Straight on Till Morning

by Mary S. Lovell

  In fact Tom and Beryl had been living together since his return from a trip to England in the previous autumn, and to Beryl the relationship was far more than a simple romance. Some friends say that Tom was the one man in her life who came anywhere near her father in her estimation, even superseding her feelings for Denys Finch Hatton. Certainly when I interviewed her in 1986 she spoke of both men with great respect and obvious affection, but it was Tom’s photograph she kept over her chair.

  It is not generally known now that Tom was as much at home in the saddle as in the air. He had raced in the colony on a number of occasions, and in common with Beryl and many of her friends was a constant competitor in the series of gymkhana events around the country. He was a magnificent horseman23 and nothing could have been more calculated to impress Beryl. Together they rode around the high country on the slopes of the Rongai, and around Tom’s ranch. They played polo up country where the teams included as many women as men. In Nairobi the couple were often seen dancing or socializing at the Muthaiga Club and Torr’s Hotel. Their relationship was a well-rounded one and, as in her relationship with Denys, it was successful because she was never allowed to become the dominant partner. In a curious way Tom had somehow inherited the role of teacher from Denys, though his subjects were less aesthetic.

  These were the good times with Tom. His job at Wilson was a tremendous and enjoyable challenge to him and he enjoyed the constant nights into the interior and to Europe.24 He was a tender and considerate lover, but stood no nonsense from Beryl and never allowed her to interfere with his work. Beryl’s tendency to dominate stemmed from a natural ability to command (although some saw it as arrogance), but it cut no ice with Tom. His firm, almost paternal control of her behaviour was probably the essential recipe for Beryl’s happiness, given her obvious father fixation. Oddly enough Tom even resembled Clutterbuck in appearance, with his high forehead, long face and thick eyebrows over humour-filled eyes. ‘He could control Beryl,’ said a friend, ‘with a single look, and she adored him.’

  But Tom was far more than a lover, he also helped to get Beryl started on her own as a commercial pilot, something which she craved desperately. Throughout her life when she wanted something she went after it with a single-mindedness almost frightening in its intensity. Nothing was allowed to stand in her way and she used people and friends with breathtaking ruthlessness. The fact that Tom was prepared to work as hard as she at achieving her personal ambitions was an important part of their relationship. There can be no doubt that she had loved Denys Finch-Hatton; her intense grief when he died was very real and recognized by many people, though few perhaps realized how deep the hurt had gone – she was always very good at hiding personal feelings. But her love for him had grown out of childish infatuation for a seemingly unattainable lover who belonged to another woman. Had Denys lived, their relationship could never have lasted, for many reasons. But Beryl’s love for Tom had firmer foundations, and might have lasted through her life. At the age of eighty-three, when interviewed for this book, she referred to Tom as ‘my beloved’ on several occasions and she told close friends over the years that Tom was the love of her life.25

  In 1932 the media hype surrounding the professional and romantic liaison between the aviators Amy Johnson and Jim Mollison was at its extravagant height. From letters between Tom and Beryl it is clear that in idle moments, when they lay back and dreamed aloud their lovers’ dreams, or when deep in conversation as they rode together on Mount Kenya, they saw themselves as just such a pair. They talked of record-breaking flights that would set them on the road to fame and fortune. Amy Johnson had made her record flight to Australia and Jim Mollison made a successful solo crossing of the Atlantic in his Puss Moth, The Heart’s Content. However he had taken off from Ireland, and did not reach his intended destination, New York, non-stop. Mollison desperately wanted to succeed in a crossing from England to New York, because people in aeronautical circles realized that any commercial transatlantic service would have to link the great cities of New York and London, but it still remained to be proved that such a flight was possible going ‘the wrong way’.26

  Tom talked to Beryl about these flights, and about the goals rapidly becoming attainable due to technological advances. Here were challenge and adventure, something to work for. There was no doubt in her mind that she and Tom were linked together and would find fame in the eyes of the world as a flying partnership. It was a glittering goal that floated before Beryl’s dazzled vision and she meant to have it. Not for the transitory public glory – that never meant anything to her – but for the satisfaction of personal achievement. She was happy, deeply in love, and the future, with Tom beside her, was promising.

  From this time onwards her flights generally had some purpose – they were no longer practice hops. She went to friends’ farms up country and stayed overnight, or she ferried passengers – for instance in February she flew Betty Playfair from Nairobi to Mombasa, staying overnight there before returning next day to Nairobi. Her passenger list read like the members’ list of Muthaiga, though some complained that after offering a lift up country she asked for a fee when they arrived. They had understood she had been giving them a free flight as a friendly gesture.

  In March the pair were openly criticized for living together. Beryl was known to be a married woman with a child, and a past, in England. There was an unpleasant incident at the Muthaiga Club when a gentleman standing at the bar, who had probably had too much to drink, expressed his opinions loudly to the world at large. ‘Just the sort of thing that’s given Kenya Colony a bad name…’ Stories of sexual depravity in the White Highlands of Kenya were being given unwelcome publicity in England and there was general touchiness among the colonists at the time, about the bad press. Tom reacted by inviting the speaker outside where he thumped him on the nose, but the damage had been done.

  This event coincided with difficulties between Tom and Mickey Wheeler (a friend of Beryl’s), who accused Tom of exploiting Mrs Wilson, and using her money to further his own ambitions rather than those of Wilson Airways.

  Tom was bitterly angry. He could hardly deny the accusation of his relationship with Beryl, but he had worked like a Trojan for Wilson Airways. By coincidence, he had just been offered the job of private pilot to Lord Furness, who had been in the colony on safari that winter. The offer came with the rider that Tom must accompany him to England in the spring. In the wake of the bad feeling that prevailed in the colony, and when Florrie Wilson did not, as Tom expected, rally to his side, he resigned his position at Wilson Airways in April and took the job with Furness.27

  A few years older than Tom, Furness was a ‘red-headed, steely-eyed, hard-swearing, high-living peer who had about him an air of scandal transmuted to glamour28 by virtue of his vast fortune which ran into many millions. The family seat of Grantley in Yorkshire was backed up by three other country residences, one of which was Burrough Court near Melton Mowbray, where Lady (Thelma) Furness introduced Wallis Simpson to Edward Prince of Wales in 1930 and thereby changed the course of English history.29

  Marmaduke (nicknamed Duke) Lord Furness was the son of a dynamic man who had started life as a docker at Hartlepool and became a multi-millionaire and 1st Baron Furness of Grantley. When he died aged sixty the former stevedore was head of the Furness Line of steamers, had been Member of Parliament for Hartlepool, and was a JP and Deputy Lieutenant for Durham. The scandal that surrounded Duke stemmed from 1921 when his first wife, Daisy Hogg, died suddenly on board the Furness’s yacht Sapphire, under mysterious circumstances which have never been explained, and was hastily buried at sea.30 Duke was given to wild temper, scenes of loud bluster and shouting and swearing when thwarted, but Tom seemed to rub along well with him and enjoyed his new employer’s company.31

  Beryl clearly thought that Tom’s new position was a temporary arrangement, for she apparently made no move to dissuade him from accepting it. Whether or not she would have been able to is in any case open to doubt for in retrospe
ct it is obvious that Beryl was more in love with Tom than he was with her. Furness had already indicated that he would be spending the next few English winters in East Africa on safari trips, so Tom knew he would be returning to the colony within six months, perhaps earlier. The work would consist mainly of ferrying the Furness family around England and continental Europe, and was well paid. In addition Furness had agreed to allow Tom to compete in the King’s Cup air race in his De Havilland Puss Moth during the summer months. Tom announced that he was flying to England in April.

  Beryl had already purchased her blue and silver Avian, now bearing the Kenya registration VP-KAN painted on the fuselage and predictably earning it the nickname ‘the Kan’. Without telling Tom, Beryl planned to follow him, and managed to get in some advanced dual instruction from him before he left. Tom had often told her of his flights to and from England, so she had some idea of what to expect. Perhaps she questioned him more closely about his flights to Europe in those final days before his departure. Beryl’s log book records intensive lessons in spinning, night flying, deliberately flying into a storm; and she passed all the tests. At the end of March Tom and Beryl flew to Naivasha where they spent a few days with friends. Two weeks later she new Tom to Nyeri where he picked up an American Waco bi-plane in which he departed for England.32 Beryl returned to Nairobi and set the wheels in motion for her own trip.

  At dawn on 24 April, with 127 hours in her log, she took off from Nairobi headed for Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria on the first leg of her flight. The mechanics at Wilson Airways had been aghast when she told them she was flying to England. No special flight servicing had been done, and there was not even time to paint out the old British registration, GE-BEA, from the top of the wings. The flight to Kisumu was uneventful, other than a low run across her father’s farm en route, and took just under two hours. She refuelled there, and stretched her legs briefly before taking off for Juba, a four-and-a-half-hour flight during which she encountered a very bad storm and was forced down with engine trouble some miles south of the airport – ‘Just clearing a swamp where landing might have meant death,’ she said later. She stayed overnight at Juba and the next day, the weather having cleared, took off for Malakal – a refuelling stop and the first point on the Nile, an important navigational feature of the journey. Here she managed to have some minor repairs done to the undercarriage which had been damaged in the forced landing.

  At Malakal she suffered doubts as to whether or not to carry on, for she sent word back to Wilson Airways that she might be returning. But a subsequent cable from the Shell Oil depot at Malakal advised that she had continued on her northern flight. She was forced down again at Kosti, just over halfway to Khartoum. The Avian’s engine had been running rough but she made a perfect landing in deep sand in the desert on the western bank of the Nile. ‘My aeroplane was soon surrounded by a crowd of grinning natives. They just stood and watched me until I got the machine going again,’ she told reporters later.33 But she managed to persuade them to help her push the Avian on to some firm sand, and she took off again, landing at the refuelling airstrip where she ‘fiddled about with the engine, trying to find out what was causing it to misfire’. Next morning she left for Khartoum, which she reached only with great good luck. The engine had cut out twice in the two hours taken to complete the distance. Here a mechanic had a look at the Gipsy II engine, and said he thought she had a cracked piston ring. She decided to push on to Atbara where he thought there was some chance that they might have the spares she needed.

  There was silence then for a week before her friends, anxiously waiting at Nairobi, received news from an unexpected quarter. Sir Philip Wigham Richardson had landed at Atbara in the Sudan on his way south to Nairobi, and had met Beryl there. ‘She had a broken piston,’ he reported, ‘but a spare had just arrived from Cairo. She was quite well and would proceed homeward when the repair was complete.’34

  The next stages of her journey were equally troublesome. The engine continued to give problems and at Cairo she was forced down yet again in a dust storm so severe that the sun was blotted out and she was unable to see the ground. This time the Royal Air Force came to her rescue. They flew out a mechanic from Heliopolis to examine and make repairs to the engine. After this the engine ran better, and she continued north to Alexandria where she followed the southern Mediterranean coast via Tobruk and Benghazi to Tripoli. Here she flew across Malta to Sicily and on to London via Naples, Rome, Pisa, Marseilles, Lyon and Paris. She arrived at Heston aerodrome on 17 May.

  Her flight was widely reported through Reuters. ‘Dressed in grey flannel trousers, a blue sweater and an oil-stained white mackintosh, Mrs Mansfield Markham, 31-year-old sister-in-law to Sir Charles Markham, startled Heston aerodrome yesterday evening when in stepping out of an aeroplane she announced that she had flown solo from Kenya in seven flying days.’ She told the press that she had simply decided to take a holiday in England, which she had not seen for about eighteen months, packed some bags and set out. ‘I experienced considerable engine trouble and was held up for days in the Sudan. The worst spots were crossing the desert, where the heat was terrific; crossing the Mediterranean, where I did not feel at all chirpy because of the engine trouble I had had; and from Marseilles to Lyon where the visibility and weather were very bad.’ She added that on the long sea crossing from Tripoli she had worn an inflated inner tube around her neck. If those who received her at Heston were startled, it must have been something to have seen Tom’s face when she confronted him in London that evening. ‘He was a little surprised I think,’ she remembered. But he would soon have forgiven her – it was a spectacular achievement under any circumstances, even more so given her lack of experience. Could any man have resisted such a compliment from such a beautiful source? His own flight had been performed in a record five days and he must have blanched when he heard Beryl’s story. It was less than five years previously that the very first flights between Kenya and England had taken place and Beryl’s aircraft was equipped with only a compass, rev counter, altimeter and a lateral stability indicator;35 she had no form of direction-landing equipment or radio, not even a way of knowing her airspeed.

  Immediately she was sucked into London’s social whirlpool. In borrowed evening clothes she danced the nights away in the Dorchester, the Savoy and the Ritz. There were many Kenyan friends in England, including the Carberrys and the Soames, as well as the new circle of friends in Tom’s aviation world. She spent her days at the airfield where Tom had arranged for KAN to have a complete engine overhaul. Meanwhile she used a borrowed Avian (G-ABLF) to fly around the fashionable aeroclub circuit of Heston, Stag Lane, Brooklands and Croydon. On 9 July her own Avian was returned, and she found to her delight that it flew beautifully, its engine problems repaired. She was also lucky enough to fly one of the brand-new Avro 631 Cadets, a new type added assiduously to her log book, along with a Genet Avian – an Avian with a Genet Major I radial engine specially built for the RAF.36

  She saw the three-year-old Gervase on a couple of occasions, but she showed no signs of wanting him to be with her.37 If she saw her old flame Prince Henry, who was stationed in Tidworth with the 11th Hussars, the meeting was discreet and not recorded.

  In mid August she made a somewhat mysterious flight to Coblenz in Germany and had to make a forced landing near Muendon when she ran out of fuel. She damaged the propeller and fuselage, was shocked and slightly injured and continued her journey by car to Coblenz where she was to ‘meet friends’,38 Her snappy refusal to talk to the press of this mishap was uncharacteristic; indeed she only entered it in her log book as an afterthought, out of date-order. Maybe she was not going to enter it at all, but she had second thoughts – ten flying hours takes a lot of flying, and she was building up her hours with a purpose in mind. The flight went into the log book, without any comment on the problem.

  That summer passed pleasantly enough; she saw Tom often, and flew with him on occasions to the Furness’s mansion near Melton Mowbray
where they used to ride together. Whilst watching the King’s Cup air races Tom introduced her to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French writer/aviator; Hubert Broad, test pilot for De Havilland and one of the best racing pilots in the country; and to Sydney St Barbe, formerly an instructor with the London Aeroplane Club and a pilot of some distinction. St Barbe had latterly given up flying instruction in order to exploit the potential of sky writing, which had found great favour in the United States, although it was slow to catch on in England. Mary, Duchess of Bedford (known as the Flying Duchess), was a pupil of St Barbe’s and later became famous for her long-distance flights. On one occasion after she had completed a particularly praiseworthy feat he greeted her return to England with the word BRAVO written in huge letters across the sky.39 All three of these men were to become firm friends, and over the next few years each in his way played a part in Beryl’s story.

  Tom departed for Kenya in early October with Duke Furness, and on 22 October, four days before her thirtieth birthday, accompanied by St Barbe, Beryl took off in her blue and silver aeroplane for the return flight to Nairobi. No problems were encountered and they spent a pleasant couple of days relaxing at the old town of Mersa Matruh on the North African coast, between Cairo and Tobruk. The journey took only ten days – eight not counting the two spent at Matruh. Their arrival at Nairobi was noted by the East African Standard, who ran a large report on the flight, and in the private diary of an acquaintance: ‘Beryl Markham (the Duke of Gloucester’s love) has just flown out from England and looking very lovely.’40

  Beryl spent Christmas with John and June Carberry, flying over to the Prestons’ place on Christmas Eve to persuade the outrageous Kiki to join them at the Carberry ranch, Seremai, at Nyeri.41 Kiki, an amusing and beautiful woman, was quite openly on drugs and carried her silver syringe everywhere, causing the ever-witty Cockie Hoogterp to remark to a friend, ‘She’s very clever with her needle.’42 When she ran out of morphine, Kiki used to send her own aeroplane down to Nairobi for a fresh supply.43