OBITUARIES : Solo East-West Flight Was 1st for Women : Early Atlantic Flier Beryl Markham Dies

Beryl Markham, a noted British aviator who in 1936 became the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo from east to west, died at a Nairobi hospital, her attorney said Monday.

Mrs. Markham, 83, died Sunday after an operation on a leg she had broken when she tripped over her dog at her Nairobi cottage, attorney Jack Couldrey said.

Her memoir, “West With the Night,” chronicled her Kenyan childhood and her historic flight. Praised by Ernest Hemingway as “bloody wonderful,” it failed to receive immediate recognition because it was released at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Hemingway and Mrs. Markham had met in the late 1930s and shared a love of the Kenyan wilderness.

Her memoir was rediscovered by a Sausalito restaurateur, George Gutekunst, and reissued in 1983, selling nearly 140,000 copies and bringing royalties that meant that Mrs. Markham no longer had to depend on handouts from friends.

A documentary on her life, by San Francisco television station KQED, is scheduled for broadcast on PBS in October. Born in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, England, she went to Kenya at age 4 with her divorced father, retired British Army Capt. Charles B. Clutterbuck, who bought a farm and taught his daughter to hunt. She later learned to fly and became a bush pilot.

Mrs. Markham, in a single-engine Percival Gull monoplane, departed Britain’s Abingdon Royal Air Force aerodrome on Sept. 4, 1936. Engine failure forced her to land 21 hours and 25 minutes later in a bog in Nova Scotia. Her plane was heavily damaged but she escaped with only a cut between her eyes. She later received a ticker-tape parade in New York, her original goal.

Amelia Earhart had made a west-to-east flight four years earlier.

After her memorable flight, Mrs. Markham established a home in California and was placed under contract to Paramount Pictures, where she taught flying techniques.

Never a wealthy woman, she returned to Kenya and busied herself with the other love of her life--horses.

She trained eight winners of the most prestigious East African race--the Kenya Derby.

Mrs. Markham had less than four years of formal education but said that her father encouraged her to read widely.

She married and divorced three times but retained the name of coal mining heir Mansfield Markham, by whom she had a son who was killed in a car accident.