The Lost War Horses of Cairo

by Grant Hayter-Menzies

  Nobody would argue that life in this condition was better than a quick and painless death, yet it was no easier to end the life of such a brave animal than it would be had he been young and healthy. That stalwart courage in the face of illness or old age ironically made one want to help the animal continue to cheat death, not succumb to it.

  George Gibson badly needed the job, especially one that was relatively well-paying. When Glenda Spooner talked to him in 1956, he told her that this was his primary reason for accepting Dorothy’s offer, despite his reservations about having to serve as “executioner” and the misery he would see every day, so different from the work he had done in the recent past. But George felt there was no recourse but to accept the job and do his best not only for the animals but for her. “There was something about her that ‘got me,’” he told Spooner, “like it did everyone else from the highest official to the lowliest syce.” Before he came to Egypt, George had grown up in England in a period when stratification of classes was still very strong, and people from a higher class did not mingle with those from a lower one, or stoop to do their work. Yet here was the epitome of an English lady, no longer young and not in the best of health, her whole life animated by a passion to ease the suffering of working equines, who had set up a hospital in a Cairo slum, and who bartered and sometimes battled with the lowest of the low as she tried to help their suffering horses, mules, and donkeys. She could well have told George in their interview that while the supervisor’s job was to put the animals down, her job was the even less enviable one of choosing which animals had to die. She had a stomach to rival any man’s, and the physical and emotional strength to do what had to be done, no matter how heartrending, without tears or weakness. If she could do what she did for the animals at the Old War Horse Memorial Hospital, then there was no reason George could not do his part. Very likely taking all this into consideration, he accepted her offer. It was an important choice he was never to regret.4

  It was well past time for the hospital to have its official opening, not least because some two hundred old horse and mule war veterans were waiting to be purchased.

  Ultimately, far more animals were taken in than there was accommodation for, but as these were the most critically compromised ones, space was made available on a regular basis. “All war horses and mules were put down within twenty-four hours and a few others not fit to work again,” recalled Major Heveningham. “In a steady stream they came to their final rest.”5 Everyone had a role to play in the process of intake, examination, and care. Rushdi Effendi and General Spinks assisted Dorothy at the buying table, through the medium of a dealer who communicated with the owners presenting their animals under the eyes of a couple of Rushdi’s police officers. Dorothy’s task was to count the cash and pass it along when a deal had been sealed. George was responsible for taking the owner’s thumb print (most could not sign their names) in a receipt book that was kept by Rushdi as evidence of the sale. There were the usual arguments over amounts offered, over whether the cash was correctly counted, or over the police presence, and there always was the possibility that some of the men would get into fights. Yet with these and any of the many other difficulties faced by any newly opened service organization came the small triumphs of saving another war horse, army mule, or donkey from a life of suffering and giving those who still had some life to spare the expert free veterinary care they needed as well as the education their owners needed just as much.

  In all, on the hospital’s first day they took in some seventy equine army veterans in the “Street of the English Lady.” Dorothy described this in her diary:

  Often that afternoon I left the committee table and wandered into the stables for the pure joy it gave me to watch the old horses’ faces. Long years ago they had given up all hope of having enough food and water, of a kind word, or any chance at all of evading the ceaseless round of everlasting work accompanied by blows from their owners’ sticks. They shambled behind the syces with drooping heads and sunken eyes.

  Now, however, their lagging steps were directed with unaccustomed gentleness across the road and over the pavement to the double doors of the stables, thrown open to receive them. Here many paused and cocked an ear. Obviously distrustful of all interiors—as well they might be, judging by the sort of places in which for years they had been housed—they hesitated. But Gibson was there waiting. A pat on the neck and a little persuasion from him and the old horses walked in. As their ill-shod misshapen hooves felt the deep tibben bed beneath them, there would be another doubting unbelieving halt. Then gradually they would lower their heads and sniff as though they could not believe their own eyes or noses. Memories, long forgotten, would return when some stepped eagerly forward towards the mangers piled high with berseem, while others with creaking joints, lowered themselves slowly on to the bed and lay, necks and legs outstretched. There they remained, flat out, until hand fed by the syces. Once down, they stayed there, not attempting to get up for many hours.

  I shall never forget the thankfulness in my heart as I watched them. The worst of our difficulties was behind us. Here we were at long last, running our own show with every detail under our own control. Every horse was carefully and understandingly cared for in the comfort and efficiency of our stable.…Each animal was given his own feed tin while all available syces and any volunteers joined in filling them.…They had not seen or smelt a mash since they left the army fifteen or more years ago, but they had not forgotten! The smell of the warm bran was enough. Immediately shrill excited whinnies echoed to the rafters. Ears were pricked and incredibly-aged faces, with nostrils quivering, turned on scrawny necks over bony harness-galled shoulders in an attempt to see what was going on.

  The blind horses—and there were many—received special attention, as did the old ladies and gentlemen who decided to go to bed as soon as they arrived—and stay there. They were fed mashes where they lay, their head supported by syces. Those that were past enjoyment of any sort were put down at once. But at least they pass on to the sound of an English voice, speaking kindly.6

  Around this same time, somebody took a photograph of Dorothy feeding one of her equine patients. Wearing a sleeveless summer dress and white open toe shoes, she sits alongside 2 Bairam al-Tunsi Street on an old wooden chair with rush seat. Her hair is short-cropped; there are pearls at her ears. She balances the pan on her lap while a horse with roached mane puts its nose tentatively among the contents, its eyes glancing up tiredly at its benefactor. Dorothy squints against the bright sun, or perhaps to hold back emotion, and her smile looks halfway to being a wince of pain. It is an intimate glimpse of a woman who had had an impossible dream become reality: that she could change the world for horses like the one she was feeding, horses that the world, for over a decade after the Great War, had chosen to forget. Sitting there in the shade, so calm and poised for being the “mad sitt” of the neighborhood, Dorothy radiates care and compassion, and she still seems enveloped in her dream, thinking about the English meadows to which she wished she could bring this horse and all the animals who were brought through the double doors of her stable. Yet another of her dreams was about to be realized—to send a former war horse back to England. It was a dream many a soldier had had years before Dorothy’s work began. As Pte. Christopher Massie of the Seventy-Sixth Brigade, Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), would sum it up: “The warhorse is honest, reliable, strong. He is a soldier.…I want someone to take his case up and see that he falls ‘cushy’ after the war. It is only fair.…Don’t ring a lot of bells and forget him. A field of clover, a bundle of hay, a Sussex meadow, a bushel of apples, a loaf of bread, a sack of carrots, sunshine and blue hills, clean stables, and trusses of straw, may they all be his, for he has earned them!”7

  Dorothy had very real concerns about the safety as well as the practicalities of sending an elderly animal on such a long journey back home—the trip by rail to Port Said, by ship across the Mediterranean, offloading in Marseilles for another rail trip, then another
ship across the English Channel. This trek was challenging even for a young and healthy horse; these horses may still have been prey to flashbacks from the frightening sea voyages that had brought them east nearly two decades before. Thus far Valiant had been the only war horse strong enough to return home, but soon there would be others able to retrace his steps. Three English horses who were brought to the hospital as “skeletons” had somehow found a will to survive, moving Dorothy to raise enough funds to send them back to Private Massie’s “sunshine and blue hills.”8

  These lucky three were named Jorrocks (for a famous nineteenth-century racehorse), Jordan (perhaps because he had crossed that river during the Palestine campaign), and Ransome. Their return was made possible by the generosity of English donors and also, sadly, by Dorothy’s inability to save another horse she had fallen in love with.

  One of the Brooke Hospital’s most devoted supporters was Annie Henrietta Yule, Lady Yule (1874–1950), a wealthy widow who was an avid breeder of Arabian horses. Lady Yule and her daughter, Gladys, who was also charmingly eccentric, spent lavishly on their travels together and shared a passion for big game hunting as well. But in spite of the latter interest, the Yule ladies were firmly on the side of happy lives for animals they loved, in this case horses. They lived at Hanstead Park, the family’s estate in Hertfordshire, which was the location of Lady Yule’s stud farm. Gladys Yule had been especially touched by the story of a polo pony Dorothy had rescued one particularly hot summer. Though the pony was purchased in poor health and did not seem likely to survive, she began to thrive under Dorothy’s care, and the future began to brighten. Recognizing the pony as English-bred, Dorothy made a plan. “After the thousands whose destruction I had had to order, I had set my heart upon getting this little mare home,” Dorothy wrote. But circumstances intervened, as they so often did in the unpredictable setting of Egypt. Because of the great heat of the summer and fearing the mare might not survive traveling on a ship’s horse deck, Dorothy had sent her into the country to live with an Egyptian who would care for her. The plan was to retrieve the pony once the weather favored her to be shipped to England. But when that time came, the man would not give the mare up, and for reasons that Glenda Spooner, Dorothy’s friend and compiler of her diaries, does not explain, the issue was not pursued (perhaps because the pony had died, news Dorothy would not want to reach Gladys Yule). The loss of the little mare haunted her, and she actively looked for other horses whose health would permit them to be returned.9

  Dorothy’s efforts, and those of the Our Dumb Friends League (now the Blue Cross), founded in London in 1897 to rescue abused working horses, as well as those of the RSPCA, began to pay off. From 1934 until the commencement of World War II, increased awareness of the forgotten equine warriors of the Middle East and in France and Belgium stimulated publicity and action to save and return them to England. Jorrocks, Jordan, and Ransome were the Old War Horse Memorial Hospital’s contribution to this small herd that crossed the Channel for the last time.

  Some horses had been as lucky on the battlefield as they were in being rescued years later. “The horse heroes of the War—who won ribbons and medals for gallant work on the battlefield just like soldiers—are spending the twilight of their lives in grassy meadows up and down the kingdom,” reported Gloucester’s Citizen in summer 1935. One of the luckiest of these survivors was Kitty, who entered the war on August 12, 1914, and was never wounded, though an officer was killed on her back, and she herself had had narrow escapes on more than a few occasions. Two days before Armistice “a shell struck the ground ten yards in front of her—but didn’t burst,” the Citizen explained. “Seconds later another shell fell almost at her feet…that one didn’t explode either. Kitty was a horse with as many lives as a cat.” Quicksilver was another fortunate horse awarded the Order of the Blue Cross, presented by the Our Dumb Friends League. Having survived the war, Quicksilver, a horse of “silvery white beauty” and sporting glittering medals, was ridden on several significant public occasions, including the funeral of the Unknown Soldier, the weddings of Princess Mary and of the Duke of York (future King George VI), the funeral of Queen Alexandra, widow of King Edward VII, and at every opening of Parliament.10

  Wolseley Russell of the Yorkshire Post took the celebration a step further, reproducing in his column of June 18, 1934, a conversation between several elderly war horses who were presented at the International Horse Show at Olympia. These were Suzette (age twenty-nine), Taffy (twenty-eight), Grey Button (twenty-seven), and Ragtime (twenty-five). Russell depicted these elders as “deep in conversation,” comparing scars and memories, when he interrupted them for an interview. “I saw the Somme, Arras, and Cambrai,” says Grey Button. “I was wounded at Arras.” “And Loos, and Neuve Chappelle, and St. Quentin,” Suzette adds. “And d’you know, it’s a very funny thing, but I was back at Mons on Armistice Day.” “You and your daughter trotting round taking care of officers!” Grey Button sniffs. “Let me tell you what my idea of real war-work is. It’s serving in the East as a veterinary pack pony, whatever.”11

  This is where one of the veterans Dorothy saved offers up his story: “‘Listen, you chaps,’ spoke up an aged horse in the corner. ‘Jorrocks’ was the name on his box. ‘I don’t mind hearing your reminiscences. But don’t forget those ex-Service fellows who haven’t been as lucky as you. Most of them are like me—our war records have been lost and our peace-time experiences haven’t been such fun that we want to talk ’em over.’”

  Jorrocks tells the other horses that he had been found in Cairo quite recently, working hard, and “I certainly never thought I’d see England again.” He had been saved from hard labor and brought back to England thanks to the Old War Horse Fund Committee, “to represent the others, your old comrades and mine, who will never leave the East now.” Jorrocks hopes, he says, that people who come to see him and the other former war horses will give a thought to those others.12

  Ransome’s biography was featured as contrast to the happier postwar lives of Quicksilver and Kitty. Described as being thirty-one years old in 1935, Ransome was one of the horses that Dorothy had purchased from the notorious quarrymen of Cairo. Not only was his rescue one of her greatest successes, but the fact that he was brought back to health and to England, after years of toil that few nonnative horses survived, was virtually unheard of.13

  Three other English war horses, unnamed in the press, were reported as having been taken in by Maj. Gen. and Mrs. A. Solly-Flood and Lt. Col. and Mrs. E. J. L. Speed in Warwickshire and by the RSPCA branch in Birmingham. Lady Yule and daughter Gladys took two horses, a pair photographed on Armistice Day 1934 standing in a pleasant field, beside them a groom wearing medals from the Great War.14 Jordan, too, would be taken in by the kind-hearted Old War Horse Fund supporter in Warwickshire, Mrs. George Bryant, who had coauthored a fund appeal with Captain Durham. Jordan was well in excess of twenty years old when he was found working in a salt mine, and only after protracted negotiations with his owner was he sold. Exhausted from pulling an overloaded cart uphill, Jordan had to be brought to the hospital by ambulance, and there was no reason to assume he would survive more than a few months. “Such was his marvellous constitution and his indomitable spirit,” wrote Glenda Spooner, “that, after a winter’s good feeding and three months out on that wonderful natural restorative, spring grass, he was soon as fat as butter and his legs remarkably restored.” Photographed in England walking through a field, with Mrs. Bryant and her dogs strolling beside him, and greeting three curious neighbor horses poking their noses at him over a fence, Jordan still looks thin—his ribs can be seen under his gleaming coat—but his ears are pricked and his bearing alert. “I doubt if he ever forgot the past,” Spooner wrote, “but was philosophical enough to put it behind him and to enjoy the present to the full.” If only, she adds, all the others could have been so lucky.15

  Jordan’s and Ransome’s good fortune in being rescued from mines and quarries, two of the most notoriously abusive envir
onments for equines in the Cairo area, shows how much trust and how much prestige Dorothy’s charity had gained since its founding only a few years earlier. She now did not need to fear approaching anyone in Egypt about the welfare of their working animals. She had a hospital that took in all equines in need, provided free veterinary care for them, and offered the incentive of subsidies for owners whose animals required hospitalization for extended periods of time. Dorothy and Dr. Branch had parted ways, and she could count herself lucky that he had not proved as menacing as he had threatened to be. Despite his opposition to her work, he had put no serious obstacles in her path and had even visited the hospital on the day of its opening, accompanied by members of the Cab Drivers’ Union. Glenda Spooner noted that they came by the location a few more times, and though they weren’t seen again, their interest was assumed benign.