Beryl Markham

Beryl Markham was born in Leicestershire and taken to British East Africa at four when her father bought land near Njoro to farm and train horses. Her mother returned to England; Beryl stayed, growing up largely unsupervised among the Kipsigis and Nandi children on the farm, learning to hunt with a spear and to ride anything. At eighteen she was the first woman in Kenya licensed to train racehorses, and she won the Kenya Derby.

She learned to fly in 1931 in Nairobi and became a working bush pilot, carrying mail, passengers and medical supplies across country without maps, and scouting elephant herds for safari hunters, a job she came to dislike. In 1936, a London group looking for publicity offered to fund an attempt at the Atlantic from east to west, into the prevailing wind, which nobody had done alone.

She took off from Abingdon on 4 September 1936 in a Vega Gull with no radio. After some twenty hours of flying through night and storm, ice blocked the fuel line and the engine cut out. She glided down into a peat bog on Cape Breton Island, nose-first, and climbed out with a cut on her forehead to walk for help. New York gave her a parade.

Her memoir, West with the Night, was published in 1942 to praise from Hemingway, then forgotten. It was rediscovered in the 1980s and became a bestseller while she was living quietly, and rather poor, in a cottage at the Nairobi racecourse, training horses to the end.