Beryl Markham

https://books.google.dk/books?id=u3um6-uFF6EC&pg=PT344&lpg=PT344&dq...

In a few years, when the farm was settled and a western-style house had been built, Beryl's father brought in tutors for her formal education. During World War I, she was sent away to a proper English school in Nairobi, but she felt out of place there. After three years she was expelled from school and she returned to her father's farm at Njoro. When she was 16, Beryl married Jock Purves. The marriage was not successful and ended in divorce three years later.

Source: Beryl Markham Facts - Biography - YourDictionary biography.yourdictionary.com › Reference › Biography › Beryl Markham

This condescension of the colonizer is scattered more liberally throughout Trzebinski's own writing: "Africa in the grip of atavism bows its head to customs centuries old, by fear and talismen." {sic} This is not just bad writing, though Trzebinski often loses control of her sentences. She also has, shall we say, an underdeveloped sense of consequence. My favorite example comes when she is describing Markham's first husband, Jock Purves, whom she married on Oct. 15, 1919, 11 days before her 17th birthday. "Jock was almost twice Beryl's age (a high preponderance of the men she was to be involved with were balding)."

Source: THE LOVER WHO FLEW SOLO - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../65922786-06f9-45b8-b77a-2e05b5fd...

Added to Geni by Janet Milburn 5/7/2018 _____________________________________________________

Wikipedia: English

Beryl Markham born October 26, 1902, died August 3, 1986.

Beryl Markham was a British-born Kenyan aviatrix, adventurer, and racehorse trainer. During the pioneer days of aviation, she became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. She is now primarily remembered as the author of the memoir West with the Night.

Obit BERYL MARKHAM IS DEAD AT 83; FLEW ACROSS ATLANTIC IN 1936 AP

The article as it originally appeared. VIEW PAGE IN TIMESMACHINE , Page 00022 The New York Times Archives The British aviation pioneer Beryl Markham, who in 1936 became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west, died Sunday at a Nairobi hospital, her lawyer said today. She was 83 years old.

Mrs. Markham was also a professional race horse trainer, with six Kenya Derby winners, and remained active as a trainer until her death.

Her lawyer, Jack Couldrey, said she died after an operation on a leg she broke at the weekend when she tripped over her dog at her Nairobi cottage.

She was born in Melton Mowbray, England, but was brought to Kenya at the age of 4 by her divorced father, Charles B. Clutterbuck, a retired British Army captain, who bought a farm.

She hunted wild boar as a barefoot child. Formal Education Slight

Mrs. Markham had less than four years of formal education, but her father made her read extensively after she was expelled from a Nairobi school for a prank. Later, she was taught literature and music by an Oxford-educated aristocrat and professional hunter, Denys Finch Hatton, lover of the Danish writer Karen Blixen, who was better known as Isak Dinesen. She was also a pilot for Baron von Blixen.

Baroness Blixen described her as pantherine. Mrs. Markham's blond beauty was legendary in colonial Kenya.

She married and divorced three times.

Her 1942 memoir, West With the Night, chronicled her Kenyan childhood and historic flight across the Atlantic. Ernest Hemingway called the book bloody wonderful. It was republished four decades later to glowing reviews in Britain and the United States.

She learned to fly in Kenya, became a bush pilot and pioneered the scouting of elephants from the air for safaris, when Kenya was a British colony and encouraged big game hunting.

By 1936, successful attempts had been made to cross the Atlantic westward from Europe, but all the aircraft carried at least two people aboard and were piloted by men. A Ticker Tape Parade

Mrs. Markham left Abingdon Royal Air Force field in Britain in a single-engine Percival Gull monoplane on Sept. 4, 1936, and had to land in a bog in Nova Scotia after running low on fuel. She received a ticker tape parade in New York, her original goal.

She said that the weather was simply terrible from the time I took off and that she had to fly by instruments all the way.

Mrs. Markham worked for a time in Hollywood as a consultant in films dealing with flying or Africa.

Her marriages were to Alexander Purves, once an international rugby player for his native Scotland; to Mansfield Markham, heir to a British coal mining fortune, and to the American writer and editor Raoul Schumacher.

A son by Mr. Markham, whose name she kept, died in an auto accident in 1971.