The Lost War Horses of Cairo

by Grant Hayter-Menzies

  A gift truly without price arrived from Scottish Australian poet William Henry Ogilvie (1869–1963), whose deep love for horses was as much a part of his being as kookaburras singing in a gum tree:

  Honour, indeed, we owed to those lost, neglected ones,

  Sold to a heartless people over a broken trust,

  Those who carried our husbands, brothers and sires and sons,

  Those who toiled in our wagons, those who galloped our guns

  Left to stagger and strive in the desert’s burning dust.

  Out of the scorching sand, out of the quarry pits,

  Out of the meaner streets and the muddy flats of the Nile

  Pitying hearts have gathered them home to where Mercy sits,

  Shoulders galled by the collar, poor mouths torn by the bits–

  Lapped them with loving kindness, bidden them rest awhile.9

  When Geoffrey returned home that afternoon of the first mail drop, Dorothy shared the good news as well as the challenge. Together they added up the checks and money orders, which amounted to £600—a small fortune in 1931. And now initial surprise and joy turned to sobering reality. “It was then she realized what she had taken on,” Spooner wrote. “No longer was it a small and rather amateur and personal affair.” The money itself needed to be divided into individual budget items for specific uses, and the ebb and flow of each budget line kept track of. This meant engaging the services of an accountant to audit the funds on a regular basis. And each donor had to be thanked and issued a receipt. No amount was so small or anonymous that it was not acknowledged with public sincerity. A supporter who accepted donations made within England would state in the Evening News, “I have pleasure in gratefully acknowledging the receipt of a shilling P.O. from ‘A Lover of Animals.’ Were he not anonymous, I would gladly write to him.” Another published an acknowledgment in the same paper for a ten-shilling donation.10

  But Dorothy realized her biggest responsibility would be to account to her donors for how their gifts would be used. This meant developing a system for gathering statistics based on the charity’s ability to make good on its promises and evidence of positive progress for the animals in its care, and presenting the information in a way that made methods transparent and achievements measurable. All of this faced the woman who wrote, “I had never done any office work, and I had no training whatsoever.”11

  Luckily, some of these most basic difficulties were cleared up immediately. When it came to managing the funds deposited in the National Bank of Egypt, Dorothy was invited to turn the responsibility over to officers from the Royal Army Pay Corps, who volunteered to look after the accounts for her. For an office, she simply set aside a corner of the villa’s drawing room, while the dining table remained a broad, flat surface for opening of mail in between the Brookes’ frequent dinner parties.

  The one task that flummoxed Dorothy was deciding what her charity was to be called. For Dorothy, the term “war horse” was problematic. It seemed to conjure not the animals she was rescuing, veterans of the desert campaigns of the Great War, but rather knights and steeds in armor from the age of Agincourt. While the condition of many of the horses Dorothy helped and the knowledge of how to care for them on the part of their owners could aptly be described using medieval terminology, Dorothy preferred to stay clear of language that might distract or mislead present and future donors or the press. She considered “Old Army Horses” but discarded it, as not all army horses took part in battle (though all equines harnessed into the service of war can be seen as war horses, whatever job they filled). In the end, Dorothy was most comfortable with a variation that had undertones of the kind of organizations formed to assist elderly and infirm human veterans—Old War Horse Fund. The subtle equation of four-hoofed and two-footed veterans in need of support in their final years was heart-reaching without being sentimental, and ultimately the proof of the pudding was in the eating: after the name was selected and made public, more donations came in than ever.12

  Dorothy’s next big job was to assemble a committee along the lines of that which governed the Cairo SPCA.

  It was to be first and foremost a buying committee. Its members needed to have an expert understanding of equines and of the conditions from which they were being rescued; the members also needed to enjoy connections within Cairo society that could help the cause, as cooperation was vital not just from the horses’ owners but from all levels of legal enforcement, municipal and provincial government, and anywhere else that might prove useful. When Dorothy solicited Dr. Branch, not only was her request accepted with alacrity, but Branch offered the spacious RAS grounds for reviewing and accepting the war horses brought in for sale. This was a most promising beginning, as was the generous acceptance of Dorothy’s nominations of some of the most prominent members of Cairo’s British society: Maj. Gen. Sir Charlton Watson Spinks, Sir Alexander Keown Boyd (director general, European Department, Ministry of the Interior, Egyptian Government, 1923–37), Col. Paul Hornby (Twelfth Lancers), Col. Arthur Main (Royal Horse Artillery), Maj. Gen. Meade Edward Dennis, Maj. Roland Heveningham, and Maj. Joseph Bell (Royal Army Veterinary Corps).

  In addition to these men, Branch urged Dorothy to include on the committee several men from the Cab Drivers’ Union, members of which, as we have seen, boarded their animals at the Cairo SPCA for a nominal fee and for the animals’ benefit. “These men, [Branch] maintained, were prosperous but quite decent,” wrote Glenda Spooner. They were on the side of the average poor driver and had intimate knowledge of market prices for working horses. There may have also been a certain realpolitik on Branch’s part. During 1906–7 there had been increasing agitation among the gharry drivers of Cairo. Denigrated as among the lowest and most violent members of Cairene society, both by foreigners and by modern-minded Egyptians who considered horse-drawn transportation an embarrassing anachronism in a developing nation, finally the drivers of Cairo had had enough, and they organized and mounted a strike action. The virtual shutdown of this vital transportation service forced the government to promise never again to imprison drivers whose animals had suffered serious injury, and the action served to reduce punishment for infractions to fines rather than deprivation of a driver’s license. While this softening of punishment undid much of what the RSPCA had achieved to protect drivers’ animals from abuse, the restrictions these older regulations had created had put many gharry drivers out of business, resulting in increased misery for their horses anyway, defeating the purpose on all sides. Branch was in Egypt at the time of the strike; he understood the need for balance between the welfare of animals and the complex exigencies of people, so as to mitigate the suffering of both. By involving members of the Cab Drivers’ Union, Branch would have preserved that balance while exposing union members and their fellow drivers to the humaneness and practicality of ensuring working equines received the care and attention they deserved.13

  Dorothy had also come to a realistic conclusion on this issue. She and, perhaps, Branch were among the few on the committee who had really looked into the dark heart of abuse of the elderly war horses they intended to rescue. As such, they knew how easy it could be to let their emotions get the better of good sense. “It was essential,” writes Spooner, “that in their anxiety over the horses, the committee did not overpay.”14 What they feared and indeed anticipated was that hope of financial gain might tempt some horse owners to cripple otherwise sound animals and present them for sale to play on the heart strings of the committee. Apart from the suffering inflicted on horses (thanks to such superstitious practices as “firing” or applying flame to painful joints or skin infections, and nostril slitting), purchasing these animals would drain funds earmarked for authentic war horses. The cab drivers were there to better help identify horses, at the same time proving to the native owners who brought their animals for sale that there were Egyptian voices as well as English ones at the buying table, and that the prices offered could be trusted. Though the tarboosh-wearing Egyptians never sat with t
he English at the table but off to one side, they were still as much a part of the negotiations as their English counterparts, and they prevented abuses while lending keen eyes and experience to the overall selection process.

  Sir Charlton Spinks was chair of the Old War Horses Fund buying committee, and as Dorothy said, with characteristic frankness, he was “the man for me.”15 Not only was he inspector general of the Egyptian Army—the last sirdar of Egypt (1924–37)—and spoke fluent Arabic, but Sir Charlton had almost as thorough a knowledge of horses as Branch. Branch and Sir Charlton would seem a dream team on the buying committee; as time passed, Dorothy would find to her consternation and her despair that for Branch, no committee was big enough for himself and another powerful male presence to occupy at the same time.

  Each Thursday the committee members would take their seats at a series of tables in the shade and be presented with horses for sale. “These animals are brought before two or more members of the Committee,” Dorothy explained in a letter to the Morning Post, “who assess their value, which ranges from £6 to £12 approximately. The higher prices are paid for those in better condition, who consequently must be considered to have greater capabilities for labour before them for an indefinite period of time.”16

  Those purchased were walked to an open shed that stood within sight of Branch’s office door. Those still waiting always formed an ever-lengthening queue. “The animals collected for sale gathered in dejected lines about 50 yards distant,” wrote Glenda Spooner. Their owners sometimes accompanied the horses, but often they simply tied them up to posts along the way to the SPCA gates and left them in the sun, with no water. Some, ill and old, couldn’t stand; they lay on the ground. Some died before they could be presented for selection.17

  Dorothy would later describe the scene herself in a report to her donors. “Let us imagine we are standing in the blistering sun by our stable door on a buying day,” she wrote. “The horses brought for sale are carefully examined on arrival, noting the old war brand on its quarters, its condition and lameness, or comparative soundness.”18 In addition to the picture of misery in front of them, as far as the eye could see, the buying committee had the added struggle of making rational offers for the animals, all the while hoping that by the time they reached the ones in the worst condition they would still be alive. A syce (pronounced “sice” as in “ice,” from the Arabic word for “groom”) carried water and berseem clover up and down the lines for those horses able to partake of them.19

  Spooner points out that Dorothy was never absent from these Thursdays, though even she had her limits. Returning home one afternoon following a long morning during which everyone at the buying table had been gutted by heartrending examples of neglect and abuse, Dorothy simply fainted. This was, she later stated, with typical humor, a “rather silly performance,” but the stress that had caused this collapse was very serious. “I will not attempt to describe to you the condition of the old English horses we purchased in that first and other innumerable buying days,” Dorothy wrote in a letter. “I can only state without a shadow of exaggeration that so appalling is the work and so horrified all the English members of the committee, including tough Mr [Branch], that at times it is almost beyond our power of endurance to continue.” Indeed, if Branch could barely handle some of the sights on buying day, there is no reason to assume that Dorothy was exaggerating; actually, she herself said often that there were no adequate means to describe the sufferings of the animals whose fates she presided over each week.20

  Thursdays were a trial for everyone, including the horses, who until buying was moved to the SPCA often had to be walked long distances, in lame condition, to reach the Royal Agricultural Society grounds. But they were nothing compared to what happened the day after. Dorothy called this day “black Friday.”

  Following the purchase of war horses, Dorothy took upon herself the responsibility of inspecting each animal individually to determine which ones would need to be euthanized. A more businesslike person might possibly have taken one look at the entire collection bought on Thursday and sent them all to be destroyed, but Dorothy felt otherwise. To her, the first order of business was to treat these damaged but gallant old warriors with respect. This meant offering them a quiet, shaded place to rest. Many had been kept in the opposite conditions, crowded gharry stables with hard floors and poor ventilation. When Dorothy was later to visit some of the places from which her patients had been brought, in all of them she found horses left to lie “on wet mud or cement in their own dung which, in that climate, gave out even more acrid fumes of ammonia” than had they been stabled in normal conditions. She was determined that her patients would never have to endure this again.21 From the beginning, to Dorothy the animals under her care were no different from human patients in a hospital or hospice. Their immediate suffering needed to be addressed; and while some of them might be brought back to some semblance of health through adequate diet, rest, and veterinary care, others were dying or in such compromised condition that death was to be preferred, sooner rather than later. They must be offered all the food and water they could take, which many of the patients received with obvious surprise. These were cases to be managed because they could not be cured.

  Walking into a box, the floor of which was strewn with sweet, fresh straw, “they would lower their heads and sniff as though they could not believe their own eyes or noses,” Dorothy wrote in her diary. “Memories, long forgotten, would then return when some stepped eagerly forward toward the mangers piled high with berseem, while others with creaking joints, lowered themselves slowly on to the bed and lay, necks and legs outstretched.”22

  Some never got up again.

  Dorothy’s daughter Pinkie captured one of her mother’s patients in a watercolor dating from around 1931–32. As demonstrated throughout her work, Pinkie had a keen understanding of how to depict a horse. It was almost as if she painted from the inside out, starting with the animal’s spirit and personality, then capturing it within a body of gleaming muscle. The horse Pinkie chose to memorialize at the hospital was very different from her portraits of the blooded Arabs of family friends. What we see first is the interior of a large, cavernous stable in which horses with jutting hipbones stand with faces to the wall, munching their hay. Just enough light spills through shadow to reveal the almost flattened figure of an emaciated chestnut horse, a white stripe down its nose. This is not a horse that has eased itself down comfortably into its hay; it has literally dropped, unable to stand. Its scrawny legs are splayed as if it had not been able to walk in the first place, or was too weak, once down, to rearrange its limbs. As it rests there in the bar of sunshine, its nose deep in a bucket of bran mash, the horse fixes a dark, wary eye on the beholder. It is an animal that has forgotten what it was like to take rest or food without interruption or to labor without pain, and it has not forgotten the whip that fell on it should it be unable to continue. Yet as its tired head arches up to eat what is in the bucket, even if it had been summoned with shouts or blows, there was no way this animal would have been able to get on its feet.

  To the pages of her diary Dorothy confided what it meant to her to serve these traumatized animals not just as angel of mercy but as angel of death:

  It is a heartbreaking business and one which I dread beyond all words. To see one suffering or starving horse gives all horse lovers a pain in the heart. Imagine being faced, day after day, with rows of such animals, each more pitiful than the last. And in so many cases one can sense the remnant of a gallant spirit and a nervous anxiety as to what fate may yet befall them. So accustomed are they now to the endless demands of their owners, they nervously prick an ear or roll an anxious eye when I approach, which adds immeasurably to my own misery when I simply have to order the syce to lead this one or that out to a distant shed to be put down. If only a green English field would miraculously appear outside that blistering, dusty yard, a field with shady trees and a brook running through it, what heaven it would be! If only I could say to
the syce who is my fellow executioner, “Lead them into that field, let them lie down and roll to their heart’s content, let them crop the sweet grass and drink the cool running waters.” If I could have said that and left them there for even a week, I would not have minded so much. But to have to give the orders—one after the other and after only a few hours’ precious rest in a shed and with the dread of tomorrow still in their eyes—caused me infinite pain. Only the knowledge that it just had to be done, that their suffering must cease…only this makes it possible for me to do it and go on doing it day after day.23

  4. Black Friday

  Good-bye, old man; I wish that you could answer

  And tell me all your brown eyes try to say.

  —LUCY LAWRENCE1

  Facing suffering on a weekly basis gave Dorothy insight into equine psychology. She came to realize, even more so than she had ever done before, that horses were not so different from human beings who had lived through similar hardships—that, in fact, they were often far more sensitive to affection, gallant under strain, and able to summon trust after years of betrayal, than most human beings were capable of after surviving such trauma.

  Anyone who has spent time around horses knows they have unique personalities and display a vivid range of emotions, with sudden loves and just as sudden antipathies. There are passionate attachments, not just always to other horses or to human beings but even to other animals with whom they have formed relationships, often under difficult or lonely conditions. There are those who could not be bribed to draw close with all the bran mash in the world, who lived in a wild-eyed solo drama of their own, often prompted by unforgettable mistreatment. There are the nobly poised and the warily skittish, the quietly affectionate and the sweetly shy. By studying the different interrelationships she saw, it became apparent to Dorothy that some of the war horses brought to the buying committee were bonded pairs. They had perhaps served together in the Great War, or they were from different regiments but were sold together when the British Army departed Egypt. Whatever had joined them, they had established a critical dependence on one another, propping one another up lest both fall. But she only discovered this after inadvertently separating two inseparable mates.