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