April 11, 2012 • 33 mins
Beryl Markham was Africa's first female licensed racehorse trainer, but by the 1920s she'd found a new passion: flying. She went on to become Kenya's first female commercial pilot, and by 1936 she was ready to fly solo across the Atlantic. Or was she?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast
I'm debling a chocolate boarding and I'm Scared downy And
a few weeks ago we did an episode on Bessie Coleman,
who was the first African American woman in the world
(00:21):
to earn a pilot's license, and after that, requests for
episodes about other female aviators just started to pour in
from listeners. One of the subjects that really caught my
eye was, of course, today's subject, Beryl Markham, who made
a historic solo flight across the North Atlantic Ocean in
ninety six from England to Canada. So that of course
(00:41):
made her the first woman to have flown across the
Atlantic from east to west, and the first person of
either gender to have made this trip taking off from England.
Of course, we all know Markham wasn't the only lady
to have crossed the Atlantic, though. Even if you know
very little about aviation, you probably know that Amelia Earhart,
who's been in the news again pretty recently because of
(01:02):
the renewed effort to find the wreckage of her plane,
became the first female aviator to traverse the Atlantic solo
in ninety two. But air Heart, of course, was crossing
the ocean in the opposite direction from west to east,
and I was interested to find while researching Markham, how
sources like to point out how she crossed the Atlantic
(01:23):
quote the hard way. Apparently, crossing from east to west
is much more difficult than the other way around because
of the powerful headwinds that you have to fly against.
In the northern hemisphere, the jet stream actually travels from
east to west. So this is quite a feat that
Markham accomplished. Yeah, and still, much like Coleman, there are
a lot of people who don't know much about Barrel Markham,
(01:44):
don't know much about who she was, So we're gonna
be talking about her historic flight, but also some of
her other accomplishments, because Markham's story doesn't begin and end
with flying, to say the least. There's some horse racing writing,
plenty of controversy, as well as a very eerie apathy
that she received in her youth. And you know, we
love we love it when our podcast subjects have these
(02:05):
strange prophecies. Beryls was, you will always be successful, but
you will never be happy. So we're gonna look into
that and see if it comes true how it pans
out for her. But first we have to tell you
a little bit about Beryl's unusual upbringing, because it really
sheds a lot of light on her unique character and
(02:26):
why she did a lot of things that she did later.
I know that's true of a lot of people, but
I think it's especially true in her case. She was
born Baryl Clutterbuck in Lester, England, on October nineteen o two.
Her parents were Charles and Clara Clutterbuck. Charles was a
former army officer who had actually been asked to resign
his commission, probably because of debts. He'd gone into the
(02:48):
army as a gentleman cadet, but since his father had
died after remarrying and having several more children, he didn't
come away with that. Charles, that is, didn't come away
with as much of an inheritance as he might have.
Up or wise, he was making a meager living for
himself training horses for fox hunting when Beryl was born.
Both he and his wife really loved horses, and they
(03:09):
and he in particular, had a great talent for training them.
So when Beryl was only about two or three, years old,
Charles Clutterbuck moved his family to East Africa, or specifically
to Kenya. And Kenya had come under a British control
in the late eighteen hundreds and people generally thought of
it as almost another India, and Charles and other kind
(03:29):
of people like him were drawn there by the potential
to purchase really inexpensive land and make a lot of
money farming there, and he hoped that this move for
his family would ultimately make him very wealthy. So Charles
ended up setting up a farm as well as timber
meals at Injuro, about eighty miles north of Nairobi, Kenya,
and once things got going, he did see some success
(03:52):
with these ventures. Family life, however, wasn't working out quite
the same way. Richard Beryl's elder brother, had always been
sort of sickly, and he got even worse when he
moved to Africa, so he was sent back to live
in England in September of nineteen o six. Clara Beryl's
mother followed three months later, but she went for very
different reasons. In England, she had been really social, enjoying
(04:14):
going to parties a lot and so forth, and there
just wasn't very much society at all to be had
in their new home. There was increasingly more stuff as
time went on, but still really not enough to satisfy her. Also,
living standards were way below what they were used to
back in England when they first arrived. For example, they
had to live in mud huts rather than real houses,
so there may have been some other reasons to just
(04:36):
besides the standard of living. Many also suspect that Beryl's
mother moved because of a romantic interest in Major Henry
or Harry Kirkpatrick. But either way, it's generally accepted that
Beryl never really forgave her mother for this abandonment. So
Beryl was left in Africa with her father and ended
up being a pretty undisciplined and she had an undisciplined upbringing.
(05:00):
She was watched over by African house servants, and her
childhood playmates were the kids of Africans who worked on
the farm. You know, a very different upbringing from what
she probably would have had back in England. But she
learned a lot too. She learned several African languages and
in a lot of ways she grew up almost more
African than European in her way of thinking. From the beginning.
(05:20):
She was known to be really full of life and
was always looking for adventure. She learned, for example, how
to hunt wild game with a spear and with a
bow and arrow when she was just a kid. One
thing that those who knew her tend to reiterate is
how she seemed to have no fear In her barrel
mark and biography Straight until Morning author Mary Lovell relates
the story of how Beryl and her cousin wants as kids,
(05:43):
killed a black mamba, which was one of the most
poisonous snakes in Africa, with sticks, and then they just
paraded the snake around the dead snaker on on poles.
Her other cousin said of her quote, she was absolutely
wild and would try anything, no matter how dangerous it was.
I looked depth the black mamba to to see what
it looked like. Pretty scary looking, right, very scary looking.
(06:04):
In an addition to being really venomous, they're supposedly very
very fast, which makes this little incident of attacking one
with sticks even scarier. But even though Beryl was so
bright and so energetic and so brave, she really didn't
get a lot of formal education, and it was through
her contact with other expatriate upper class Europeans in the
(06:27):
area that she learned the European manners and what was
you know, learned enough to be able to get along
in European social circles later in her life. She also
learned to read and write from a neighbor, Mrs Lidster,
when she was eight years old. She didn't have much
education beyond that though, despite having a governess. Yeah, that's
(06:48):
because the governess didn't quite work out the way perhaps
her father had planned. He hired Mrs Orchardson to teach Beryl,
probably by about nineteen ten or so, but Beryl really
did not like her and would do whatever she could
to keep from being around her. By this time, the
farm had a real house made of cedar, but Beryl
didn't want to live under the same roof as Mrs Orchardson,
(07:10):
so she kept living in her own mud hut a
little distance away from the house. She stayed out there
with her animal friends, who were her pet dogs and
other pets that she had, and her feelings here probably
stemmed from jealousy. Looking back on it, Mrs Orchardson and
Beryl's father, it turned out later that they were having
an affair. So and we'll talk a little bit about
Beryl's relationships with her father in a second, so you'll
(07:31):
see how this could have aroused those feelings in her. Yeah. So,
like other kids in the area, though, Beryl was eventually
sent to school in Nairobi in nineteen fifteen or so,
but she was expelled after only two and a half years,
probably because she was such a troublemaker and um, she
was going through a lot though. At this time she
found out that her parents were divorcing. Her mother remarried, uh,
(07:53):
and she also found out that her father intended to
remarry Through everything though, even this going on with Mrs
Orchardson and her father, and even though he worked constantly
and wasn't really around very much, Beryl did remain very
devoted to her father. She never really stopped loving and
idolizing him. And one said quote, I admire my father
(08:14):
for the way he raised me. People go around kissing
and fussing over their children. I didn't get anything like that.
I had to look after myself, and then I used
to go off and read by myself and think by myself.
Funnily enough, it made me one thing her father definitely
passed on to Baryl was his love for horses and
his talent for working with them. Horse Racing as a
(08:35):
sport was a really popular social activity with the colonists
in Africa, and of course Charles Clutterbuck became a really
big part of that. He had a stable at the
farm and he kept and trained horses, both his own
and others, and he'd import horses to raise the quality
of the animals available in the area. So he'd import
these great stallions, for example, and bread them with mayors
(08:57):
that were in Africa already and try to create great
race horses out of that. From a young age, Barrel
helped with the grooming and eventually took on the job
of delivering folds. She also had really superb bribing skills
and the uncanny knack for working with the most difficult
wild horses, I mean horses that would put other people
in the hospital. She would somehow work with and be
(09:20):
able to ride exactly. So there you go. But tom
buish as she seemed by the time Barrel was about sixteen,
she really did care a lot about her appearance. She
was considered very beautiful, almost six ft tall. She had
blue eyes and blonde hair, and according to a story
by Gavin Mortimer in The Telegraph, a contemporary once described
her as quote a magnificent creature, very feline. It was
(09:44):
like watching a beautiful golden lioness when she walked across
the room. Kind of an overblown description. Yea, I guess
maybe one that's Africa appropriate lion comparison. It does give
you kind of a picture of her looks. But maybe
that's why, you know, because of those look that when
things started to go south for her dad financially, she
(10:04):
it didn't really take very long for rumors to start
surrounding Beryl's own next step. Around nineteen eighteen or nineteen nineteen,
when Charles Clutterbuck was at the height of his racing successes.
He was winning a lot of races, his horses were
doing really well, and he was a big name as
a trainer in the area. Drought had his crops pretty
hard and he was unable to meet the government contracts
(10:25):
that he negotiated, so he had to get help from
several people to meet these contracts. And former Scottish rugby
player who was then a neighbor of the Clutterbuck's, Alexander
Jack Purvis was one of them. According to Level's book,
this is only a rumor, but there was a story
going around that Purvis was one of Charles's biggest creditors
and he struck up a deal that he would forgive
(10:47):
Charles's debt if Charles would let him marry Beryl. Kind
of an unscrupulous founding deal. But regardless of whether this
is true, Beryl did become engaged to Jack purvo Uson
married him when she was only about sixteen or seventeen
years old. He was about twice her age at the time.
They honeymooned together in India, and then in the meantime,
(11:09):
Beryl's brother Richard came back to live with her father
and started riding for him again, so it seemed kind
of like the family was coming back together almost. It
didn't last very long, though, Charles was still having a
lot of financial problems, and by November nineteen twenty he
announced he was going to sell everything, including all of
the horses, pack out to Peru, where he accepted a
(11:31):
position as a trainer. But before he left, he talked
to Beryl about her maybe coming becoming a trainer herself,
and soon after that she did become the first woman
in Africa, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, to obtain a racehorse
trainer's license, and started out training just a few horses
out of her old stables, which her husband by that
(11:54):
point owned, and she really had some success early on,
at least yeah one of her horses even placed second
in the East African Jerby when she was only nineteen
years old, But problems on the home front soon kind
of put the brakes on her training career. She and
Purvis were fighting a lot, sometimes things even got physical
between them. Part of it was probably just her general
(12:16):
and happiness that caused some of this tension at home.
Her beloved father, as we mentioned, had moved, and not
long after that, her brother Richard, who continued to be
sickly after he moved to Africa he passed away. Another
source of tension between Purvis and Barrel, though, was probably
Beryl's adulterous ways. She had a lot of lovers and
(12:36):
she never really saw a marriage as an obstacle to that.
According to Lovell, the story was that every time Beryl
would take on another lover, Purvis would nail a six
inch nail into the post by their front door, and
everybody in the area, all their friends kind of knew
what that stood for. So eventually Beryl went ahead and
(12:56):
left Purvis entirely. She had no money and had rely
on friends like Karen Blixen, who's the author of Out
of Africa, and apparently Beryl did live with Blixen for
a while after leaving purpose She Blixen was a few
years older than Beryl, but the two of them really
had some sort of close bond, and eventually, after Purvis
(13:17):
and Barrel divorced, she went back to training horses again,
living sometimes in huts or tents. Really was returning to
part of her childhood. It seemed, yeah, she didn't have
a lot of money and didn't really seemed that worried
about it. She was doing what she wanted to do,
training horses. But in n she did marry again, and
this time it was too English aristocrat Mansfield Markham, so
(13:39):
maybe she did care about money a little bit. The
two of them had a son, Gervais, in England in
nine but Beryl still couldn't shake her old ways and
so this marriage didn't work out much better than her first.
She continued to have affairs, one very scandalous one for example,
that took place right around the birth of her son.
I think before she had her son, while she was pregnant,
(14:01):
and kind of right after she had him, she was
having an affair with Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester. That
the crucial time. It's kind of it seems like an
interesting time to choose to have an affair, but she
did with Prince Henry. He was third in line with
further throne. The Queen found out about it, though, and
eventually gave Beryl an annuity of fifteen thousand pounds to
(14:22):
make her go away, and Beryl continued to receive this
throughout her life. So after that big scandal with the Prince,
Beryl returned to Africa to focus on horses again. But
in the fall of nineteen nine, she discovered something else
that she liked a lot, which was of course flying.
You know, we had to get to it sooner or later.
So she went up for the first time with Dennis
(14:42):
finch Hatton, who was a longtime lover of Beryl's dear
friend Karen Blixen, who we just mentioned. Uh, he was
at the controls and at this time Blixen and Hatton's
relationship was coming to an end, but still Blixen probably
wasn't that happy about her friend Beryl falling in love
with her long time boyfriend. Sort of a hero worshiping
(15:03):
thing probably went on between Beryl and Hatton, but they
did become lovers for a short time because Beryl was
probably just a kid when she met Hatton through blix
In so he you know, that's where the hero worship
thing came from. But a lot of people actually suspect
that she might have been the reason that Blixen and
Hattan broke up, but it's more likely, as you mentioned,
(15:24):
that they probably were already on their way to breaking
up at least by the time Beryl and he started
things up. So she immediately loved flying and she wanted
to learn to do it herself, so she started taking
flying lessons from a professional pilot, Tom Campbell Black, who
helped establish Kenya's first commercial air service. And flying in
East Africa, though, was no easy proposition, whether you were
(15:45):
a man or a woman. According to Jacquelin McLean's book
Women with Wings, maps were poor. Runways were basically just
these dirt tracks that were full of holes, and sometimes
there would be wild animals on them when we were
trying to land or something. But because the terrain was
rough for automobiles too, and there were a few roads.
People they are really welcomed planes as a potential mode
(16:06):
of transportation for them, so it was a useful scale
for her to to learn. But soon after she started learning,
Baryl got a very hard lesson in just how dangerous
flying in East Africa could be because on May fourteenth,
nineteen thirty one, Hatton was killed while taking off in
his plane in southeastern Kenya. Beryl was really devastated by
(16:26):
this that the event seemed to make her even more
determined to go on and become a pilot herself, and
only two months after hatt Instead, she earned her pilot's
license and then started studying to earn her B license,
which would allow her to become a commercial pilot, you know,
to capitalize on all these people who want to get
to areas that were difficult to reach. And on September eighteenth,
(16:49):
nineteen thirty three, she earned that B license and became
Kenya's first female commercial pilot. When she earned her license,
Barrel about her first plane and she started taking on jobs.
So we'll kind of give you an example of some
of the jobs that she took. She delivered mail and
supplies to miners and East African gold mines, and these
were extremely difficult flights, she said of them. Quote. The
(17:11):
air strips were pocket handkerchief size and force landing anywhere
on route and then almost certain death from thirst. She
also provided air taxi service to settlers in remote areas,
and she delivered medical supplies and emergencies and flew accident
victims are very sick people to hospitals. She also scouted
game for safari hunters. That was something that came up
(17:32):
a little later on. They realized that she could and
other pilots could maybe spot things like hell elephant herds,
for example, and then direct hunting parties to their location.
In meantime, Barrel also had a new boyfriend. She had
struck up a full blown relationship with Tom Black, and
according to Level's book, both Hatton and Black were really
(17:52):
the two loves of Beryl's life, the only two men
that she kind of had the same amount of respect for,
maybe as her father um Black might have also been
the only man she was ever faithful too. But together
Black and Baryl would talk a lot about flying. They
had that real strong bond in common and they talked
about going after various flying challenges. She did a few
(18:14):
of the smaller challenges. For instance, she made the six thousand,
five hundred mile trip from Kenya to England six times,
four of them solo, which was of course also over
very dangerous terrain. And then Black did a pretty major
challenge too. He went from London to Melbourne in a
race in nineteen thirty four and one the thing, but
(18:34):
Beryl's joy on his behalf him winning this race didn't
last very long because after the race, she found out
in a newspaper that he'd become engaged to a British
actress named Ms. Florence Desmond. Her reaction, though, was not
one of of anger, or at least um not for long.
She decided she wanted to win him back, so she
(18:56):
made one of her flights to England in early nineteen
thirty six and stayed there for a little while. And
it was while she was in London at a dinner
party that she got the inspiration she needed to take
on her biggest flying challenge yet. She had been telling
an acquaintance, John Carberry, about a wild goal of hers
to be the first woman to fly the Atlantic from
east to west and to be the first take off
(19:18):
from England. By this time, Earhart had her achievement under
her belt, and Scotsman Jim Mollison had flown the Atlantic
from east to west, but he'd started from Ireland, which
was a shorter route, probably just to test how serious
she was. We're not really sure what was behind it,
but Carberry told her that if she'd fly NonStop from
England to New York, he'd let her use his brand
(19:39):
new Vega Goal monoplane, which was then under construction, and
she of course accepted this challenge right away. The plane,
which would be named the Messenger, wouldn't be ready until August,
and so Beryl used this time in the interim to
train both physically and mentally, studying maps and routes and
plans of past crossings, both successful and otherwise, and Jim
(20:01):
Mallison even helped her plan her trip. So by September four,
Barrel was ready to start the trip, and there was,
of course, as you can imagine, a lot of hype
surrounding what she was about to do, and the press
made a big deal about her being quote a society lady,
which is a funny way to categorize her if you
consider her upbringing in mud huts and um. Beryl herself
(20:25):
read a letter that was published in a newspaper the
day after she left, and it said, quote, I failed
to see what an accident of birth has to do
with flying the ocean, so bam, there you go. But
the messenger was ready by the time Barrel was engaged
in the defense of her upbringing, and it was specially
designed to fly very long distances without stopping. The body
(20:48):
was longer and wider than standard planes, and it was
custom fitted with extra fuel tanks. There were two tanks
in the wings, two in the center, and two more
in the cabin. So with all of this that had
the path city to fly around three thousand, eight hundred
miles without stopping to refueling. Perfect for record breaking, however
not so perfect for taking off. So Beryl's initial challenge
(21:12):
was just getting off the ground with all of that
fuel in her plane. The runway in Abington, which is
where she took off, was a mile long, and Baryl
really wasn't sure at first if she was going to
be able to take off in that distance and if
she did if she'd be able to get the heavy
plane over the tree line. After that, she did manage
to get off the ground and in only six hundred
yards and was off on her journey. When she was
(21:34):
in the air, though, she had problems right from the start. First,
she lost her chart of the Atlantic. A gust of
wind blew right out of her hands and out of
the cockpit window, turning the plane around. I know it
would be too imagine. I mean, it's already hard enough
for us in the day and age to think about
doing something like this without GPS, but to think the
one little map that you have is suddenly right away. Well,
(21:58):
the conditions weren't good either. Another thing that made it
a very difficult trip. There was low visibility. That was
an issue pretty much the entire time because the weather
was very bad. There were clouds driving rain, a thirty
mile headwind, and Baryl basically flew blind for nineteen hours
and had to rely on the plane's instruments to guide her.
(22:19):
The messenger didn't have a radio, despite being so stated
of the art with fuel tanks, it didn't have a radio,
so she had no way to contact anybody if she
got into trouble. The worst parts, though, as she recalled them,
were the loneliness and the fatigue. All she had to
eat were some coffee and some nuts. A particular low
point that she remembered as when she went to grab
(22:39):
her last flask of coffee and the plane suddenly lurched,
and then the coffee spilled everywhere, and she was just
devastated in that moment. She said it was her lowest
point and it was the closest that she came to tears.
Losing her coffee wasn't the worst thing that could have happened,
though after that. Later on in the trip, something really
scary happened. Her engine started to off and die because
(23:01):
the fuel tank right out and the other one didn't
kick in right away, so her plane actually dropped to
blow three hundred feet before that new tank kicked in
and reached the engine well. And also that fuel tank
was her last one, and the gates said that it
would last another eleven hours, but only nine hours later
the engine started to fail again, and she couldn't figure
out what was going on because she should have had
(23:23):
more than enough fuel to reach New York City and
things were looking pretty dire. She later wrote, quote I
watched that tank getting emptier and emptier, and still saw
nothing but sea and clouds and missed so in these moments,
you know, preparing for a crash into the ocean. She
took a couple of swigs from her flask of brandy,
and then just as it seemed like the plane was
(23:44):
going to come down in the water, she saw land,
which was the coast of Nova Scotia, and later said,
I've never seen land so beautiful. She picked a grassy
spot and was able to bring the plane down onto it.
It wasn't just picture perfect though. Misjudged the landing spot.
What she thought was grassy ground was actually a moth
(24:05):
covered bog, so it was a rough landing. When she
brought the plane down, it tipped up on its nose
and she hit the windshield and got a huge gash
on her forehead. But overall she was very lucky. Just
that gash and some bruising, she was able to walk
away safe. She had to trudge for three miles though,
through waste hime mud, until she came across two fishermen
(24:26):
who took her to a farmhouse and got her medical attention.
She greeted them by saying quote I'm Mrs Markham. I've
just flown from England. Beryl was initially afraid after this point.
I mean, she was probably relieved just to be alive,
but she was afraid and sad that she had failed.
She didn't make it to New York, and she was
really upset about that. She couldn't figure out why. She
(24:46):
kept trying to evaluate. You know, I didn't have in
a fuel. It turned out later we should mention that,
or at least technicians assumed that what happened was that
her fuel tank froze and that's why the rest of
the fuel didn't make it to the engine, and maybe
why it was slow transitioning between the tanks exactly. So.
She soon learned, though, that people were applauding her accomplishment.
(25:09):
Nobody else was disappointed that she didn't make it to
New York. People were glad that she was alive, and
they thought that she had done something great. She was
a heroine, and so she was suddenly a star in
America and across the pond Aviator. Newspapers dubbed her quote
the beautiful Lady in Blue, and a US Coast Guard
plane brought her to New York, where she was celebrated,
and she even wrote in a motorcade throughout the city.
(25:30):
Lots of cool folks gave her kudos and various publications.
Earhart said, I am delighted beyond words that Mrs Markham
should have succeeded in her exploit and has conquered the Atlantic.
It was a great flight. It's a pretty nice thing
to say from the fellow aviator. So Tom Black also
praised her. He said, amazing. I thought she'd do it,
but the weather on what is always a tough cross
(25:52):
thing seemed appallingly bad. Um. But girl might have been
hopeful at this point that her great feet had also
done the double task of winning Black back to her.
But before she even set fail for England, she got
the terrible news that Black had been killed in a
freak accident. Another plane had landed on top of his,
(26:13):
and she was of course entirely devastated by this. She
lived in England for the next few years, but she
didn't really take up flying again. I was sort of
surprised by that that after something like this she put
it a fight for for a bit. She moved to
California nineteen thirty nine, and apparently there were plans for
the story of her transatlantic flight to be made into
(26:33):
a movie, but this never really panned out. Again, like
Bethy Coleman, they're two great movies now that could be
made about these women. She did, however, get an offer
to write about her experiences, and she produced the book
West with the Night, which was published in nine two.
In ninety two, she also officially divorced to Mansfield Markham
finally they hadn't lived together for years, and married her
(26:55):
third husband, Ral Schumacher, a writer and a journalist who
helped her write her book Book and the book was
well received at first, but eventually sales declined and people
just sort of forgot about it. I mean, this was
during World War two two, so there are more important
things going on perhaps for people to focus on. But
like her other relationships, Beryl's marriage to Schumacher eventually ended
(27:16):
unhappily and she returned to Kenyan in nineteen fifty so
for the last thirty some odd years of Beryl's life,
she returned to her first profession and her true childhood love,
which was horse racing. She became one of the most
successful trainers in Kenya, winning the Top Trainers Award five
times and the Kenya Derby six times, and continued to
train horses into the early eighties. Then in two she
(27:41):
became a well known personality again for a different reason,
kind of re emerged from the past. Almost yeah. A
man named George Gudkuntz, who was a friend of Ernest
heming Away's son Jack Hemingway, had read through ernest correspondence
and found a letter to as editor in which Hemingway
had called Beryl's book West with the Knight a quote
bloody wonderful book. Hemingway just as in a side a
(28:04):
side note to this. Hemingway had met Beryl in their youth,
I think in the nineteen thirties, late nineteen twenties, and
he had apparently hit on her, but she wasn't into it.
He was one of the few people she actually rebuffed,
which was a below to Hemingway's reputation. Absolutely, it was
kind of well, sort of unusual for both of them.
But that's just a little side note there. But this
(28:26):
man he got a publisher to reissue the book and
it became a huge success and made six figures through
its sales, appeared on best seller lists again, and inspired
a TV documentary about Beryl's life. So she did make
the money, got a little notoriety again toward the end
of her life, but she was still very lonely. And
that brings us back to that prediction the clairvoyant had
made when she was only sixteen, that you will always
(28:48):
be successful, but you will never be happy. Um. I
don't know how how much that's true, I know. I mean,
happiness is such a hard thing to define. Else happy enough, yeah,
I mean sometimes people just say they're happy because it
sounds good. And I mean I think she definitely had
fleeting moments of success and of happiness. But who can
(29:09):
really say if the some of all of that equals
a happy life or not. So. Beryl died in nineteen
six at the age of eighty four, but the controversy
did not end with her death. Some people don't believe
that she actually wrote West with the Night. They think
that her third husband, Raoul Schumacher wrote it. Errol Trasbinski
(29:30):
wrote a biography about Beryl in the nineteen nineties that
made exactly this claim. Yeah, some possible evidence that might
support this idea that she didn't write it. For example,
friends recalled them saying that they were writing it together,
but some who knew Beryl say that they always assumed
that she hadn't written it because she was basically literate
(29:50):
or didn't like to read or write, which I don't
know from what we've seen through our research. She did
actually like to read when she was younger, so I'm
not really sure if that she wasn't exactly literate. I
guess that's what I'm trying to say. It's a little
bit of an overstatement. Another example that people give is
that it contains literary references that people think had to
have come from Schumacher, and uh, conversely, errors and descriptions
(30:13):
about flying that Beryl would have never made. Also, much
of the original manuscript was in Raoul's handwriting. Mary Lovell,
though whose bioe mentioned earlier, spent a time with Baryl
before her death and seemed absolutely convinced that she was
the sole author of this book. Either way that it
sounds like an interesting read, it does. I I haven't
(30:34):
picked that up. I did read Level's book straight on
till morning, which was I mean, it's really hard to
put down. Um, it's written kind of interestingly, but it is. Uh,
it's one of the better biographies I've read recently, which
is saying a lot because every lot of biographies nowadays,
But she was really I think, I guess I say
why I think it's it's written in an interesting way
(30:56):
is because you can tell the affection almost the Level
house for Beryl throughout that book, and she did spend
six weeks with her before before writing this book and
shortly before Beryl's death. Maybe a little bit like Mrs
Gaskell Charlotte Bronte biography, you know, a biography that's clearly
influenced by knowing the person personally, which would have to
(31:17):
have you know, that would certainly make you take a
different take on writing about somebody's life. Absolutely, and you know,
Level says in her introduction to the book that it
was Beryl's influence that actually kind of gave her the
courage to quitter day job and become a full time writer.
So she was an inspiration to her in that way.
And I would encourage people, even if you don't have
(31:39):
time to read the full book, to read the introduction
because it is kind of moving in that way, and
you learn a lot about Beryl's personality, especially as an
older woman, from that. And I thought I would share
the inspiring quote that Speryl gave to Lovell. She said
to her when she heard about level struggles with wanting
to give up her job and debating about coming a
(32:00):
full time writer. Her advice was, never look back. You've
got to keep looking forward. Something will always happen if
you try to make it happen. So I think that's
a nice note to end on with Baryl's story. Well
in a nice quote from an aviator to where you're
not going to turn around just because your chart blows up,
You're gonna keep going straight on to novas. Very true.
(32:23):
So that was a listener request. If you guys have
any more requests of aviators, we might do maybe one
or two more episodes along these lines and maybe make
a little mini series out of it. Feel free to
write us and let us know what your suggestions are.
We're at History Podcast at Discovery dot com or you
can look us up on Facebook and we're on Twitter
at mist in History. And if you want to learn
a little bit more about another subject we mentioned on
(32:45):
today's podcast, Amelia Earhart, we do have an article called
why can't we Solve the Amelia Earhart Mystery? Maybe an
article that might need an update one of these days.
It might not be relevant. We'll see it on our
editorial calendars. Probably that I will know the story is
really going forward, So if you want to check that out,
search for Amelia Earhart on our homepage. It's www dot
(33:10):
how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out
our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how
Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and
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Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast
I'm debling a chocolate boarding and I'm Scared downy And
a few weeks ago we did an episode on Bessie Coleman,
who was the first African American woman in the world
(00:21):
to earn a pilot's license, and after that, requests for
episodes about other female aviators just started to pour in
from listeners. One of the subjects that really caught my
eye was, of course, today's subject, Beryl Markham, who made
a historic solo flight across the North Atlantic Ocean in
ninety six from England to Canada. So that of course
(00:41):
made her the first woman to have flown across the
Atlantic from east to west, and the first person of
either gender to have made this trip taking off from England.
Of course, we all know Markham wasn't the only lady
to have crossed the Atlantic, though. Even if you know
very little about aviation, you probably know that Amelia Earhart,
who's been in the news again pretty recently because of
(01:02):
the renewed effort to find the wreckage of her plane,
became the first female aviator to traverse the Atlantic solo
in ninety two. But air Heart, of course, was crossing
the ocean in the opposite direction from west to east,
and I was interested to find while researching Markham, how
sources like to point out how she crossed the Atlantic
(01:23):
quote the hard way. Apparently, crossing from east to west
is much more difficult than the other way around because
of the powerful headwinds that you have to fly against.
In the northern hemisphere, the jet stream actually travels from
east to west. So this is quite a feat that
Markham accomplished. Yeah, and still, much like Coleman, there are
a lot of people who don't know much about Barrel Markham,
(01:44):
don't know much about who she was, So we're gonna
be talking about her historic flight, but also some of
her other accomplishments, because Markham's story doesn't begin and end
with flying, to say the least. There's some horse racing writing,
plenty of controversy, as well as a very eerie apathy
that she received in her youth. And you know, we
love we love it when our podcast subjects have these
(02:05):
strange prophecies. Beryls was, you will always be successful, but
you will never be happy. So we're gonna look into
that and see if it comes true how it pans
out for her. But first we have to tell you
a little bit about Beryl's unusual upbringing, because it really
sheds a lot of light on her unique character and
(02:26):
why she did a lot of things that she did later.
I know that's true of a lot of people, but
I think it's especially true in her case. She was
born Baryl Clutterbuck in Lester, England, on October nineteen o two.
Her parents were Charles and Clara Clutterbuck. Charles was a
former army officer who had actually been asked to resign
his commission, probably because of debts. He'd gone into the
(02:48):
army as a gentleman cadet, but since his father had
died after remarrying and having several more children, he didn't
come away with that. Charles, that is, didn't come away
with as much of an inheritance as he might have.
Up or wise, he was making a meager living for
himself training horses for fox hunting when Beryl was born.
Both he and his wife really loved horses, and they
(03:09):
and he in particular, had a great talent for training them.
So when Beryl was only about two or three, years old,
Charles Clutterbuck moved his family to East Africa, or specifically
to Kenya. And Kenya had come under a British control
in the late eighteen hundreds and people generally thought of
it as almost another India, and Charles and other kind
(03:29):
of people like him were drawn there by the potential
to purchase really inexpensive land and make a lot of
money farming there, and he hoped that this move for
his family would ultimately make him very wealthy. So Charles
ended up setting up a farm as well as timber
meals at Injuro, about eighty miles north of Nairobi, Kenya,
and once things got going, he did see some success
(03:52):
with these ventures. Family life, however, wasn't working out quite
the same way. Richard Beryl's elder brother, had always been
sort of sickly, and he got even worse when he
moved to Africa, so he was sent back to live
in England in September of nineteen o six. Clara Beryl's
mother followed three months later, but she went for very
different reasons. In England, she had been really social, enjoying
(04:14):
going to parties a lot and so forth, and there
just wasn't very much society at all to be had
in their new home. There was increasingly more stuff as
time went on, but still really not enough to satisfy her. Also,
living standards were way below what they were used to
back in England when they first arrived. For example, they
had to live in mud huts rather than real houses,
so there may have been some other reasons to just
(04:36):
besides the standard of living. Many also suspect that Beryl's
mother moved because of a romantic interest in Major Henry
or Harry Kirkpatrick. But either way, it's generally accepted that
Beryl never really forgave her mother for this abandonment. So
Beryl was left in Africa with her father and ended
up being a pretty undisciplined and she had an undisciplined upbringing.
(05:00):
She was watched over by African house servants, and her
childhood playmates were the kids of Africans who worked on
the farm. You know, a very different upbringing from what
she probably would have had back in England. But she
learned a lot too. She learned several African languages and
in a lot of ways she grew up almost more
African than European in her way of thinking. From the beginning.
(05:20):
She was known to be really full of life and
was always looking for adventure. She learned, for example, how
to hunt wild game with a spear and with a
bow and arrow when she was just a kid. One
thing that those who knew her tend to reiterate is
how she seemed to have no fear In her barrel
mark and biography Straight until Morning author Mary Lovell relates
the story of how Beryl and her cousin wants as kids,
(05:43):
killed a black mamba, which was one of the most
poisonous snakes in Africa, with sticks, and then they just
paraded the snake around the dead snaker on on poles.
Her other cousin said of her quote, she was absolutely
wild and would try anything, no matter how dangerous it was.
I looked depth the black mamba to to see what
it looked like. Pretty scary looking, right, very scary looking.
(06:04):
In an addition to being really venomous, they're supposedly very
very fast, which makes this little incident of attacking one
with sticks even scarier. But even though Beryl was so
bright and so energetic and so brave, she really didn't
get a lot of formal education, and it was through
her contact with other expatriate upper class Europeans in the
(06:27):
area that she learned the European manners and what was
you know, learned enough to be able to get along
in European social circles later in her life. She also
learned to read and write from a neighbor, Mrs Lidster,
when she was eight years old. She didn't have much
education beyond that though, despite having a governess. Yeah, that's
(06:48):
because the governess didn't quite work out the way perhaps
her father had planned. He hired Mrs Orchardson to teach Beryl,
probably by about nineteen ten or so, but Beryl really
did not like her and would do whatever she could
to keep from being around her. By this time, the
farm had a real house made of cedar, but Beryl
didn't want to live under the same roof as Mrs Orchardson,
(07:10):
so she kept living in her own mud hut a
little distance away from the house. She stayed out there
with her animal friends, who were her pet dogs and
other pets that she had, and her feelings here probably
stemmed from jealousy. Looking back on it, Mrs Orchardson and
Beryl's father, it turned out later that they were having
an affair. So and we'll talk a little bit about
Beryl's relationships with her father in a second, so you'll
(07:31):
see how this could have aroused those feelings in her. Yeah. So,
like other kids in the area, though, Beryl was eventually
sent to school in Nairobi in nineteen fifteen or so,
but she was expelled after only two and a half years,
probably because she was such a troublemaker and um, she
was going through a lot though. At this time she
found out that her parents were divorcing. Her mother remarried, uh,
(07:53):
and she also found out that her father intended to
remarry Through everything though, even this going on with Mrs
Orchardson and her father, and even though he worked constantly
and wasn't really around very much, Beryl did remain very
devoted to her father. She never really stopped loving and
idolizing him. And one said quote, I admire my father
(08:14):
for the way he raised me. People go around kissing
and fussing over their children. I didn't get anything like that.
I had to look after myself, and then I used
to go off and read by myself and think by myself.
Funnily enough, it made me one thing her father definitely
passed on to Baryl was his love for horses and
his talent for working with them. Horse Racing as a
(08:35):
sport was a really popular social activity with the colonists
in Africa, and of course Charles Clutterbuck became a really
big part of that. He had a stable at the
farm and he kept and trained horses, both his own
and others, and he'd import horses to raise the quality
of the animals available in the area. So he'd import
these great stallions, for example, and bread them with mayors
(08:57):
that were in Africa already and try to create great
race horses out of that. From a young age, Barrel
helped with the grooming and eventually took on the job
of delivering folds. She also had really superb bribing skills
and the uncanny knack for working with the most difficult
wild horses, I mean horses that would put other people
in the hospital. She would somehow work with and be
(09:20):
able to ride exactly. So there you go. But tom
buish as she seemed by the time Barrel was about sixteen,
she really did care a lot about her appearance. She
was considered very beautiful, almost six ft tall. She had
blue eyes and blonde hair, and according to a story
by Gavin Mortimer in The Telegraph, a contemporary once described
her as quote a magnificent creature, very feline. It was
(09:44):
like watching a beautiful golden lioness when she walked across
the room. Kind of an overblown description. Yea, I guess
maybe one that's Africa appropriate lion comparison. It does give
you kind of a picture of her looks. But maybe
that's why, you know, because of those look that when
things started to go south for her dad financially, she
(10:04):
it didn't really take very long for rumors to start
surrounding Beryl's own next step. Around nineteen eighteen or nineteen nineteen,
when Charles Clutterbuck was at the height of his racing successes.
He was winning a lot of races, his horses were
doing really well, and he was a big name as
a trainer in the area. Drought had his crops pretty
hard and he was unable to meet the government contracts
(10:25):
that he negotiated, so he had to get help from
several people to meet these contracts. And former Scottish rugby
player who was then a neighbor of the Clutterbuck's, Alexander
Jack Purvis was one of them. According to Level's book,
this is only a rumor, but there was a story
going around that Purvis was one of Charles's biggest creditors
and he struck up a deal that he would forgive
(10:47):
Charles's debt if Charles would let him marry Beryl. Kind
of an unscrupulous founding deal. But regardless of whether this
is true, Beryl did become engaged to Jack purvo Uson
married him when she was only about sixteen or seventeen
years old. He was about twice her age at the time.
They honeymooned together in India, and then in the meantime,
(11:09):
Beryl's brother Richard came back to live with her father
and started riding for him again, so it seemed kind
of like the family was coming back together almost. It
didn't last very long, though, Charles was still having a
lot of financial problems, and by November nineteen twenty he
announced he was going to sell everything, including all of
the horses, pack out to Peru, where he accepted a
(11:31):
position as a trainer. But before he left, he talked
to Beryl about her maybe coming becoming a trainer herself,
and soon after that she did become the first woman
in Africa, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, to obtain a racehorse
trainer's license, and started out training just a few horses
out of her old stables, which her husband by that
(11:54):
point owned, and she really had some success early on,
at least yeah one of her horses even placed second
in the East African Jerby when she was only nineteen
years old, But problems on the home front soon kind
of put the brakes on her training career. She and
Purvis were fighting a lot, sometimes things even got physical
between them. Part of it was probably just her general
(12:16):
and happiness that caused some of this tension at home.
Her beloved father, as we mentioned, had moved, and not
long after that, her brother Richard, who continued to be
sickly after he moved to Africa he passed away. Another
source of tension between Purvis and Barrel, though, was probably
Beryl's adulterous ways. She had a lot of lovers and
(12:36):
she never really saw a marriage as an obstacle to that.
According to Lovell, the story was that every time Beryl
would take on another lover, Purvis would nail a six
inch nail into the post by their front door, and
everybody in the area, all their friends kind of knew
what that stood for. So eventually Beryl went ahead and
(12:56):
left Purvis entirely. She had no money and had rely
on friends like Karen Blixen, who's the author of Out
of Africa, and apparently Beryl did live with Blixen for
a while after leaving purpose She Blixen was a few
years older than Beryl, but the two of them really
had some sort of close bond, and eventually, after Purvis
(13:17):
and Barrel divorced, she went back to training horses again,
living sometimes in huts or tents. Really was returning to
part of her childhood. It seemed, yeah, she didn't have
a lot of money and didn't really seemed that worried
about it. She was doing what she wanted to do,
training horses. But in n she did marry again, and
this time it was too English aristocrat Mansfield Markham, so
(13:39):
maybe she did care about money a little bit. The
two of them had a son, Gervais, in England in
nine but Beryl still couldn't shake her old ways and
so this marriage didn't work out much better than her first.
She continued to have affairs, one very scandalous one for example,
that took place right around the birth of her son.
I think before she had her son, while she was pregnant,
(14:01):
and kind of right after she had him, she was
having an affair with Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester. That
the crucial time. It's kind of it seems like an
interesting time to choose to have an affair, but she
did with Prince Henry. He was third in line with
further throne. The Queen found out about it, though, and
eventually gave Beryl an annuity of fifteen thousand pounds to
(14:22):
make her go away, and Beryl continued to receive this
throughout her life. So after that big scandal with the Prince,
Beryl returned to Africa to focus on horses again. But
in the fall of nineteen nine, she discovered something else
that she liked a lot, which was of course flying.
You know, we had to get to it sooner or later.
So she went up for the first time with Dennis
(14:42):
finch Hatton, who was a longtime lover of Beryl's dear
friend Karen Blixen, who we just mentioned. Uh, he was
at the controls and at this time Blixen and Hatton's
relationship was coming to an end, but still Blixen probably
wasn't that happy about her friend Beryl falling in love
with her long time boyfriend. Sort of a hero worshiping
(15:03):
thing probably went on between Beryl and Hatton, but they
did become lovers for a short time because Beryl was
probably just a kid when she met Hatton through blix
In so he you know, that's where the hero worship
thing came from. But a lot of people actually suspect
that she might have been the reason that Blixen and
Hattan broke up, but it's more likely, as you mentioned,
(15:24):
that they probably were already on their way to breaking
up at least by the time Beryl and he started
things up. So she immediately loved flying and she wanted
to learn to do it herself, so she started taking
flying lessons from a professional pilot, Tom Campbell Black, who
helped establish Kenya's first commercial air service. And flying in
East Africa, though, was no easy proposition, whether you were
(15:45):
a man or a woman. According to Jacquelin McLean's book
Women with Wings, maps were poor. Runways were basically just
these dirt tracks that were full of holes, and sometimes
there would be wild animals on them when we were
trying to land or something. But because the terrain was
rough for automobiles too, and there were a few roads.
People they are really welcomed planes as a potential mode
(16:06):
of transportation for them, so it was a useful scale
for her to to learn. But soon after she started learning,
Baryl got a very hard lesson in just how dangerous
flying in East Africa could be because on May fourteenth,
nineteen thirty one, Hatton was killed while taking off in
his plane in southeastern Kenya. Beryl was really devastated by
(16:26):
this that the event seemed to make her even more
determined to go on and become a pilot herself, and
only two months after hatt Instead, she earned her pilot's
license and then started studying to earn her B license,
which would allow her to become a commercial pilot, you know,
to capitalize on all these people who want to get
to areas that were difficult to reach. And on September eighteenth,
(16:49):
nineteen thirty three, she earned that B license and became
Kenya's first female commercial pilot. When she earned her license,
Barrel about her first plane and she started taking on jobs.
So we'll kind of give you an example of some
of the jobs that she took. She delivered mail and
supplies to miners and East African gold mines, and these
were extremely difficult flights, she said of them. Quote. The
(17:11):
air strips were pocket handkerchief size and force landing anywhere
on route and then almost certain death from thirst. She
also provided air taxi service to settlers in remote areas,
and she delivered medical supplies and emergencies and flew accident
victims are very sick people to hospitals. She also scouted
game for safari hunters. That was something that came up
(17:32):
a little later on. They realized that she could and
other pilots could maybe spot things like hell elephant herds,
for example, and then direct hunting parties to their location.
In meantime, Barrel also had a new boyfriend. She had
struck up a full blown relationship with Tom Black, and
according to Level's book, both Hatton and Black were really
(17:52):
the two loves of Beryl's life, the only two men
that she kind of had the same amount of respect for,
maybe as her father um Black might have also been
the only man she was ever faithful too. But together
Black and Baryl would talk a lot about flying. They
had that real strong bond in common and they talked
about going after various flying challenges. She did a few
(18:14):
of the smaller challenges. For instance, she made the six thousand,
five hundred mile trip from Kenya to England six times,
four of them solo, which was of course also over
very dangerous terrain. And then Black did a pretty major
challenge too. He went from London to Melbourne in a
race in nineteen thirty four and one the thing, but
(18:34):
Beryl's joy on his behalf him winning this race didn't
last very long because after the race, she found out
in a newspaper that he'd become engaged to a British
actress named Ms. Florence Desmond. Her reaction, though, was not
one of of anger, or at least um not for long.
She decided she wanted to win him back, so she
(18:56):
made one of her flights to England in early nineteen
thirty six and stayed there for a little while. And
it was while she was in London at a dinner
party that she got the inspiration she needed to take
on her biggest flying challenge yet. She had been telling
an acquaintance, John Carberry, about a wild goal of hers
to be the first woman to fly the Atlantic from
east to west and to be the first take off
(19:18):
from England. By this time, Earhart had her achievement under
her belt, and Scotsman Jim Mollison had flown the Atlantic
from east to west, but he'd started from Ireland, which
was a shorter route, probably just to test how serious
she was. We're not really sure what was behind it,
but Carberry told her that if she'd fly NonStop from
England to New York, he'd let her use his brand
(19:39):
new Vega Goal monoplane, which was then under construction, and
she of course accepted this challenge right away. The plane,
which would be named the Messenger, wouldn't be ready until August,
and so Beryl used this time in the interim to
train both physically and mentally, studying maps and routes and
plans of past crossings, both successful and otherwise, and Jim
(20:01):
Mallison even helped her plan her trip. So by September four,
Barrel was ready to start the trip, and there was,
of course, as you can imagine, a lot of hype
surrounding what she was about to do, and the press
made a big deal about her being quote a society lady,
which is a funny way to categorize her if you
consider her upbringing in mud huts and um. Beryl herself
(20:25):
read a letter that was published in a newspaper the
day after she left, and it said, quote, I failed
to see what an accident of birth has to do
with flying the ocean, so bam, there you go. But
the messenger was ready by the time Barrel was engaged
in the defense of her upbringing, and it was specially
designed to fly very long distances without stopping. The body
(20:48):
was longer and wider than standard planes, and it was
custom fitted with extra fuel tanks. There were two tanks
in the wings, two in the center, and two more
in the cabin. So with all of this that had
the path city to fly around three thousand, eight hundred
miles without stopping to refueling. Perfect for record breaking, however
not so perfect for taking off. So Beryl's initial challenge
(21:12):
was just getting off the ground with all of that
fuel in her plane. The runway in Abington, which is
where she took off, was a mile long, and Baryl
really wasn't sure at first if she was going to
be able to take off in that distance and if
she did if she'd be able to get the heavy
plane over the tree line. After that, she did manage
to get off the ground and in only six hundred
yards and was off on her journey. When she was
(21:34):
in the air, though, she had problems right from the start. First,
she lost her chart of the Atlantic. A gust of
wind blew right out of her hands and out of
the cockpit window, turning the plane around. I know it
would be too imagine. I mean, it's already hard enough
for us in the day and age to think about
doing something like this without GPS, but to think the
one little map that you have is suddenly right away. Well,
(21:58):
the conditions weren't good either. Another thing that made it
a very difficult trip. There was low visibility. That was
an issue pretty much the entire time because the weather
was very bad. There were clouds driving rain, a thirty
mile headwind, and Baryl basically flew blind for nineteen hours
and had to rely on the plane's instruments to guide her.
(22:19):
The messenger didn't have a radio, despite being so stated
of the art with fuel tanks, it didn't have a radio,
so she had no way to contact anybody if she
got into trouble. The worst parts, though, as she recalled them,
were the loneliness and the fatigue. All she had to
eat were some coffee and some nuts. A particular low
point that she remembered as when she went to grab
(22:39):
her last flask of coffee and the plane suddenly lurched,
and then the coffee spilled everywhere, and she was just
devastated in that moment. She said it was her lowest
point and it was the closest that she came to tears.
Losing her coffee wasn't the worst thing that could have happened,
though after that. Later on in the trip, something really
scary happened. Her engine started to off and die because
(23:01):
the fuel tank right out and the other one didn't
kick in right away, so her plane actually dropped to
blow three hundred feet before that new tank kicked in
and reached the engine well. And also that fuel tank
was her last one, and the gates said that it
would last another eleven hours, but only nine hours later
the engine started to fail again, and she couldn't figure
out what was going on because she should have had
(23:23):
more than enough fuel to reach New York City and
things were looking pretty dire. She later wrote, quote I
watched that tank getting emptier and emptier, and still saw
nothing but sea and clouds and missed so in these moments,
you know, preparing for a crash into the ocean. She
took a couple of swigs from her flask of brandy,
and then just as it seemed like the plane was
(23:44):
going to come down in the water, she saw land,
which was the coast of Nova Scotia, and later said,
I've never seen land so beautiful. She picked a grassy
spot and was able to bring the plane down onto it.
It wasn't just picture perfect though. Misjudged the landing spot.
What she thought was grassy ground was actually a moth
(24:05):
covered bog, so it was a rough landing. When she
brought the plane down, it tipped up on its nose
and she hit the windshield and got a huge gash
on her forehead. But overall she was very lucky. Just
that gash and some bruising, she was able to walk
away safe. She had to trudge for three miles though,
through waste hime mud, until she came across two fishermen
(24:26):
who took her to a farmhouse and got her medical attention.
She greeted them by saying quote I'm Mrs Markham. I've
just flown from England. Beryl was initially afraid after this point.
I mean, she was probably relieved just to be alive,
but she was afraid and sad that she had failed.
She didn't make it to New York, and she was
really upset about that. She couldn't figure out why. She
(24:46):
kept trying to evaluate. You know, I didn't have in
a fuel. It turned out later we should mention that,
or at least technicians assumed that what happened was that
her fuel tank froze and that's why the rest of
the fuel didn't make it to the engine, and maybe
why it was slow transitioning between the tanks exactly. So.
She soon learned, though, that people were applauding her accomplishment.
(25:09):
Nobody else was disappointed that she didn't make it to
New York. People were glad that she was alive, and
they thought that she had done something great. She was
a heroine, and so she was suddenly a star in
America and across the pond Aviator. Newspapers dubbed her quote
the beautiful Lady in Blue, and a US Coast Guard
plane brought her to New York, where she was celebrated,
and she even wrote in a motorcade throughout the city.
(25:30):
Lots of cool folks gave her kudos and various publications.
Earhart said, I am delighted beyond words that Mrs Markham
should have succeeded in her exploit and has conquered the Atlantic.
It was a great flight. It's a pretty nice thing
to say from the fellow aviator. So Tom Black also
praised her. He said, amazing. I thought she'd do it,
but the weather on what is always a tough cross
(25:52):
thing seemed appallingly bad. Um. But girl might have been
hopeful at this point that her great feet had also
done the double task of winning Black back to her.
But before she even set fail for England, she got
the terrible news that Black had been killed in a
freak accident. Another plane had landed on top of his,
(26:13):
and she was of course entirely devastated by this. She
lived in England for the next few years, but she
didn't really take up flying again. I was sort of
surprised by that that after something like this she put
it a fight for for a bit. She moved to
California nineteen thirty nine, and apparently there were plans for
the story of her transatlantic flight to be made into
(26:33):
a movie, but this never really panned out. Again, like
Bethy Coleman, they're two great movies now that could be
made about these women. She did, however, get an offer
to write about her experiences, and she produced the book
West with the Night, which was published in nine two.
In ninety two, she also officially divorced to Mansfield Markham
finally they hadn't lived together for years, and married her
(26:55):
third husband, Ral Schumacher, a writer and a journalist who
helped her write her book Book and the book was
well received at first, but eventually sales declined and people
just sort of forgot about it. I mean, this was
during World War two two, so there are more important
things going on perhaps for people to focus on. But
like her other relationships, Beryl's marriage to Schumacher eventually ended
(27:16):
unhappily and she returned to Kenyan in nineteen fifty so
for the last thirty some odd years of Beryl's life,
she returned to her first profession and her true childhood love,
which was horse racing. She became one of the most
successful trainers in Kenya, winning the Top Trainers Award five
times and the Kenya Derby six times, and continued to
train horses into the early eighties. Then in two she
(27:41):
became a well known personality again for a different reason,
kind of re emerged from the past. Almost yeah. A
man named George Gudkuntz, who was a friend of Ernest
heming Away's son Jack Hemingway, had read through ernest correspondence
and found a letter to as editor in which Hemingway
had called Beryl's book West with the Knight a quote
bloody wonderful book. Hemingway just as in a side a
(28:04):
side note to this. Hemingway had met Beryl in their youth,
I think in the nineteen thirties, late nineteen twenties, and
he had apparently hit on her, but she wasn't into it.
He was one of the few people she actually rebuffed,
which was a below to Hemingway's reputation. Absolutely, it was
kind of well, sort of unusual for both of them.
But that's just a little side note there. But this
(28:26):
man he got a publisher to reissue the book and
it became a huge success and made six figures through
its sales, appeared on best seller lists again, and inspired
a TV documentary about Beryl's life. So she did make
the money, got a little notoriety again toward the end
of her life, but she was still very lonely. And
that brings us back to that prediction the clairvoyant had
made when she was only sixteen, that you will always
(28:48):
be successful, but you will never be happy. Um. I
don't know how how much that's true, I know. I mean,
happiness is such a hard thing to define. Else happy enough, yeah,
I mean sometimes people just say they're happy because it
sounds good. And I mean I think she definitely had
fleeting moments of success and of happiness. But who can
(29:09):
really say if the some of all of that equals
a happy life or not. So. Beryl died in nineteen
six at the age of eighty four, but the controversy
did not end with her death. Some people don't believe
that she actually wrote West with the Night. They think
that her third husband, Raoul Schumacher wrote it. Errol Trasbinski
(29:30):
wrote a biography about Beryl in the nineteen nineties that
made exactly this claim. Yeah, some possible evidence that might
support this idea that she didn't write it. For example,
friends recalled them saying that they were writing it together,
but some who knew Beryl say that they always assumed
that she hadn't written it because she was basically literate
(29:50):
or didn't like to read or write, which I don't
know from what we've seen through our research. She did
actually like to read when she was younger, so I'm
not really sure if that she wasn't exactly literate. I
guess that's what I'm trying to say. It's a little
bit of an overstatement. Another example that people give is
that it contains literary references that people think had to
have come from Schumacher, and uh, conversely, errors and descriptions
(30:13):
about flying that Beryl would have never made. Also, much
of the original manuscript was in Raoul's handwriting. Mary Lovell,
though whose bioe mentioned earlier, spent a time with Baryl
before her death and seemed absolutely convinced that she was
the sole author of this book. Either way that it
sounds like an interesting read, it does. I I haven't
(30:34):
picked that up. I did read Level's book straight on
till morning, which was I mean, it's really hard to
put down. Um, it's written kind of interestingly, but it is. Uh,
it's one of the better biographies I've read recently, which
is saying a lot because every lot of biographies nowadays,
But she was really I think, I guess I say
why I think it's it's written in an interesting way
(30:56):
is because you can tell the affection almost the Level
house for Beryl throughout that book, and she did spend
six weeks with her before before writing this book and
shortly before Beryl's death. Maybe a little bit like Mrs
Gaskell Charlotte Bronte biography, you know, a biography that's clearly
influenced by knowing the person personally, which would have to
(31:17):
have you know, that would certainly make you take a
different take on writing about somebody's life. Absolutely, and you know,
Level says in her introduction to the book that it
was Beryl's influence that actually kind of gave her the
courage to quitter day job and become a full time writer.
So she was an inspiration to her in that way.
And I would encourage people, even if you don't have
(31:39):
time to read the full book, to read the introduction
because it is kind of moving in that way, and
you learn a lot about Beryl's personality, especially as an
older woman, from that. And I thought I would share
the inspiring quote that Speryl gave to Lovell. She said
to her when she heard about level struggles with wanting
to give up her job and debating about coming a
(32:00):
full time writer. Her advice was, never look back. You've
got to keep looking forward. Something will always happen if
you try to make it happen. So I think that's
a nice note to end on with Baryl's story. Well
in a nice quote from an aviator to where you're
not going to turn around just because your chart blows up,
You're gonna keep going straight on to novas. Very true.
(32:23):
So that was a listener request. If you guys have
any more requests of aviators, we might do maybe one
or two more episodes along these lines and maybe make
a little mini series out of it. Feel free to
write us and let us know what your suggestions are.
We're at History Podcast at Discovery dot com or you
can look us up on Facebook and we're on Twitter
at mist in History. And if you want to learn
a little bit more about another subject we mentioned on
(32:45):
today's podcast, Amelia Earhart, we do have an article called
why can't we Solve the Amelia Earhart Mystery? Maybe an
article that might need an update one of these days.
It might not be relevant. We'll see it on our
editorial calendars. Probably that I will know the story is
really going forward, So if you want to check that out,
search for Amelia Earhart on our homepage. It's www dot
(33:10):
how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out
our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how
Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and
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