The Lost War Horses of Cairo

by Grant Hayter-Menzies

  Due to this life, in later years her friend Glenda Spooner would describe Dorothy as a woman who, in her first few months in Cairo and throughout a schedule of duties dictated by her role as the wife of a high-ranking British officer, had to learn to operate in two distinct worlds. To many in Cairo’s foreign community Dorothy was a superb and engaged hostess, a pillar of expat British society, who gave excellent parties and had a genius for organization. (This was a gift she would prove by writing a book, Tribulations of a Well-Meaning Woman, about how best to organize the lives of British military wives and their children abroad.)1 To herself—for the moment at any rate—and to a few close friends, Dorothy was simply exercising the animal rights activism she had always devoted so much energy to in England. But in the very different atmosphere of Egypt, a culture about which she then knew next to nothing, she was flummoxed as to how to put an end to the suffering of these emaciated equine war veterans.

  The taxi horses at the train station continued to haunt Dorothy throughout that fall and winter. Sometime in the first months of 1931 she began to make enquiries within her social circle in Heliopolis, asking friends and acquaintances, officials and servants, and old Cairo hands whether any of them had seen branded former war horses working anywhere in or outside the city. When people did respond, Dorothy was told that while a few former war horses—or maybe they were war horses; nobody could really be sure, could they?—had been glimpsed working here and there over the years, most were probably dead now; the ones Dorothy had seen would have been the very last survivors. And anyway, she was warned, it was dangerous for a foreigner to mix in these things—aside from the presumed physical dangers to a European woman in proximity to “native” men, there was the colonialist social rank factor to contend with. Stooping to involve herself in the affairs of Egyptian cabmen meant crossing the line established between conqueror and conquered. The facts of the matter are that nobody in Dorothy’s circle appeared inclined to assist in what most probably saw as a hazardous caprice. It was also seen, claimed Glenda Spooner, as an unnecessary distraction with which many could not bring themselves to sympathize. “Nothing makes the average Englishman more uncomfortable than to be told about anything unpleasant,” commented Spooner.2

  But not all British people in Cairo had been willing to look away from unpleasantness of this nature. Since the 1890s, Cairo had had a branch of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (called simply SPCA, to set it apart from the British RSPCA). Prior to this an army chaplain had tried to set up an organization to help animals and prosecute abusers, but he ruined his opportunity by taking a whip to a camel driver he had caught mistreating his animal—an all too common response of outraged foreigners. Charges were pressed, the chaplain was brought before the Consular Court that tried foreign cases, and the end result was that his rescue organization was closed and his fate a deterrent to any other foreigners who might wish to involve themselves in the same work and expose themselves to the same hazards. Later on, Sir Evelyn Baring, British consul general in Egypt between 1883 and 1907, showed interest in establishing an SPCA in the city, and in due course an animal hospital was constructed on Shari’a al-Sahel Street, in the Bulaq district bordering the Nile River. The SPCA took on all animal cases, but possibly because of its British origins and governance, and because of the sheer number of horses, it specialized in working equine cases from the streets of Cairo. From this location in Bulaq in 1906 alone, the SPCA oversaw in excess of five thousand convictions for various types of animal cruelty—the sort of good news that has a bad news sting, as it showed how much animal suffering there was in Cairo, and implied, given the potential numbers in such a large city, that there were probably many more thousands of abuse cases than were reported, problems the SPCA had to work all the harder to try to solve.3

  It is certainly possible that foreign interest in these animals’ fates made matters worse. John Chalcraft writes that there were probably many foreigners in Cairo whose support for the SPCA had as much or more to do with “colonial identity politics…in which the self-consciously ‘civilized’ emphasized their negative response to the brutal acts of barbarous ‘natives’ in order to reinforce their own putative superiority and claim to rule,” as it did in the simple act of rescuing an animal from misery.4 Alan Mikhail puts it more starkly. “In these colonial hierarchies,” he says, “nonhumans often stood above certain kinds of (nearly always non-European) humans.” Consciousness of this on the part of the animals’ owners was not likely to translate to a kindness they may have felt was lacking toward themselves from their Egyptian overlords or from British colonial government officials.5

  Spooner tells us that even people who admitted they knew that an SPCA branch existed in Cairo seemed unable to pinpoint for Dorothy exactly where it was—perhaps, as with the topic of surviving war horses, this was a form of gentle dissuasion to save Dorothy from descending into the dangers of direct contact with Egyptian natives. However, it is not likely many in Dorothy’s social circle even had direct knowledge of the poorer areas of Cairo, where the SPCA was located. In the end, this location, not far from the main train station of Cairo, may have helped Dorothy find it: it was at the station that she had first seen the branded gharry horses, and the gharry drivers would have known all about the hospital, as there was a strong economic bond between the Cab Drivers’ Union and the SPCA clinic.

  However she did it, Dorothy did finally find herself at last at the gates of the Cairo Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. And as she would write in her diary of what would be, by any measure, the most important day of her life, it was both shock and inspiration together:

  I well remember that first visit. About fifty boxes [stalls] were surrounded by a large flower and vegetable garden. Beyond these a gate opened into two yards. Open sheds surrounded three sides of each of these. In one shed patients, recently admitted, were awaiting “maleening”…a test for glanders—the scourge of the country. Other open sheds contained animals already maleened but awaiting results—which takes twenty-four hours. The remainder of the space was occupied by rows of little donkeys, tied to their manger, and a sorry sight most of them were. Poor little starved, overworked drudges.6

  Dorothy would have found many cabmen at the location, along with their horses. “The SPCA’s facilities were well used by the local gharry drivers,” writes Sarah Searight, “who had clubbed together to hire some thirty of the SPCA boxes for a small annual subscription, enabling their animals to be treated for well below the normal cost.” It must have been a relief for Dorothy to discover that there were at least some gharry drivers in Cairo who recognized the benefit of caring for the health and well-being of their animals.7

  It’s useful to recall that Glenda Spooner often compared Dorothy to Florence Nightingale. Another well-born Englishwoman drawn to the east, Nightingale had received a call to do something extraordinarily unusual with her life: to devote it to a cause bigger than itself, well outside the sphere to which true ladies were meant to confine themselves.

  Born in Italy in 1820, Nightingale, who died only twenty years before Dorothy’s arrival in Cairo, had been an animal lover since childhood. “It was characteristic of Florence,” wrote her biographer, “that her heart went out to the less favoured ones, those which owing to old age or infirmity were taken little notice of by the servants and farm-men.” A slender, coldly elegant beauty in her youth, Nightingale shocked her family by announcing her desire to go into nursing, a profession considered out of bounds for a gentlewoman, for whom any profession at all was out of the question to begin with. She struggled between duty to family and social position and listening to what her heart told her she must do. And it was while on a visit to Egypt, while staying outside Cairo, that she wrote in her diary, “God called me in the morning and asked me would I do good for him alone without reputation.” A career and immortality were hers for the seizing. At the outbreak of the Crimean War Nightingale would become famous as “the lady with the lam
p” for British troops and a pioneer for the nursing profession and for women’s autonomy.8

  One of Nightingale’s greatest contributions to the field of nursing was her application of statistics, the gathering of data from every possible angle to determine and meet specific needs. She was known to visit hospital wards armed with writing materials, making copious notes on best practices. Though Dorothy carried no notepaper with her that first day at the Cairo SPCA, the Nightingale simile was apt: also a person for whom organization was supreme and one who tried to learn as much as she could from a given situation, she filed many mental notes as she toured the premises. Though she knew very little about what it took to run an animal hospital, Dorothy would find that there were certain practices at the SPCA that she would have done differently, while there were others that she could build on for what would become her own future rescue work. But her first and most important discovery was made on a subsequent visit to the property. As with Nightingale, out of the blue she received her own “call from God” in the form of an elderly war horse of Cairo.

  The English chestnut stood in one of the stalls lining one side of the SPCA paddock. “He was without exception,” Dorothy wrote later, “the most dreadful looking horse I had ever seen in my life.”9

  When young, the English chestnut had developed a huge frame that, in Egypt, must have made him conspicuous next to the smaller donkeys and native horses working the streets of Cairo. Now his bones, jutting against his stretched flesh, stood out like details on an equine anatomy chart. Indeed, part of the horse’s tragedy was that he was so large. In the care of the British Army he would have received feed necessary for his size. But in the hands of a poor Egyptian he would have only been given enough food to keep him alive. Thus he was at least as damaged through malnutrition as he was because of all his untreated physical injuries. The washboard ribs, swollen joints, legs that shook, and eyes lacking shine and depth were heartbreaking to see on an animal who still bore the broad arrow brand of the British Army across his left rear quarter. “Obviously he had been a good horse once,” Dorothy recalled. “He had been happy and well fed as the other poor animals had never been. He had been born in England, had known our green fields, been groomed and cared for. He had moreover served in Palestine and suffered hardships in that campaign that few horses have endured in modern times. And then we had sold him to this.” Dorothy could see that even had his elderly, overworked body been relatively sound, his spirit was already dead.10

  Through her visits to the facility, Dorothy had come to know Dr. Ghazi, the SPCA hospital’s veterinary surgeon. She asked him about the old English horse and was surprised to be told he was being kept in the hospital only for a few days. Dorothy was aghast at the idea that the horse would ever be well enough again to be released back to his owner and his work. She was no veterinarian, but she had no difficulty seeing that as the animal was also lame in his other three legs, he was unfit for any further work at all; that it would be cruel to subject him to further misery and that he should be put down at once. Dr. Ghazi explained that as the horse was technically only lame in his near foreleg, as soon as this healed the SPCA had no legal means by which to keep him. What he told Dorothy about the horse’s owner explained a lot about the animal’s condition. The man was very poor, said Dr. Ghazi, and also “very bad.” This was not the first time his horse had been seized by police. Incredibly (to Dorothy if not to Dr. Ghazi), the SPCA board had always given this particular horse a pass to continue working. In order to be judged eligible for euthanasia, an animal had to be unable to do any work at all—in other words, had to be flat out and dying on the street—and the board had decided to err on the side of the owner’s interests rather than the animal’s. This horse’s owner was too poor to obtain another horse to keep his livelihood going. Despite what a man had done to make this animal’s life a hell, “we have to consider the men these animals belong to,” Dr. Ghazi insisted.11

  Dorothy asked how much it would cost for her to buy the horse from its owner. She expected to pay only a few shillings for an animal in such poor condition. Dr. Ghazi suggested £9, a sum that took Dorothy aback. To put this price in perspective, a pound in 1930 would be worth about £57 in inflated 2015 values. Multiply that by nine and you have a very large sum to shell out in the early years of the Great Depression. Dr. Ghazi told her that the purchase price was deliberately set at that rate to allow the owner to purchase another horse; otherwise he and his family would have no horsepower to haul or pull and thus no way to make a living. At this point, writes Spooner, Dorothy “was feeling so sick she did not argue further.”12 She paid over the money without further argument, only to discover that she would have to wait another forty-eight hours before she could take possession: the owner had to formally seal the bargain by accepting her money. And until he showed up at the SPCA, the horse remained his property. The owner couldn’t be contacted as he was not meant to retrieve the horse for another two days. So Dorothy, maddeningly, had to wait to bring the animal’s sufferings to an end. These two days were among the worst of Dorothy’s life. Had she been free to do so, the moment she handed the cash over to Dr. Ghazi she would have led the animal to a quick euthanization. As there was nothing, legally, that she could do, Dorothy decided she must make the stallion’s final hours as pleasant as possible. In what would become a Brooke Hospital tradition, she gave the horse a name. He was dubbed “Old Bill.” In what would become another tradition, Dorothy lavished on him all the personal attention she could, an expenditure of time and effort that would gain her a reputation for eccentricity among many native Egyptians when introduced to her style for the first time, which, later, developed into a deep respect.

  That first day and the next, Dorothy drove to the SPCA stables to visit Bill. She ensured he had all the feed and water he needed, and she caressed and soothed him and talked to him. One of the more wrenching experiences Dorothy was to have in her future rescues of war horses was the pricking up of battered old ears at the inflection of a voice speaking English, a language most of these animals had not heard since the war. “Every horse is endowed with a retentive memory,” wrote Geoffrey Brooke in 1927, “though he is unable to reason for himself. He cannot understand why he has changed hands.…he will remember [his master] years after.”13 But nothing Dorothy said had any such effect on Old Bill. If he was deadened to a once familiar language, Dorothy still expected Bill to brighten at the sight of the unimaginably delicious treats she offered him, but all was in vain. Nothing mattered to him anymore. Even soft straw spread for him to lie down on seemed to mean nothing. Old Bill stood over the straw on his trembling legs, with Dorothy beside him, helpless to do anything.

  In what would become another integral feature of her future work—what we might call a sort of forensic crime scene record—Dorothy had a photograph taken of Old Bill in front of the SPCA stables. People may still see the photograph today, one of the most famous images in the history of equine rescue. Bill’s huge frame, imposing despite his emaciation, dwarfs the stable hand holding his bridle. All four legs are swollen; even the front left foreleg, which he seems to be favoring while the right hangs back tentatively, looks bent and misshapen. His coat is scarred, rough, and the ridge of his backbone can clearly be seen. His hooves have not been trimmed, and his eyes, as Dorothy noted, are lifeless. “He was past enjoyment,” wrote Glenda Spooner about this photograph of Bill, “all he wanted was rest.”14

  Eventually the horse’s owner did arrive and took the money without argument. Directly afterward, Dorothy went to Old Bill’s box. She found him looking at her from the shadows. For the first time, he appeared alert, as if he knew that his waiting was over. Within minutes of the purchase, Dorothy had Old Bill put to sleep.

  At the price of £9, Old Bill could have been considered Dorothy’s good deed for the entire year. Even for a woman of means this was not an expenditure she could afford to make every week or even every month. Yet for her nine pounds, Dorothy had received so much more than ju
st Old Bill’s release from his damaged body. Through the process of his discovery, purchase, and humane end, Dorothy learned a lesson she would not forget. Old Bill had been trapped in a circle of pain that was not just his own, and in order to stop it, the human had to be addressed along with the animal.

  Perhaps when the owner arrived to take Dorothy’s money, she had been expecting a surly man, the stereotyped “cruel eastern foreigner” of the lowest class, but she had seen something in his eyes or demeanor that proved that even someone Dr. Ghazi described as a “bad owner” was human after all. A man whose scope of agency had been reduced to the point where he himself has no value in his own society might all too easily transfer that valuelessness onto beings even weaker than he. “Just as livestock, dogs, and elephants were stripped of their constructive social and economic functions in the early nineteenth century,” writes Alan Mikhail, “so too were Egyptian peasants, the uneducated, the disabled, the poor, the sick, the criminal, and the itinerant cut out of the productive social and economic realms of Egypt later in the century.”15 Any constructive function this horse’s owner may have had was stripped from him by a social and political system that ranked him low on the human totem pole. The irony, as in all societies, is that men like Old Bill’s owner supported everything above him—the grander, more flamboyant parts of the totem—yet they were fixed in place; their job was to carry the load.