeed the world was waiting to be astonished by the-woman-across-the-water race and Beryl would not disappoint it. Transatlantic crossing had become a matter of national pride among pilots worthy of the name. The British would try 13 times; the French would make 12 attempts; the Germans 10; the Canadians and Poles, 4 each. The "Waterjump" was the term fliers used for this route among themselves.

Markham would later assert that she wasn.t interested in the fame and wealth associated with record-breaking feats. "Record flights had actually never interested me very much for myself. There were people who thought that such flights were done for admiration and publicity and worse. But of all the records. . . none had been made by amateurs, nor by novices, nor by men or women less hardened to failure, or less than masters of their trade. None of these was false. They were a company that simple respect and simple ambition made it worth more than an effort to follow."³⁴

Beryl went often to the factory at Gravesend, England, to watch her plane, The Messenger.s turquoise body and silver wings take shape from wood and metal and fabric. Her historic flight across the Atlantic began with the construction of a Vega Gull, designed to fly long distances. Her fuselage, or central body, was longer and wilder than standard airplane models. Her undercarriage allowed for additional fuel tanks. She had a total of six tanks, two of which were inside the cabin itself and formed a wall on either side of the cockpit. With that much fuel, a pilot could fly nonstop for 3,800 miles. It was more than enough to make the waterjump from England to the United States, provided the weather cooperated.³⁵

Markham said that she had "trained like an athlete" for her flight. She did not smoke or drink and she exercised daily to maintain her stamina, for fatigue would be as much a hazard to her as strong headwinds and blinding fog. She spent hours studying maps and plotting a route across the ocean. Flying was more than pointing the nose of a plane in one direction and holding her steady. Drift had to be factored into the route. Just as wind creates current and waves in the ocean, so too does wind create currents in the air. Wind direction and speed could push The Messenger off course. If visibility were good, Beryl might be able to calculate the amount of drift by watching the movement of the waves on the ocean. If visibility were poor, then she would have to fly blind and trust her instincts and experience to stay on course.

On September 4, 1936, a Friday, the weather forecast was gloomy. The west coast of England was drenched with fog and rain and Markham would have to contend with severe thunderstorms over the Atlantic. Time magazine later described the beginning moments of her flight: ". . . a lone British woman had just taken off from Abingdon in a single-motored sportplane with an almost suicidal minimum of 260 imperial gallons of gas." In order to carry enough fuel, the article reported, Markham found it necessary to rip out a passenger seat and to go without a radio. "Cocking an eye at the weather report, which indicated increasingly bad storms all the way," the news magazine reported, Markham "soared away into the rain."³⁶

Thirty minutes into the flight, Beryl knew she was in trouble. The headwinds were driving hard against her, reducing her speed to about ninety miles per hour. At that rate, it would take more than thirty hours to reach North America. The Messenger was eating up fuel. She was flying at about 2,000 feet, unable to see beyond the wingtips. She tried to climb above the storm, but the rain turned to sleet. Ice coating the wings could cause her to lose control of the plane. When she dove to a lower altitude, hoping to keep her eye on the movement of the waves and so adjust for drift, the turbulent winds sent her plane into a spin.

After four hours, the engine quit. The first fuel tank was empty. This was expected, though not so soon in the voyage. It was another indication that she was using up too much fuel in flying through the storm. Five fuel tanks remained. It was to be a long and lonely night. She flew blind for nineteen hours, eventually crash landing in a mossy bog. The plane ploughed into the muck and drove for forty feet. Then the left wheel sank, throwing The Messenger into a nosedive. Thrust forward, Beryl cracked her forehead against the glass and lost consciousness. She was found by a fisherman. He told her that she was on Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. She had just flown the Atlantic in twenty-one hours and twenty-five minutes nonstop.

On that Sunday afternoon, she arrived at Floyd Bennet Field in New York. 150 policeman had formed a protective line to hold back the crowd of five thousand people. It was not John Carberry.s The Messenger that had brought them to them. But they did not care. That she had flown the Atlantic and made the continent was good enough. In fact, it was spectacular. She was the first person.man or woman.to have flown from England to Canada, east to west across the Atlantic, and the throng of well-wishers roared with delight at seeing her.³⁷ It was at this moment that she lifted her arms and bowed to them in a traditional African salaam. In the golden age of flying, Beryl Markham had become a hero.

Beryl spent much of her life in the United States after her remarkable flight. She remarried and published her memoirs, entitled West with the Night in 1942. In 1952, Beryl returned at last to the place that was home after all, Kenya. She began training race horses again. "Beryl.s life had a rhythm to it, a refrain marked by loss, rebellion, and then achievement repeated itself over and over."³⁸ By 1958 and throughout the 1960.s, the Thoroughbreds in her stables were once again in the winner.s circle. But the cycle was about to repeat itself. She gave all of her attention to her horses and little to her finances. Beryl seemed to share the same attitude toward money as the Africans who had stood in line on payday at her father.s farm. The few coins that he counted out into their palms were either paid in taxes to the British government or buried in the ground as worthless trinkets. Beryl always spent whatever money she earned.

By 1980, she was once again living in squalor with only a few horses in her stables. But Beryl.s strength was that she dared to achieve again. "A life has to move or it stagnates." In 1983, the republication of her book West with the Night brought her new wealth and worldwide fame. In her 80.s, the woman who was once Lakweit continued to rise at dawn in the African highlands, to breathe deeply the sharp, cold air and to train horses. Beryl Markham died in Kenya on August 3, 1986, at the age of 83.

On September 4, 1986, the 50^th anniversary of her famous flight across the Atlantic, a Thanksgiving service for Beryl.s life was held at St Clement Dane.s Church in London. A packed congregation of friends from every sphere of life in which Beryl had been immersed.racing, aviation, and literature, from Kenya, America and all corners of the British Isles.heard Beryl.s friend George Bathurst Norman read an eloquent tribute to a woman he had found to truly be the epitome of adventure. "Around Beryl," he said, " life was never dull. Like a comet passing through the firmament she lit up all around her. None who came into contact with her could fail to recognize the genius of a truly remarkable person. I like to think that the place where she is now is a happier and more interesting place because of her presence. . . Kwaheri, Beryl; God bless you and God speed."³⁹