76. Lost Ladies of Aviation

KIM ASKEW: Hey everyone, welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I'm Kim Askew.

AMY HELMES: And I'm Amy Helmes. And today we're switching gears a little bit to talk about a pioneering female pilot from the 1930s who became a celebrity, thanks to a historic solo flight across the Atlantic. 

KIM: Amelia Earhart. Right?

AMY: Well, no, hold that thought because we're also going to discuss a female aviator who tragically went missing. Her body was never found after her plane crashed. 

KIM: Okay, well, now that's Amelia Earhart, right?

AMY: Nope. At least that's not who we're focusing on in this episode and see, that's sort of the problem when it comes to women in the history of flight. She's the big name everyone knows, but there are dozens of other women pilots that deserve recognition. And we're going to focus on two of them today. Their stories have much in common with Earhart's, and their lives were flat out fascinating. 

KIM: All right. Let's expand our horizons, especially since one of the aviators we're going to be discussing today. Beryl Markham, was also an author who, like Earhart, wrote about her adventures. So technically a lost lady of literature too. And Ernest Hemingway of all people admired her writing. 

AMY: Knowing Hemingway, who knew her, that's probably not all he admired about her. 

KIM: I can only guess.

AMY: She was a good looking lady. Um, anyway, the other aviator we'll be talking about today is a name that actually cropped up in books we discussed in last week's episode, Noel Streatfeild's The Whicharts. Amy Johnson is the pilot that the flying-obsessed little girl in her book idolized. 

KIM: Okay, this is so cool. I'm loving the synergy. So fasten your seatbelts, everyone, and return your seat backs and tray tables to their upright positions, because we are going to tell you about a couple of female pilots who deserve to be filed away in your brain right alongside Earhart. Who should we discuss first, Amy?

AMY: I think we should start with Beryl Markham. I did want to say though, I think you sound like you could be a flight attendant. 

KIM: I've always wanted to say that!

AMY: I liked your delivery. So while Earhart may be the first female pilot to pull off a transatlantic crossing, she did it from east to west. Beryl. Markham was a British-born pilot who pulled off the same feat in the opposite direction. Now she did it four years after Earhart's historic flight, mind you, but it's actually a much longer flight. You're heading west right into the jet stream. So definitely nothing to sneeze at. 

KIM: God, I hate long flights, even when I have in-flight movies and free biscotti and beverage service and all that. But anyway, Beryl's backstory is also pretty interesting because at the age of 40, in 1904, her family moved from England to Kenya. Her mother was really not feeling it there and so she moved back to England, which meant Beryl was basically raised by her dad and his Masai servants who taught her Swahili and how to spear hunt .Later in adulthood, she befriended Baroness Karen Blixen. That's author Isak Dinesen of Out of Africa fame. In fact, if you remember the pilot Denys Finch-Hatton from Out of Africa, he was Blixen's lover. He was also Markham's lover for a while. He's the one who sparked her interest in learning to fly\.

AMY: Yeah. And so in her late twenties, around 1931, she began taking lessons and she became the first commercially-trained female pilot in Africa. To get that certification meant knowing how to strip and rebuild her plane's engines. So she started off as a bush pilot earning her money helping big game hunters spot game animals from the air. Prior to that, as a young woman in Africa, Beryl was actually the first woman to earn her license as a race horse trainer at the age of 18. That's the same trade as her father. She eventually trained six winners in the Kenya Derby, in fact. But getting back to her love life for a second, I know it's not as important as her career feats, but it's really just as interesting. She was glamorous and captured the eye of many men. Apparently she had a scandalous affair with Queen Elizabeth's Uncle Henry, the son of King George V. She met him when he was big-game hunting in Kenya. 

KIM: Ooh.

AMY: She was married at the time. Uh, so the Windsor family was pretty aghast at this affair and they nipped it in the bud, but it's quite a salacious story. Uh, there's a lot more to it, and we'll link to an article in our show notes, explaining. 

KIM: Yes, but anyway, back to her career, being a pilot in Africa was a dangerous undertaking considering you were flying over pretty remote locales. If something were to go wrong, say, it would go really wrong. All that training in the bush obviously prepared her for this historic transatlantic flight that she took in 1936, which actually did go slightly wrong. She ran in a field and crashed-landed her small single-engine plane in a peat bog in Nova Scotia. She got a bloody gash on her forehead and then wandered through the bog thinking she would probably die there until she stumbled across some local fishermen and explained who she was. So it wasn't pretty, but she did it. She'd flown across the Atlantic from England, making her the first person to do it. The first man to do it had technically started in Ireland. She received a ticker tape parade in New York City for the feat. That is so cool.

AMY: I know, I love that the first guy started from Ireland and she's like, "Oh yeah? Let me back it up a bit." Um, incidentally, Markham's original motivation for wanting to break records as a pilot sort of stemmed from bad blood with an ex-boyfriend. Um, I am so sorry to keep harping on her love life, but it's all kind of part and parcel of her story. So she had become romantically involved with the man who taught her how to fly. His name was Captain Tom Campbell Black, and there was a famous air race in Australia that she dreamed of winning with him. But she found out that he'd flown the race and won it with another pilot. So she was kind of ticked about that. And then shortly thereafter, she found out he had married someone else. It spurned her to want to prove to him that she was every bit as good a pilot as he was, if not better. She wanted to make him eat his heart out by making headlines. 

KIM: To the soundtrack of, uh, Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood" in the background.

AMY: Um, yeah. 

KIM: And she did it! Good for her. If you want to know all the incredible details of Markham's transatlantic flight, go read her 1942 memoir. It's called West With the Night. What a great title.

AMY: Yeah, and Kim, you and I haven't yet read this one, but maybe the testimony from one Ernest Hemingway can speak to its merit. So this is from a letter that he wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, and it was later used as a blurb on West With the Night when it was re-published in the early 1980s, because Hemingway gushingly wrote, "Did you read Beryl Markham's book West With the Night? I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer's log book. As it is, she has written so well --and marvelously well --that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen, but she can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers. The only part of it that I know about personally, on account of having been there at the time and heard the other people's stories, are absolutely true. I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful book." 

KIM: Wow. Knock me down. That is incredible praise from Hemingway, especially. Anyone who's a famous writer to write that kind of praise for another author. He must've really meant it. Wow.

AMY: Yeah, but there was one line that was omitted from all of that effusive praise when they put it as a blurb on the book, because in the original letter, Hemingway called her unpleasant and I quote a "high-grade bitch." 

KIM: "And now we've got bad blood..." Anyway, that's so Hemingway; true to form. 

AMY: Yeah, totally. You would expect nothing less from him, but I guess in a way that makes the praise all the more authentic. He didn't even like her, and he gushed about her in her writing. Um, it really does make me want to rush out now and read West With the Night. The book was pretty much forgotten by history, but then it was reprinted in the early eighties, as we said. But you should also know there is some controversy about whether or not she really wrote the book or if it was ghostwritten by, or at least jointly written with, her third husband, screenwriter Raul Schumaker. That's another whole rabbit hole you can dive into. The answers remain inconclusive. I don't know, I haven't researched it really enough. 

KIM: I mean, hang on a second. Would they say that if it were the other way around and this was a man's? Uh, no, they wouldn't, so…. 

AMY: Just have to suddenly feel like, could she really have written this? The fact of the matter is all the anecdotes in the book are her anecdotes, you know, so...

KIM: Oh, and I'm sure if he wrote it he would have told everyone anyway.

AMY: I think that might kind of be what happened. I'm not sure. Um, anyway, Beryl died in 1986, but lived long enough to see the book republished to massive critical praise. There are also several biographies of Markham out there which might be of interest and also a 2015 novel called Circling the Sun by Paula McClain. McClain also wrote the hit novel The Paris Wife about Hemingway's first wife Hadley Richardson. So anyway, there are many more resources out there to check out if you want to know more about Beryl Markham. We really barely scratched the surface of her incredible life. There are so many anecdotes that I didn't get a chance to put it in. 

KIM: Yeah, it almost seems like, um, she could be a whole episode on her memoir about that trip. 

AMY: yeah, yeah. 

KIM: Anyway, let's pivot to the pilot Amy Johnson, who Noel Streatfeild, our last "lost lady," references in her book, The Whicharts.

AMY: Yes, Amy Johnson's life, on the surface, I guess, might not be quite as sensational from a personal standpoint as Beryl Markham's, but her aviation feats certainly were. After I saw her name pop up in The Whicharts, I thought, "Wait a second, who's this?" Um, I did some Googling and discovered that she was the first woman to fly solo from London to Australia. She was nicknamed "The Queen of the Air" and she set many long-distance flying records in the 1930s, both flying solo and with her Scottish pilot husband, Jim Mollison. Jim proposed to her during one of their flights only eight hours after meeting her, which sounds so romantic. Uh, but also maybe not a huge surprise that marriage only lasted six years. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: Um, but anyway, if you check out Amy Johnson's Wikipedia page, there's a gorgeous photo of her staring off at the camera like such a bad-ass. She's got her leather bomber jacket and her goggles are pushed up on her head, and you're just like, "This woman is so clearly fire." 

KIM: This is your next Halloween costume. 

AMY: Oh my God. I 

KIM: It's perfect. And she has the name, Amy. Anyway, this other Amy apparently had several white-knuckle moments in her mini adventures. She and Mollison crashed landed their playing in a drainage ditch in Connecticut on a route from England, but survived with only a few scrapes. She also crashed landed in India and had to get a village tailor and carpenter to help her fix up the plane's wings so she could keep going. She also overturned her glider during an exhibition in England, but was not seriously hurt.

AMY: She was always literally flying in the face of danger, but ultimately Amy's luck ran out in 1941 when she was serving as a pilot in WWII. She was part of the air transport auxiliary, which transported Royal air force aircraft around the country. And she was flying near Oxford in poor weather conditions when her plane crashed into the Thames estuary. It was supposed at the time that she ran out of fuel, but more recently, it came out that she was maybe probably struck by friendly fire, and this was all covered up so as not to hurt the country's morale during the war, because she was such a legend. A convoy of wartime vessels saw Amy escape the plane in her parachute, and she was spotted alive in the water calling for help. An attempt was made to rescue her, but because of the bad weather, it was difficult to get to her. The captain of one ship actually dived into the water and tried to swim out to save her and he actually died in those efforts. So really sad. Um, they tried tossing ropes to her from one ship and they almost got to her, but she got swept under the boat and they lost sight of her. And anecdotally, one crewman on board, he years later stated that it was thought that she probably got sucked into the blades of the ship's propeller, which is horrific. Her body was never recovered, though her belongings and her log book eventually washed ashore. She was only 37 years-old when this happened. We'll link to a recent news article about the circumstances surrounding her death, because they've, you know, since uncovered a lot more information. So if you'd like to learn more about what really happened the day she died, you can check that.

KIM: Wow. And I'm reminded of the young girl in Streatfeild's book who was so enamored with Amy as a celebrity figure and how devastated the entire British public must have been to have heard of her death. That's so tragic. Wow. And also, someone needs to make a movie about her life.

AMY: Yeah, there were several films made about both Amy Johnson and Beryl Markham. But yeah, as Streatfeild kind of implies in her books, Amy Johnson was basically an obsession of the British tabloids for better or for worse. She was beloved by that country, and she always told people, "Call me Johnny." That was her nickname for Johnson. Um, she was very down to earth despite her fame. People knew how perilous these long- distance journeys were and how much courage and physical stamina and determination and intelligence it required. And to think of little girls of the time being able to read about women like Beryl and Amy in the newspapers, and to have these brave women icons to look up to and to follow their exploits, it's really pretty remarkable. 

KIM: Yeah, I'm so impressed by what these women were able to accomplish in their lives. It's incredible. Well that's all for today's episode. Tune in next week, when we'll be discovering another lost lady of literature. We're going to be talking about Daisy Fellowes with Catbird's Leigh Plessner. 

AMY: Perfect guest for that book, right? So off we go into the wild blue yonder, but keep those five-star Apple podcasts, reviews, and Instagram shout- outs coming. They are the metaphorical wind beneath our wings. Don't make me sing it people! Um, they make our hearts soar. Is that enough flying metaphors or should I keep going?

KIM: No, that's okay. Thanks. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant.

Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes. And Kim Askew.