The Lost War Horses of Cairo

by Grant Hayter-Menzies

  This omission would continue to remain a sort of blind spot for the British government, much as it had been in 1919 when Secretary of State for War Winston Churchill discovered that war horses who had served in the European theater of war had been left behind to starve, die of disease, or become steaks in Belgian and French abattoirs. In a memo to Quartermaster-General Lieut. Gen. Sir Travers Clarke, Churchill had used a tone echoing Dorothy’s own desperation of years later. “If it is so serious, what have you been doing about it?” Churchill demanded. “The letter of the Commander-In-Chief discloses a complete failure on the part of the Ministry of Shipping to meet its obligations and scores of thousands of horses will be left in France under extremely disadvantageous conditions.” It is unfortunate that this concern, welcome as it is to see in a high-ranking British official, for the horses left in Europe (many of which were still to be found there into the late 1920s and early 1930s, this concern notwithstanding), does not seem to have extended to those left in the Middle East.22

  For the present the growing success of the Old War Horse Fund, thanks to which help for the horses and mules in the Cairo stone quarries now seemed within reach, spurred Dorothy to take a more personal role in seeking out animals to rescue on her return to Egypt that fall. If she thought she had seen some of the worst of what individual human beings, and the larger scourge of poverty, could inflict on helpless animals, venturing into Cairo slums would reveal additional depths of despair. And so, to her shock, would her future work with Dr. Branch.

  2

  Adventure

  I loved the wide gold glitter of the plains

  Spread out before us like a silent sea,

  The lazy lapping of the loose-held reins,

  The sense of motion and of mystery…

  —WILLIAM HENRY OGILVIE (1869–1963)

  5. An End and a Beginning

  Horses were all about heroines, not heroes.

  —SUSANNA FORREST1

  Dorothy returned to Cairo to find that over the summer many more war horses and mules had been identified and were ready to be brought to the buying committee’s attention. This promised an even busier fall than spring. She also found that Dr. Branch had come up with an idea to improve on the buying experience for people and animals.

  “In future,” wrote Glenda Spooner, “[Branch] decreed they should collect not at the Agricultural Society grounds, but outside the SPCA Hospital.” In another change of routine, Branch required that animals brought for sale be presented in discrete groups rather than strung out in long queues. How they were grouped is unknown, but it is likely that animals in worse shape than others were kept together and examined before those in better condition, which would have helped prevent the heartbreaking cases of animals dying before they could make it to the buying table.2

  However, there was another side to these changes, as became clear to Dorothy and the committee at a later date. While Branch was clearly a man who loved animals, he also loved his preeminence among the Egyptian princes and officials who employed and relied on him. Perhaps, too, Branch was motivated by a certain amount of professional jealousy. To most who support animal charities and conservation work, the people who carry out missions of compassion are very near to being saints—think only of Dr. Jane Good-all and the chimpanzees of Gombe. And this is true of many like Dr. Goodall. Unfortunately, among even among those who dedicate their lives to saving the last of an endangered species, there are those who must also always keep an ear to the ground for more funding and how best to acquire it to support their mission and its expenses. They must stand out from the herd of other conservationists in the fight for this support, without which, in a world of cash burned on as many bonfires of vanity as altars of compassion, the good work of one season can be undone by the poverty of the next, depending on economic factors and on the more sophisticated or attractive marketing of competing charities, as well as on politics, wars that take place in boardrooms as well as on battlefields, and other human-caused triggers for suffering that animals too often are made to endure.

  And while most conservationists rise above the internecine warfare spawned by funding cycles and ever-tightening restrictions on ever-shrinking dollars, some descend to actively backstabbing their “rivals.” These competitors are not necessarily bad people, but are rather good people driven to do whatever it takes to ensure the future of their particular work, even when this means ranging well outside the territory assigned to benign goodness. Indeed, this often calls on otherwise well-meaning people to ape the jungle creed of survival of the fittest, or worse, the human creed of vindictiveness and revenge.

  To what degree professional jealousy played a part in what destroyed the happy medium of the relationship Branch and Dorothy shared we may never know. But it is clear that the term “amour propre,” which Branch liked to use—in humor, it was assumed, by those who did not know how seriously he meant it—had something to do with his about-face.

  It began with rumors. According to what Dorothy was told, Branch had been informed by various powerful personages in Cairo that the sight of miserable horses lined up on the RAS grounds and en route to the SPCA hospital for treatment or destruction had proved insupportably distressing to “various Egyptian officials,” as Spooner tersely puts it. Tourists who had seen the horses had apparently also made “complaints.” They had come to Cairo, after all, to see pyramids and to shop for fake but exotic trophies for the mantelpiece back home, not to have their heartstrings tugged or vacation ruined by dying animals. Spooner suggests these were less likely to have been complaints about seeing the animals as they were embarrassing enquiries of officials as to how equines in Cairo had been allowed to reach this level of misery in the first place. “[Dorothy] was told that not only did this sight cause distress to sensitive persons (who, as she points out, never lifted a finger to help),” Spooner says, “but that it embarrassed the Egyptian Government to have such animals paraded weekly before the public.”3 Branch informed the buying committee that operations would have to be moved to the grounds of the SPCA and away from the precincts of the RAS.

  At the time, Dorothy had considered the move a boon and accepted Branch’s reasoning on its merits. In truth, she was already casting her energies past any fixed place of collection in Cairo. She had realized that there were horses and mules throughout Egypt who needed help; the germ of developing several clinics was already active in her thoughts; indeed, one clinic was already in operation. A group allied with the Old War Horse Fund had been formed in Alexandria, where a number of former war horses were purchased and rescued. Dorothy was also increasingly drawn to working animals native to Cairo, who had not fought in the Great War but who each fought their own daily war of survival. “Driving through the streets of the town,” writes Spooner, “she encountered heartbreaking cases of overloading and starvation of broken down little Arabs.” Almost from the start of her quest, Dorothy had had the idea of setting aside some of the fund monies for the rescue and rehabilitation (if possible) of these Egyptian work horses, mules, and donkeys.4 One major contributive factor was that many owners of former war horses were increasingly bundling into purchases their native horses, mules, or donkeys, often similarly neglected. “To look at these wretched little Arabs and donkeys was bad enough,” Dorothy remembered, “to send them away well-nigh impossible. Very little had to be given for the cast-offs. A few shillings satisfied the most rapacious owners who had to admit the animals were useless.” If, however, the committee members refused to buy any but former war horses or army mules, owners not infrequently held all the animals hostage. “Savagely tugging at the frayed rope that held the poor little misery and, nearly capsizing it in its weakness they would drag it away calling down curses upon our heads.” She was powerless to call the police; an owner could only be held culpable if the animal were witnessed being worked in observably infirm condition.5

  Branch, at least in the beginning, seemed to sympathize with Dorothy’s concern for these baladi or “peasant�
� equines. He, like the other committee members, saw what happened when they refused to purchase two or three dying Arabs to get at one old war horse. A few otherwise powerless men often found themselves in a position to pose a shrewd bargain that was difficult for the committee to reject. “The owners of the gharry stables of mixed English and Baladi horses assured the committee that if only it would buy their whole stableful they would give up horses altogether and purchase a taxi,” wrote Spooner.6 So the group began to agree to these arrangements, using money Dorothy, as treasurer, had set aside in a neutral “Animal Assistance Fund.” And when that account ran low, Branch authorized expenditure from the SPCA’s funds, setting in motion an enduring relationship between the Cairo SPCA and Dorothy’s own future hospital.

  Then the trouble started in earnest.

  In all her written references to him, Dorothy would protect Branch from his own well-known reputation, as best she was able to, by using a pseudonym for him, a practice carried through in Glenda Spooner’s 1960 book For Love of Horses. (This pseudonymic reference only ceased when Dorothy’s granddaughter Sarah Searight named Branch thirty-three years later in her book Oasis.) In the pages of her diaries, Spooner writes, Dorothy “is scrupulously fair and uses the fictitious name [Mr. Strong], an assiduity one might excuse her for not exercising on his behalf, given what he had done, and would continue to do, to set obstacles in her way.”7 But there may be more to the story of Branch’s “defection” from the Old War Horse Fund than what Spooner assumes was merely wounded self-pride and accompanying vindictiveness.

  For instance, if this turnabout was a personal matter for Branch, why had he helped Dorothy establish her charity in the first place, never missing a Thursday buying session or stinting in the time he devoted to the project? Why did he cooperate when Dorothy asked him to send his men into the slums and the quarries to locate all known or suspected former war horses or army mules, sometimes at risk to their physical safety? Why did he give his assent to expansion of Dorothy’s mission to include fund expenditures on native animals?

  What we should ask is whether Branch really did have a personal antipathy to accepting these additional native animals, or whether he was put under pressure from some higher source of power, for whom the embarrassment of international attention to the problem of the war horses had proved too sensitive for the Egyptian government to bear. Indeed, it is fair to ask further what role Egyptian nationalist fervor played in this effort to scuttle a charity founded by a British woman and staffed by Britons, most of whom had served past and present in the “veiled protectorate.” Had Branch agreed to be involved as a means of surveillance or control over what Dorothy was doing? Or could it be that Branch of Essex, like Lawrence of Caernarvonshire, had become more Arab than the Arabs he served, to such degree that he, too, saw his fellow British as colonialist interlopers, publicly embarrassing the native Egyptians with their interference in cultural issues that were none of their business? Did Dorothy sense this—that she was dealing with political expediency rather than personal vendetta—and cut Branch more slack than his obstreperousness deserved? Or did she simply refuse to descend to Branch’s level lest the fight compromise her work for the animals? Given the complexities involved, it may well have been some or all of the above.

  Her first battle with Dr. Branch started at the buying table. One day, taking everyone by surprise, Branch suddenly objected to the quantity of animals being purchased. He blamed the acceptance of native horses along with war horses for driving up numbers and costs. But since he had agreed to this process from the beginning, the change in attitude confounded the committee members, setting off a chain reaction of disagreements and counterarguments that interfered with their duties each time a native animal was presented along with one of foreign origin. Branch then made the atmosphere more heated by taking the side of owners during arguments about prices offered for their animals, which naturally did nothing to smooth what were very difficult transactions at the best of times. He also took a stand for the peasants, claiming they couldn’t possibly get on with their work when their sick horses were bought for prices too low for them to purchase replacements—an absurd objection inasmuch as the committee mandated purchase prices that would easily allow an owner to buy another horse or mule, a system to which he had not objected before this.8

  Branch might have known better than any of the others on the committee that to renege on the offer to purchase native horses was, to belabor a metaphor, closing the barn door after the horses had fled. Pains had already been taken by the committee members to ensure that none of the horses presented as war veterans were purchased without verification of history and, at the very least, to ensure strict authentication of their brands, which were difficult to falsify. Now those men who did not own war horses but had old, sick animals on their hands saw an opportunity, as Spooner describes it, “to bring their animals into the hospital on the off-chance of a deal.…Most were victims of years of absolute starvation and neglect owing to some injury received in the past, which prevented them from working. They had then been cast aside to keep themselves as best they could.” It was as pointless to stop buying native animals now as to push the Nile back toward Lake Victoria. And as it was a natural by-product of the buying process, it was impossible now to restrict or prevent it.9

  In the beginning, consensus among committee members was that Branch’s turnabout should be ignored as best they could. Yet this reticence only heightened the tensions and finally led to a scene made all the worse by the context in which it took place.

  On that particular buying day General Spinks was seated at the table alongside Dr. Branch and Dorothy. She had already noticed the light skirmishes taking place between these two self-possessed males, but internecine disagreements are normal for any board or committee, and after a while they began to seem part of the fabric of how the men worked together. But the day of the clash had already been a distraught one. Everyone was heartsore, having presided over the purchase of several battered war horses and the protracted process of purchasing a sad former army mule, who had been worked for months, even for years, with a broken leg. The owner disagreed with the price offered. When he saw that his arguments were getting him nowhere, he had suddenly lunged at Dorothy with a knife—the first time she had ever been threatened in this way. The owner was subdued and taken away by police, and just when everyone was catching their breath, Branch chose to take a curiously forgiving approach to the attacker, puzzling and angering members of the committee. The mule, in the meantime, having been purchased, was taken away and put out of its misery. There could be no great mystery as to what its life had been like. Once the committee saw the violence of the mule’s owner, the idea of how long it had suffered at his hands left everyone even more deeply shaken.10

  It was shortly after this incident that a man approached with “two of the most awful-looking native horses it had been the committee’s fate to see.” “They stood before us shaking in every limb,” Dorothy wrote, “their heads nearly touching the ground. No distance they might have travelled could have accounted for what was obviously due to weeks of lack of any food at all.”11

  Branch chose this emotional moment to put his foot down. He declared that neither these nor any other horses were to be bought that day or any other day. As he was in charge of the Cairo SPCA, his order, effective immediately, was that no more native horses were to be allowed on the premises at all, and those purchased that day should be ejected with the rest. Dorothy asked him what he thought would happen now to the horses that had already been bought, which were resting in a nearby yard. “What happened to them,” Branch told her brusquely, “he did not care or wish to know.”12

  “As a rule,” Dorothy would state later, “the more incensed I become the less I am capable of saying.”13 General Spinks, too, seemed to be a person who said less the angrier he felt. But his rage was shown in another way. The general stood, then lifted the cane he habitually carried with him and slammed it down on the tab
le top “with such concentrated fury” that even Branch flinched. Spinks then stalked off with his aide-de-camp. At that point everyone else left the table except the recalcitrant Branch and Dorothy. There was no way to overestimate the predicament that had just descended on the committee. Branch’s dictum had effectively broken it up and ended its purpose, since if they could not convene at the SPCA to purchase animals, their work could not be carried out. Stunned, Dorothy also rose and walked back to the yard where the two miserable Arabs were temporarily penned. She couldn’t let them go back into the street. She bought them from their owner using her own money, then sorted through the other animals and purchased the most desperate cases from among them. The pair of Arabs had reached her just in time. When she and General Spinks returned next morning, they found that one of the two had died during the night. As the other little one lay beside the corpse, he was euthanized then and there.

  Having cooled off, General Spinks was of the opinion that for the short term, the Old War Horse Fund buying committee should accede to Branch’s request and deal only with verified war horses, in the meantime looking for another location to achieve their broader mission. Finding a new location was a depressing prospect for Dorothy in a city she didn’t know, having only just moved operations from the Royal Agricultural Society. But now that people knew about the Old War Horse Fund, the animals would only keep on coming. A solution had to be found, and fast.