Straight on Till Morning Read online

  In common with all student pilots Beryl had spent most of her initial training on ‘circuits and bumps’, for it was not until Tom was absolutely sure that she was capable of handling this procedure that he could allow her to solo. It involves taking off, circling the aerodrome in the correct pattern, and landing. It sounds simple and indeed in today’s modern aircraft it is not difficult. But in 1931 at Nairobi things were not quite so easy. The runway – a dirt track – was subject to the sudden appearance of pig-holes and ant-hills and it was not unusual to have to clear it of wild animals who had wandered on to it from the Athi plains in search of water.1 The landing technique involved executing a perfect three-pointer in which the two wheels of the undercarriage had to make contact with the ground at the precise moment that the tail skid touched down. If the aeroplane came in too fast, when the control column was pulled back to stall the machine bounced up into the air and came to rest after an embarrassing series of bumps always watched with great interest by spectators. If the speed was too slow the aeroplane would pancake heavily, often breaking the tail skid.

  Gradually the instructor hands over control of the aeroplane until, confident that the pupil is able to take off, circle the aerodrome and land safely, almost casually he utters the awesome words: ‘I think you might be ready for a solo now, you know. Would you like to take her around?’ Of course the student has been waiting for just this moment, but when it happens, the stomach tightens, and the heart turns over.

  Beryl would not have been sent up alone one second sooner than Tom felt she was ready. He was an extraordinarily careful pilot and she could not have been more fortunate in having him as an instructor. He was probably one of the best pilots in the world at that time. A modest man, with a delightfully puckish sense of humour, he was precise, well educated and kind; and he believed implicitly in the future of civil aviation. While many of his generation who had learned to fly in the war now saw aeroplanes as toys, and flying as the smart thing to do, Tom had a broad vision of future civil aviation which was subsequently borne out almost exactly.

  Born in Brighton in 1898, the son of an Australian who became mayor of Brighton, Tom was educated at Brighton College and at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. Writing of his schoolday interests he recalled, ‘When Bleriot flew the Channel there was intense excitement. We all set to work to construct models…It was this early toying with models and the opportunity which the war gave to so many of my generation that created in me the urge to fly.’ He was seventeen when the war broke out but he immediately enrolled with the Royal Naval Air Service, adding a year to his age in order to be accepted. Later he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps2 and at the end of the war he led the first British squadron into Cologne.3

  He remained in the RFC after the war ended, and then, after an inconclusive period studying law, in the early 1920s he went out to Kenya with backing from an uncle. With his brother, he started a coffee farm at Rongai. By now, though, flying was in his blood, and he spent less and less time coffee-farming and more in the air. Eventually his brother returned to England. Tom hired a full-time manager to run the farm, which was not self-supporting, got himself a commercial licence and did freelance flying work from a landing ground at the side of the Langata Road, which was later to become Nairobi West Airport (now Wilson Airport). He opened up air routes for mail deliveries in East Africa, and he saw it almost as a personal mission to establish a commercial air service there. Without any doubt his level-headed approach to flying was responsible for Beryl’s competence later on.

  In 1928 Tom met Mrs Florence Kerr Wilson, then nearly fifty years old and recently widowed. In the spring of 1929 Tom flew ‘Florrie’ to England in a Fokker Universal aircraft belonging to John Carberry, taking Archie Watkins along as the engineer. He had made the flight several times before and indeed was partly responsible for establishing the air route for civilian traffic. There were no airfields as such, for flying was not an established occupation, and proper facilities for aircraft did not become available until the African service of Imperial Airways was formally established in the early 1930s.4 When Tom made his flight in 1929, the best one could hope for was a level piece of ground, suitable for landing and taking off, located near a refuelling depot. The Shell Oil Company were of tremendous assistance in the early days of flying, particularly over the Sudan, and would usually provide a representative with a fuel supply to hang around and wait for a pilot on a given day. If an aeroplane didn’t turn up, the representative would assume the worst and instigate a search – if the pilot was lucky.

  At the end of 1924 captains Tony Gladstone and Tom Twist had pioneered air transport routes by making a journey up the Nile from Cairo to Kisumu on foot to establish landing stages for the first flying-boat services,5 and for many years civilian pilots used landing strips adjacent to these staging posts when flying between Europe and Africa. There were no proper flying maps, merely charts which had been put together based on the few flights made by pilots over the territory. Tom, Florrie Wilson and Archie accomplished their flight to London in eight days, a record time for the journey which lasted only briefly. Tom broke it later that same year.

  Beryl Markham, July 1936.

  Charles Clutterbuck in the uniform of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers Regiment, circa 1895. (Neil Potts)

  Paddy (the lion who attacked the ten-year-old Beryl) with his owners: Margaret and ‘Mrs Jim’ Elkington. (Elspeth Huxley)

  The house which Clutterbuck built for Beryl in 1915.

  Beryl’s first marriage to Jock Purves in Nairobi, October 1919. l. to r. Jock, Beryl, Charles Clutterbuck, Captain Lavender, Miss Eliza Milne.

  Prince Henry with the lion he killed while on safari in 1928. (British Library)

  l. to r. Bror Blixen, Edward, Prince of Wales, Denys Finch Hatton. (Cockie Hoogterp)

  (Centre) Denys Finch Hatton and (seated) Baroness Cockie von Blixen-Finecke, 1930. (Cockie Hoogterp)

  The Prince of Wales and Lord Delamere, 1930. (Cockie Hoogterp)

  Beryl’s second marriage to Mansfield Markham, Nairobi, 1927. l. to r. Middle row: Karen Blixen, Clara (Beryl’s mother), Mansfield, Beryl, Lord Delamere, unkown. The two boys seated in the foreground are Beryl’s stepbrothers. (British Library)

  Mansfield and Gervase. (V. Markham)

  Beryly riding at Aldenham House a few days before her flight. She said it helped her to relax. (Photosource)

  Beryl before presentation at Court, London, 1928. (V. Markham)

  An early picture taken shortly after Beryl learned how to fly in 1931. (North Point Press)

  Tom Campbell (right) with a passenger for Kenya Airways. (British Library)

  In Florrie Wilson (who later became a pilot of no mean accomplishment), Tom found an enthusiastic backer for a commercial air service in East Africa, and on 31 July, with a capital of £50,000 and a Gipsy Moth aircraft, Wilson Airways was born,6 with Tom as managing director. Later that year Tom flew the Gipsy Moth, loaded with a seventeen-and-a-half stone passenger (Mr H. White of the Chicago Field Museum) and his baggage, to Croydon in under a week, a sensational time for those days when the journey by sea took up to a month. Whilst in England he purchased an addition to the Wilson fleet – an Avro Five, which he flew back laden with two passengers and an engineer; the Gipsy Moth was piloted by Tommy Woods. In the first full year of operation the company flew more than 150,000 miles at a cost to passengers of one shilling and threepence per mile, and by 1931 – when Beryl was learning to fly – the company had three pilots and a fleet of two Avro Fives, two De Havilland Puss Moths and three De Havilland Gipsy Moths.7

  On the second royal safari, in February 1930, Tom acted as pilot to the Prince of Wales, operating from a hastily cleared bush airstrip near the camp. He flew the prince and his aide Joey Legh across the Rift Valley in a Puss Moth; Legh sat in the fold-away auxiliary seat. Later Tom flew Bror Blixen over Voi to spot elephant – anticipating Denys’s idea that this might be a feasible way of locating herds. In March Tom took
the prince over Kilimanjaro in a Gipsy Moth. In his diaries the prince recalled:

  The view was very wonderful. Below was Lake Amboseli, about it a vast area of swampy shallow pools and dense bush which stretched away eastward to the Tsavo River. Westward was to see, ridge upon ridge, the Great Rift Valley where the Athi goes punctuated always with diamond falls. And forever ahead of [us], rose the huge pile of the Great Mountain, cloud capped Kilimanjaro. And into the blanket of clouds the Moth went too and when it sailed out of them, far below in the sun dazzle, the great domed peak of Kibo glittered in a mail of snow and ice. Glacier after glacier lifted as the Moth soared and circled among the great peaks. It seemed another world after the green tropics.8

  Tom’s memories of the time he spent flying the prince are more prosaic. After he flew Blix down to Voi to locate the elephant he took the prince there and when they were over the herd, the prince, who had his rifle with him, shouted to Tom, ‘Go down, Black, let’s have a crack at them.’ Tom pretended not to hear and flew on. A little later on the return journey the prince spoke to him and Tom answered. When the prince asked him why he had not landed when they were over the elephants, Tom replied, ‘I couldn’t hear you, sir.’ ‘Well it’s damn funny you can hear me now,’ the prince retorted.9

  In his early flying days in Kenya Tom had accompanied a safari party into the bush, where, with an early cine-camera, the fearless hunters hoped to get live pictures of a lion kill. One of the men shot a lion and the eager cameraman moved in for his pictures before Tom could warn him to wait. The lion, who was in fact wounded and not dead, attacked the cameraman, and the camera, which was still switched on, recorded the scene. Tom then killed the lion but not in time to save the man. The dead man’s wife, who had witnessed the whole thing, was prostrate with shock, and became hysterical when told she could not ship her husband’s body back to the United States for burial because they were so far from civilization and because of the heat. Instead Tom and the other members of the party conducted a hasty cremation and placed the ashes in the only available container – a tin biscuit box, an item that Tom never flew without. Tom then flew the widow and the biscuit tin back to Nairobi.10

  In April 1930 Tom made the first non-stop flight from Zanzibar to Nairobi, in five hours and twenty minutes, a journey which normally took two days. It is believed that his was the first aeroplane to land on Zanzibar.

  One can imagine the scene at the embryo airport as Tom and Beryl finished their landing run at Nairobi on 11 June 1931. As the Gipsy Moth VP-KAC rolled to a halt amid clouds of red dust, Tom climbed out on to the wing. ‘Why don’t you take her up now,’ he shouted to her, leaning towards the rear cockpit to enable her to hear over the noise of the engine. ‘Just climb to about eight hundred feet and make one circuit. All right?’ Beryl grinned, holding up her thumb in acceptance, and Tom jumped to the ground.

  He stood clear and watched as she taxied to the end of the runway and turned into the wind. Then he shaded his eyes, appraising her performance as she started her take-off run. ‘Good girl, hold her down, hold her down, let her build up speed…’ Beryl could hear the words repeated in her head. Wilson airport is over five thousand feet above sea level, a height which significantly affects the performance of light aircraft, particularly in hot weather; a pilot needs to be sure of sufficient speed before pulling back on the stick. Taking to the air without sufficient speed will cause the aircraft to stall and Tom had repeated these words so often in his quiet, confident way that she would never fly again without hearing them in her mind.11

  When she landed after a brief five-minute hop into the air, he smiled. ‘Good. That was fine, Beryl. Now let’s go round again and see if we can’t improve on that landing technique. I noticed that as you came in you flattened out too early…’12 On the next day she managed a fifteen-minute solo flight, entered in a neat feminine hand in the new pilot’s log book.13

  She could not then fly for a week because Tom was involved in a venture in which he hoped to prove the value of commercial flying in East Africa. In one day he planned to link the four East African territories by flying from Nairobi to Entebbe, Kisumu, Mombasa, Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, and back to Nairobi. During that week he flew to each in turn, ensuring that there were sufficient petrol supplies and essential spares should he need them. Having announced the flight, he could not allow anything to go wrong. If he failed for some mechanical reason this would set back his dreams of a regular commercial air service for years. In the event he successfully achieved this feat setting up a world record by covering the 1600 miles in a single day in a De Havilland Puss Moth.14

  When he returned on 19 June Beryl began her tuition again, each day gaining some new experience. She remembered those early flying lessons with great affection: ‘He would wait until the very last minute and then say, “Beryl – do you really want to die – because you’ll never get over that mountain”…or he’d say, “Where are you going?” And I’d say, “Nairobi.” And he’d say, “You haven’t a chance of getting there on this course.”’ He always waited until she could actually see where she’d gone wrong, and then in his calm professional way he’d correct her.15

  A month after her first solo on 13 July, with five and a quarter hours in her log, she took her ‘A’ licence tests and passed. Now she could take off and fly whenever she wished, without the sanction of her instructor. But she still had a lot to learn, for even with her dual instruction, she still had less than fifteen hours of experience. She had not even made her first solo cross-country flight.16

  She speedily rectified this on 17 July by flying to Nakuru, the nearest landing ground to Njoro. No doubt she took time to fly over her father’s farm to waggle her wings at him.17 Later she said of her early aviation experiences:

  I’m afraid Tom found me rather a trying pupil…distances are long and life is rather lonely in East Africa. The advent of airplanes seemed to open up a new life for us. The urge was strong in me to become part of that life, to make it my life. So I went down to the airport. My people and my friends, of course, shrugged their shoulders as if to say: ‘She’ll get over it.’ They didn’t know I’d already decided to take up aviation as a career. By solid application on my part and superhuman efforts by Tom Campbell Black I was flying solo after eight hours of instruction. How zealously did I enter up my hours in my log book. That book is more precious to me than any diary. Every minute jotted down there meant a step nearer my A ticket. It is beside me now as I write. I obtained my A ticket when I had fifteen hours to my credit. I was a fledged (not fully) pilot!18

  Even Tom could not fault her application. Her log book tells the whole story. Special occasions and milestones are recorded in the column entitled ‘Remarks’. In mid August she made her first bush landing at Machakos. Later that month she flew to her farm Melela and landed on the gallops. In September she took her first passenger up – it was Tom. During October she added a new type of aircraft to her repertoire. Tom had told her that if she seriously wanted to take up flying as a career in East Africa (and by this time she was considering an aeroplane of her own), she could not do better than buy an Avro Avian. One had recently arrived from England and still bore the English markings GA-BEA.19 It was an Avion IV, powered by a Gipsy II 120-hp engine. She leased the machine in early November and flew it until the following February when she bought it from Wilson Airways for about £600.20

  Advanced dual instruction followed, and a spell of blind flying, then ‘Passenger M. Cottar’. After thirty hours her confidence was such that she could take up a non-pilot for a local flight.21 On 13 November Beryl, along with the entire colony, heard with grief and shock that Lord Delamere had died. Delamere went back as far as Beryl’s very earliest memories; he had been present at her marriage to Jock, stood in as protector during the break-up of her first marriage, and had given her away on her marriage to Mansfield. Clutterbuck attended Delamere’s touching funeral on a rocky out-crop overlooking the lake at Soysambu. Beryl would not attend, but it is certain
that her sorrow was sincere and went deep.

  In December Beryl’s flights became more wide ranging. She flew to Njoro and landed on the polo ground, then on to Nakuru where she stayed for the races; from Nakuru she flew to Naivasha where she stayed with the Errols at Oserian. Other neatly written notes in her log book reveal that she ‘dropped a message to Crofton’, and flew a passenger, F. Darling, to Kajiado and back, and her friend Lilian Graham for a nip around Nairobi. Nothing was wasted, no experience too small to profit by.

  In the first days of 1932 she took her young half-brother flying, and a few days later on 9 January flew down to Tanganyika to visit Bror and Cockie Blixen, in company with Tom; he flew a Gipsy Moth and she the Avian. Cockie remembers them as being ‘very close’. On the return journey from Babarti they intended to stop at Arusha to refuel, so Cockie begged a lift as far as Arusha. ‘Tom never took his eyes off Beryl for a single second as we flew to Arusha. In the end I got a bit tired of this and said to him, “I suppose you couldn’t watch where we are going now and again?”’ He told her there were severe down-draughts and he wanted to be sure that Beryl could cope. When they landed at Arusha he talked to Beryl about this phenomenon, reminding her of its potentially fatal effects.22