Beryl Clutterbuck Markham

Beryl Markham (Rutland, 1902 – Nairobi, 1986) was an aviator, racehorse trainer and writer born in England who spent much of her life in Kenya. She is best known for a flight in 1936, when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. Her aircraft came down in Nova Scotia rather than New York, but the crossing still secured her place in aviation history. She wrote in English, and her memoir made her a distinctive voice in travel writing about colonial Africa.

Born Beryl Clutterbuck, she moved with her father to British East Africa at the age of four and grew up on a farm at Njoro, hunting and playing with children of many backgrounds. As a teenager she became a racehorse trainer, and later learned to fly under the influence of Tom Campbell Black, with whom she had a long relationship. She flew in remote areas, spotting game from the air for safari parties on the ground. Her private life was turbulent: she married three times, had an affair with Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, son of George V, and befriended Karen Blixen in the Ngong Hills.

Her 1936 flight set out from England for New York, but her Vega Gull, The Messenger, ran short of fuel after ice blocked the tank vents, and she landed in Canada. She did not reach her goal, but she became the first woman to cross the Atlantic alone in that direction. After many years in the United States, she returned to Kenya in 1952 and resumed training racehorses.

Her memoir, West with the Night, appeared in 1942. It received good reviews but sold modestly and soon went out of print. In 1982 the Californian restaurateur George Gutekunst rediscovered it, and a reissue the following year brought her late-life financial security and renewed attention.

Questions were raised about whether she wrote the book, since her third husband, the journalist Raoul Schumacher, was suspected of contributing to it. The biographer Mary S. Lovell, who interviewed her shortly before her death, concluded that she was the sole author, although Schumacher made some basic edits. Today she is remembered in aviation history and by a crater on Venus named after her by the International Astronomical Union.