Straight on Till Morning

by Mary S. Lovell

  When she left Kenya to fly the 6000 miles to England in her Leopard Moth, Beryl took Bror as her passenger. Eva had gone on ahead some weeks earlier by boat, and would meet Bror in London, prior to the Blixens’ departure for the United States where, among other things, the couple were to visit Hemingway who was in the Bahamas. It was a cool, highly professional woman who piloted Bror to England. Thanks to Tom, she had been offered interviews for several flying jobs in England, but it was not her intention to migrate simply to take a mundane flying job there. A routine occupation did not appeal to Beryl, she always needed a goal. In general terms her goal was to be the best at whatever she set out to do. Specifically it appears that she intended to try for a record attempt on the London–Cape–London route, or on the still unpicked plum of London–New York–London. She was setting out to show Tom that she was the best pilot there was.

  Beryl’s trusty Avian was purchased at auction by African Air Services. Some months later it crashed, killing its student pilot, and was burned out.42

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1936

  Bror Blixen had been intending to travel to his native Sweden by boat until Beryl had asked him to fly with her. No woman was at that time allowed to fly alone over the Sudan and despite her previous record she had been refused permission. The arrangement suited them both to perfection.

  Early-morning mist briefly delayed their departure from Nairobi but they were soon flying over the Kikuyu Escarpment and headed for Kisumu, the first refuelling stop on their 6000-mile journey. Beryl recounts this journey in her memoir, and Blix wrote of it in Letters from Africa. There are minor differences in each version – both were written some time after the event – but it was clearly an eventful trip. The Abyssinian War had begun and North Africa was controlled by Mussolini’s troops, among whom there was strong anti-British feeling.

  Blix emphasized the platonic nature of the travelling companions in a letter:

  At times we followed the Nile and at times we flew over the desert with its scorching sand glowing down there below us. Now in the middle of the day it was getting bumpy and extremely hot and the dust devils mounted skywards for hundreds of yards. A tiresome day and when we reached Luxor at about 5 o’clock we decided to stay the night. We filled up with petrol and oil and parked the plane in a small shed before travelling in to the town by car. It was nice to get a cool drink after this long day, followed by a bath, dinner and early to bed. We had great difficulties in making the hotel staff understand that we wanted separate rooms. Our declaration that we were not married made no impression on them, they just kept assuring us that they had a so-beautiful double room with a view of the river, a private balcony and a bathroom. I insisted on two rooms with baths, but it was not until I added ‘I snore’ that I got full understanding and sympathy.1

  After an uneventful flight to Cairo they ran into problems with officialdom. They had, in any case, decided to stop for a few days to overhaul the aeroplane but in the event were delayed for a week while their papers were examined by ‘Il Duce’s’ beautifully-clad officers. Not knowing that the delay would be so long, the pair settled happily into Shepheard’s Hotel, then one of the great hotels of the world. ‘As you know spring in Cairo is warm. Beryl had lots of air-minded friends here and she spent most of her time with them.’2 By the time clearance was given for the couple’s departure ‘the small aircraft shone and glittered in the sunshine’. Beryl’s friends at the nearby RAF aerodrome, Heliopolis, had been hard at work.

  They were delayed several times by officialdom on the next leg of their journey which lay westward along the North African coast – on one notable occasion it was suggested that Beryl was a man in woman’s clothing – but eventually they reached Benghazi. Here all the hotel rooms had been commandeered by the military and in Beryl’s memoir she writes graphically of the brothel in which she and Blix were forced to spend the night. Her distaste for the filthy surroundings and the meal provided for them was tempered only by sympathy for the slatternly madam’s pathetic history. Blix however saw it differently: ‘Finally,’ he wrote, ‘we found two rooms, spaghetti, good wine, and best of all a friendly reception with a kind old woman who kept a brothel.’ Next morning they were faced with the dilemma of taking off in a blinding dust storm or staying another night at the brothel. Beryl opted to leave despite her qualms that the heavy gravel being blown across the airfield might damage the Leopard Moth’s metal propeller.

  Beryl accelerated and within twenty-five yards the strong headwinds had us airborne. We swayed over bent date palms that were twisting like human forms in agony before the raging storm, and we were carried skywards at a terrific speed. The clouds became lighter, the sun became visible and underneath us was a carpet of swirling dust. Beryl smiled and took out her compass bearing on Tripoli.3

  At Tripoli, ‘despite Beryl’s blue eyes and blonde curls’, they were not allowed to continue immediately and the couple were again forced to make an unscheduled overnight stop. ‘We had our meals in our rooms in bad humour – spaghetti and chianti,’4 Blix revealed.

  At last they left the North African coast behind them and after an anxious flight across the Mediterranean in thick cloud they reached the French coast – Beryl says Cannes and Blix says Nice. They then travelled on to London without any further delays and found it alive with gossip of Hitler’s march into the Rhineland and of the king’s affair with Mrs Simpson. With the death of the old king, Beryl’s friend ‘Edward P’ of safari days had come into his own at last, but he was to find his brief tenure of the crown an unhappy period. That first evening Bror and Beryl dined with Tom and Dessie Black.

  Dessie had heard a great deal about Beryl from Tom, including the story (which Tom believed) that Beryl’s son Gervase had a royal parent,5 and she was intrigued when Tom telephoned her one afternoon, and asked her to meet him at the Mayfair so that he could introduce her to Beryl who had just flown in from Kenya. From Tom’s descriptions of Beryl’s horseriding ability and her skill as a pilot, Dessie half-expected to meet a masculine type of woman. Instead the tall, attractive girl, with blonde wavy hair, blue eyes and ‘long, thin, nervous hands’ took her by surprise.6

  Later, when she took me to her bedroom and I saw on the dressing-table a large assortment of face-creams, lotions and perfumes I was even more surprised. Beryl was one of the most feminine women I have ever met. As I got to know her better it was a never-ending source of wonder to me that she was able to drive a car, let alone fly a plane.

  Dessie thought Beryl had a dreamy, vague personality and recalled that she was more often late for an appointment than early, and on several occasions forgot the appointment altogether.7 In fact, of course, the ‘vague dreamy’ outward appearance hid smouldering ambition. Beryl, who was now thirty-three years old, desperately wanted to attack one of the big flying records and she had certainly already given some consideration to a transatlantic crossing. Tom was sympathetic to Beryl’s aspirations and even helped her by checking her out in the twin-engine Dragon aircraft so that she could gain a twin-engine rating, but Tom had plans of his own. Recently he had been contacted by a group of Spaniards whom he had met whilst in Spain with Dessie on their honeymoon. They wanted to buy some aeroplanes, they said, and they wanted Tom to fly one of the planes to Spain with an unnamed passenger. Money appeared to be no object.

  Tom knew that the caller was almost certainly a fascist sympathizer, but he did not allow this to worry him. The Spanish war was no concern of his. ‘At that time,’ Dessie said, ‘no one knew that the war in Spain would be a dress rehearsal for World War Two,’ and even Hitler, at this stage, had caused no great concern: most people saw him as a strong, potentially good leader of the German people. The charter fee offered was unusually large and Tom needed the money, so he accepted and set the wheels in motion for his delivery trip. However his longer-term plan to compete in the Johannesburg Race in late September was taking time to organize – he had yet to find a sponsor.

  Beryl got a job very qu
ickly. She had several interviews and quickly accepted one with Air Cruisers Ltd in the position of chief pilot. This company was owned by François Dupré, a wealthy French financier who was a good friend of Mansfield’s.8 He also owned the George V Hotel in Paris and the largest racehorse stud in France. Beryl and Mansfield met occasionally, even dined together. He wanted a divorce, he told her. Beryl would not grant his request.9 She also saw six-year-old Gervase and for a while used to visit the Markhams’ house to say goodnight to her son. When Gervase would not go to sleep until Mummy had kissed him goodnight, his nanny put a stop to it. ‘One couldn’t always depend on the fact that Mummy would turn up…’

  Beryl enjoyed working for Dupré; the duties were light and generally involved being on call, for he used the aeroplane – an eight-seater, twin-engined De Havilland Dragon – only moderately. Several times a month Dupré needed to fly to Paris and spend a few days there. Occasionally there were internal flights, and sometimes he would fly to Deauville. The aeroplane was very expensively fitted out, and included a bar.

  Her life was pleasant enough but it was getting her nowhere towards achieving her ambitions. Tom had introduced her to a wide circle of aviation friends among whom were the Mollisons, and she had her own friends on the fringe of court though she was never invited to the Fort as far as she recalled.10 She was living at this time in a rented flat in Belgravia and was frequently seen about town throughout May, June and July. Later her landlady was to sue for non-payment of rent,11 and this was not Beryl’s only brush with the law. Bow Street magistrates fined her two pounds for ‘causing an obstruction with a motor-car in New Bond Street on June 4th. The car was left unattended for two and a half hours whilst Mrs Markham was at a beauty specialist.’12 At Woolwich she was fined ‘twenty shillings for exceeding the 30 mph speed limit at Rochester Way, Eltham. The Magistrate also ordered her licence to be endorsed. A policeman said in evidence that on July 4th he timed Mrs Markham’s car for half a mile. Her speed was 50–55 mph. When stopped she said, “I did not know there was a speed limit. I have never been here before.”’ A slight, and rather feminine exaggeration.13

  She considered entering the Cape Race, and one evening dined with her old friends from Kenya, the Carberrys. John Carberry was at the time having his own mount for the race built by Edgar Percival at Percival’s Gravesend factory. Beryl hoped that wealthy John Carberry would sponsor an aeroplane for her in the race to Johannesburg. As it turned out his help was directed in an entirely different direction.

  John Carberry was an Irish peer, and a pilot of no mean distinction. Born in 1892, he had succeeded to the title Baron Carbery at the age of six, and was educated at Harrow and later at Leipzig.14 He learned to fly in 1912 (the first man in Ireland to fly) and represented England in the 1914 Schneider Trophy race. He married his first wife shortly before the outbreak of World War One in which he served as a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Air Service. After visiting America in 1918 he was bewitched by the country to the extent that in 1919 he became a naturalized American. However there is a story that his naturalization papers were subsequently withdrawn when he ran foul of the law on bootlegging charges.15 In 1920 he bought an estate in Kenya called Seremai (meaning the place of death – it was built on an old tribal battleground), renounced his title and took the name John Evans Carberry.16 His accent became distinctly American. He was among the earliest aviators in the new colony and in 1924 he flew a DH 51 (forerunner of the Gipsy Moth) to Kenya from England. His second wife Maia was one of a handful of early women pilots in Kenya in the mid 1920s, and was killed in a flying accident at Wilson airfield in 1928.17 Beryl claimed she was watching Maia fly when the accident occurred.

  With his wealth, the advantages of birth, education and his undoubted flying ability Carberry should have been a popular figure. Indeed certain women did find the thin, erect, square-shouldered and loose-limbed man fascinating. But it was a deadly fascination, for he was an unpleasant character with a cruel, sadistic streak, particularly towards animals. During nearly a hundred interviews conducted for this book not one person could find a good word to say for him. He was thoroughly disliked, probably with good reason, and Beryl at eighty-three still hated him. But in 1936 she was glad of his help and influence. For many years she had taken advantage of the fact that he kept a full-time aircraft engineer based at the airstrip on Seremai and often had her aeroplanes serviced there, borrowing Carberry’s detested Klemm to enable her to continue her work. Carberry’s third wife, June, became a hard drinker. During interviews Beryl thought that anyone married to him would need to drink if only in self-defence.18

  At the dinner party in London Carberry made a surprising suggestion. The talk had been about various record attempts and Beryl allowed her enthusiasm to show. Carberry said that if Beryl would attempt to fly non-stop from England to New York, a flight which no one had yet successfully completed solo, he would lend her the aeroplane presently under construction for his own entry in the Cape race. He stipulated that it would have to be back in England in time for him to compete in the race in late September, and that he would only lend her the aircraft if she attempted that specific record. In her biography Beryl claimed that the suggestion that she should cross the Atlantic came from Carberry as a dare. But her contemporary press interviews make it clear that she had been mulling over the idea for a considerable time before the dinner party. All she had needed was the machine and finance.

  Jim Mollison had flown the Atlantic from east to west solo in 1932 from Portmarnock in Ireland, but had not achieved his goal – non-stop to New York. Mollison’s aeroplane, named The Heart’s Content after one of a small group of villages in Newfoundland lying near his flight track, was a De Havilland Puss Moth. His flight, which was described as ‘the greatest flying achievement ever’, received maximum press coverage and brought him worldwide recognition. He was not the first to fly the Atlantic, of course, but the east–west route was particularly difficult because of the prevailing winds, which were smack on the nose of any prospective flyer. Mollison failed in his bid to reach New York when, after more than thirty-one hours in the air, he took advantage of a temporary break in the thick fog which had enveloped him since he first sighted land, and touched down at Pennfield Ridge in New Brunswick, Canada.19 He later carried on to New York, but despite another attempt with his wife Amy Johnson in the following year, the goal of ‘non-stop to New York’ floated tantalizingly out of his grasp.

  Another attempt on the solo east–west crossing had been made successfully by a young Englishman, John Grierson, but his flight was not non-stop. Grierson never intended to fly non-stop. His original plan was to fly round the world in a series of hops, one of which was across the Atlantic stopping at the Orkneys, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland. To do this he equipped his Gipsy Moth Rouge et Noir (aptly named because one side was painted red and the other black) with floats. No record-breaking was attempted, and the enterprise foundered when the little moth turned turtle in a heavy swell whilst taxiing at Reykjavik. Not disheartened, Grierson made a second and successful crossing in a De Havilland Fox Moth in 1934, again via Reykjavik, where he damaged a float and one wing and had to wait for spares to be dispatched to him. His crossing, which took six weeks, may well have set a record for being the longest east–west Atlantic flight ever made.20

  In 1936 when Carberry made his offer, no one had made a successful solo non-stop crossing from England to America (the specific target was New York), and no woman had crossed the Atlantic from east to west in a solo night. Amelia Earhart was indeed the only woman to have flown the Atlantic solo at that time and she had done it ‘the easy way’, landing in Ireland after a relatively short flight of just over fifteen hours. Several women had perished in the attempt.21

  Beryl needed no time to consider the offer and accepted on the spot. The Vega Gull under construction for Carberry was expected to be ready by early August and Beryl agreed to undertake the flight in the second half of that month. The remainder of the even
ing was spent discussing who Beryl could get to sponsor the expenses of the flight.

  Throughout the summer Beryl made almost daily flights to Gravesend to see the aircraft taking shape. At the end of July she gave up her job with Dupré ‘with great reluctance’. Dupré too was sorry to lose her. ‘She was an excellent pilot,’ he was later reported to have said, ‘about the best I have ever employed.’ An impressive compliment, for Beryl’s successor was Amy Johnson.

  Beryl had hoped to take delivery of the Vega Gull, which had already been christened The Messenger, in late July or early August (all aeroplanes involved in record-breaking flights were given names – it helped the image). But it was delivered late. During test flights several minor faults needed correction, and Beryl was in a fever of anticipation by the time she finally got her hands on the controls on 15 August for a ten-minute flight. More minor adjustments were needed: the Vega Gull was a brand-new type of aeroplane. It became clear that she could not hope to attempt the flight before early September, but this would still leave time to get The Messenger back to allow Carberry to compete in the Johannesburg Race.22

  Designed as a four-seat cruiser, the standard model Vega Gull was fitted with a 200-hp De Havilland Gipsy Six engine enabling cruising speeds of up to 163 mph. The Messenger had a standard airframe and a standard engine fitted with one of the newly introduced French Ratier, variable-pitch propellers. There were two fuel tanks in the wings, two in the centre section and two more in the cabin, giving a total capacity of 255 gallons and extending the range to an estimated 3800 miles.23