Beryl Markham, pioneer Nairobi socialite who kept the Kenya colony busy

If you know Karen Blixen, then, certainly, you should know Beryl Markham, the pioneer Nairobi socialite. Tuesday this week marked 35 years since her death, and it appears the woman who kept the Kenya colony busy with her escapades — of love, sleaze, and adventure — is just about to be forgotten.

If there is a movie that could match Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa, then it should be on Beryl Markham, her three husbands, numerous lovers and flying exploits.

This is the girl who ‘stole’ Karen Blixen’s husband Denys Finch-Hatton. When she was confronted she made the most remarkable defence: “Of course I made love with him, sometimes when we were out there (in the bush), there was nothing else to do but make love....But I never did have a love affair with him.”

Besides her beauty, which hypnotised the settlers, Beryl was a horse trainer and an aviator. She looked like a supermodel, stood six feet tall and was care-free. She was the only white settler, perhaps, who spoke positively of Blacks, having grown up as a tomboy among the Kipsigis.

Brought to Kenya when she was only two and half years, her father, Captain Charles Clutterbuck, watched as his wife, Clara, left him and sailed back to England, leaving the young Beryl behind. She claimed that she hated the lonely life in the wilderness, though, as it’d turn out later on, she had actually fallen in love with  Maj HF Kirkpatrick.

From then on, Beryl’s life was a mishmash of social experiments. She had a lifelong mistrust of women, thanks to her mother’s disappearance, and she soon found solace among her African agemates in Njoro’s Ndimu Farm.

With her father busy training horses, Beryl was left with the farm workers and learnt Kiswahili (and perhaps Kipsigis) as her first language. She would often spend time with local Kipsigis boys, and in her book she mentions her escapades with Kibii when she was 12.  “Kibii and I did what children do when there are things too big to understand; we stayed close to each other and played games that made no noise.” 

Her later unauthorised biographer Error Trzebinski suggested in his book, The Lives of Beryl Markham, that Beryl had “nocturnal adventures” with Kibii, later known as arap Ruto. It was a friendship that continued later and Kibii was one of Beryl’s trusted employees until the late 1950s.

After Beryl’s mother left, her father employed Emma Ochardson as her maid, but Beryl disliked her for trying to interrupt her African escapades. Emma was more than a maid; and as it emerged later, she was, actually, Clutterbuck’s mistress.

Love triangle commenced

Perhaps to stop Beryl’s escapades with African boys, she was forced into an early marriage at 16 to a neighbouring farmer, Capt Jock Purves, a Scottish soldier who was the founder of Njoro Golf Club and an employee at Beryl’s father’s sawmill.

The marriage was a disaster. “They spent the first night of their honeymoon at Muthaiga, then to India. It was a disaster. Jock drank heavily. Neighbours thought Jock was too coarse for her. He could not face her in bed without alcohol and she quickly (got) tired of him,” one writer summed up the marriage. 

After only six months, Beryl left. After that Jock became paranoid and in December 1923, outside Nakuru Hotel, he broke Lord Delamere’s neck over a girl.

By this time, the Kenyan economy was in a mess and nothing seemed to work. The post-war economic depression and currency crisis had hit many farmers. Beryl’s father had been auctioned in 1920 and in frustration left for Cape Town,  then to Peru. Emma left for Australia.

Beryl, now 18, was on her own, but following her father’s footsteps as a horse trainer. This was just about the time that Danish writer Karen Blixen’s marriage to Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke was collapsing. Apparently, at Muthaiga Country Club, Karen had been introduced to Etonian casanova Denys George Finch Hatton, an aristocrat and son of the 13th Earl of Winchilsea.

Soon, he developed a close friendship with Blixen and her Swedish husband, another aristocrat, and whether this accelerated their divorce is not clear. What we know is that when Karen divorced Finecke, Denys moved in. Their love affair would soon be disrupted by the arrival of Beryl Markham.

Beryl had befriended Karen, then struggling to farm coffee in the Ngong hills, perhaps to get Denys. Both Beryl and Denys shared similar hobbies — flying and safari. It is said most of the girls in the colony wanted this boy who had good looks. Beryl did, too, and soon a love triangle commenced. It was Denys who would take Beryl for flying lessons and that is how their love affair started; though she knew that it would not end in marriage.

And that explains why Beryl fled to London to terminate a pregnancy in 1925, rather than tell Denys, who was said to be “incapable of long-term monogamy.”

In 1927, Beryl, to the surprise of Nairobi’s social elite, got married to Mansfield Markham, the son of a British industrialist. They had a son. Five months earlier, it had been announced in Nairobi that she was engaged to Robert Watson, son of Lord Manton, the pioneer family in industrialised agriculture.

Love affair with Prince Henry

In the elite social gossip of 1920s, especially in Muthaiga, Watson’s predicament was treated as a lucky escape. It was true. After only two years in marriage, Beryl started a public affair with Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester and son of British King George V.

Beryl had apparently met Prince Henry when he accompanied his brother Prince of Wales on safari to Kenya. By now an aviator, and the only pilot who knew the African bush, Beryl was one of the few with a Class B licence.

The affair with a member of the Royal family was not discreet and Mr Markham got to know about it. He threatened to sue for divorce and name the Prince as a co-respondent. Faced with a sex scandal that could rock the British royal family, and in order to save face in the courts, Prince Henry agreed to put £15,000 into at trust for Beryl. He also agreed to pay her an annuity for the rest of her life, and that is the money she used to finance her later escapades. It was banked in Bermuda.

Error Trzebinski suggests in The Lives of Beryl Markham that besides Prince Henry, Beryl also slept with his brother, the Prince of Wales. 

But it was her affair with Capt Hubert Broad that would lead to divorce in 1937. It happened that after she had earned international fame in September 1936 — when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west — she eloped with Broad, the man who had partly influenced her flying career.

By flying the single engine Percival Gull monoplane — from Abinton, England to the US — in a record 21 hours and 25 minutes, Beryl had turned to be a daredevil. Actually, media reports say she did not land but crash-landed in a Canadian bog in Bailing Cove, Nova Scotia.

Her plane had six separate gas tanks bolted to the underside carrying enough fuel for the 6,100-kilometre journey. 

“To prevent air lock from developing, Markam had to let one tank run dry before manually opening the valve on the next tank. In the dark of the night, she had to do this by feel, all the while gliding over the Atlantic until she could restart her engine,” it was later recounted. “During one change of gas tanks, she dropped to 300 feet above the sea before the engine kicked in.

Beryl and Ernest Hemingway

Later, after her engine failed, she crash-landed in a Newfoundland bog”.

It is said that the reason she made this daring feat was to impress a man she had fallen in love with, Tom Campbell-Black, her other trainer. This was after the untimely death of Denys. But Campbel-Black had broken her heart by getting married to another woman. She had hoped that her celebrity status would convince him to come back, but Campbell died before Beryl won him. Frustrated, she left for California.

It was here that she published her memoir, West with the Night, suspected to be ghostwritten by her third husband, the screen writer Raoul Schumacher. Writer Robert Obrien had quoted Beryl’s third husband, Raoul Schumacher, as saying in 1943 that “Beryl did not write West with the Night... not one damned word of anything.” While later biographers claim that she wrote the book, it is known that Beryl had only four years of formal education after she was expelled from a Nairobi school.

Among her list of other boyfriends included Ernest Hemingway, who described Beryl’s book as “bloody wonderful”. Hemingway had met Beryl in Kenya and he later remarked that her book made him feel “ashamed of myself as a writer”. 

“This girl can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers,” he gushed.

In her final years, Beryl was living in her house at the Jockey Club Kenya in Nairobi’s Ngong Road, where thieves once tied her throat with ropes and body with barbed wire. While friends asked her to leave the insecure park, Beryl, with the stubbornness of a settler, did not budge.

She loved the horses and was well known in the racecourse nearby.

The Jockey Club of Kenya partly owes its existence to her and she is known to have won six Kenya derbys, which made Jockeys respect her.

In life she drifted through many boyfriends but was only known to love two people: Denys and Campbell-Black. So much for a happy valley soul. The woman who kept the colonial gossip circles alive.

[email protected] @johnkamau1