Beryl Markham was born Beryl Clutterbuck, an
aristocratic (though the family was not wealthy)
British name, in 1903 and
was raised in British East Africa—now
Kenya. She was smitten by
flying when she was in her late
twenties, soon logged a thousand hours and worked
as a bush pilot out of
Nairobi. Twice married and twice
divorced, Markham was a woman with social graces
and noble bearing, though
she was a sportswoman and anything but snobbish.
Having flown, by her own
calculation, hundreds of thousands
of miles over the African jungle, she decided to
fly a new Percival Vega
Gull, which she named the
Messenger, from England to New York.
Beryl Markham, the British socialite who made the first
east-to-west non-stop solo trans-Atlantic flight in 1936.
The flight
west-ward over the North Atlantic was more difficult
than a flight in the opposite
direction because of the
prevailing easterly winds of the
jetstream. Markham made it to Nova
Scotia, and when the engine cut
out she landed the plane nose down
in a bog. It was not the most elegant
crossing of the Atlantic, but it made her famous
nonetheless.
Markham also showed a real talent for writing
about flight and her works are still considered
some of the most inspiring
aviation literature ever written.
Though they had very different
personalities, Johnson and Markham
shared one very important quality—they
competed and flew on equal
terms with men, Johnson having the
technical expertise and Markham the flight
experience. Even Earhart, as accomplished as she was,
could not match either of these aviators
for sheer flying ability or
know-how. It is inconceivable, for example,
that either Johnson or
Markham would have agreed to be
only a passenger on the Friendship, as Earhart had.
The next generation of
woman aviators (such as Jean
Batten) would look more frequently to Johnson and
Markham as role models than to Earhart, Quimby, or
Nichols.
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