The Lost War Horses of Cairo

by Grant Hayter-Menzies

  She had been thinking of how to address this problem for years, and every year she lived in Egypt, Dorothy appealed to the Ministry of Labor to erect a water trough for these animals. And every season, until the last few years of her life, the authorities had smiled and nodded and accomplished nothing. “At last she obtained permission for the hospital to install a trough so long as the ministry supplied the tap,” Spooner wrote. Though the tap was eventually vandalized and stolen, the water was now piped there for the animals to drink, and the troughs Dorothy brought are still in place, just as needed this century as they were in the middle of the last one.10

  Plenty of other problems remained for Dorothy to solve.

  In 1947 Egypt stopped pegging its currency to the pound sterling. This meant the country was no longer a member of the Sterling Area, a consortium of nations that used the currency as their standard, and suddenly the Bank of England delivered the news that sterling transfers to Egypt were no longer possible. “This was certainly one of the most devastating obstacles she ever had to contend with,” writes Spooner—indeed, it could have spelled the end for the hospital. But Dorothy had never had any compunction about aiming high. She went straight to Sir Ronald Campbell, British High Commissioner, who wrote a letter in support of the Brooke Hospital, and with this in hand Dorothy met with Bank of England officials in London. These gentlemen afterward related that Dorothy not only had a firm grasp of facts and figures, “but she made such pungent and often witty remarks,” the officials could not help but give in to her request. Moreover, Dorothy was allowed to move an amount from the London account much larger than she had originally requested. Whether the president of the Revolutionary Command Council of Egypt or pin-striped nabobs who ruled the Bank of England, her combined assault of determination, information, and charm felled and, in the best sense of the word, seduced them all.11

  After 1952, Dorothy’s health began to fail.

  Afflicted with emphysema—a legacy of long years of smoking, which itself was her calming response to years of unremitting stress—Dorothy was sometimes swamped with such weariness she had difficulty functioning. She was also getting on toward seventy. This was not exactly aged even by the standards of that era, but the decades of constant travel, of living and working in difficult climates, of dealing with daily and hourly problems, had caught up with her. Yet the “mad sitt” of Sayyida Zeinab pressed on. Her passion for the well-being of the suffering animals who needed quality veterinary care never abated; it seemed to most who knew her to flame even higher than in earlier decades, as if she knew her time was short.

  Dorothy’s last report to her subscribers is a case in point. Indeed it is as filled with the fire of compassion as any of her earlier writings about the Cairo hospital: “We cannot close one box. We cannot reduce our staff. Every inch of the hospital and every person we employ is essential to our work. We cannot contemplate turning a single animal away for want of room, for want of food, for want of sufficient skilled attention. For the sake of any animal you have ever loved I implore you to help carry on this great and needful work for suffering animals whose lives are ones of unremitting toil.”12

  In December of 1954, when Dorothy was at home in Salisbury, she asked Kathleen Taylor Smith to come for a visit. She was beginning to formulate succession plans for her charity. It was obvious now to Dorothy that she needed to form a committee in England to handle the administrative tasks that she herself had normally undertaken and that she, despite her poor health, was still managing on a regular basis. That could not go on forever.

  After meeting with Kathleen, says Spooner, Dorothy “finally knew that Kathleen was the one person to whom she could hand over the care of the hospital in years to come.” Dorothy understood from the start that she didn’t need to do any serious convincing where Kathleen was concerned. It had been Kathleen’s dream to be of service to animals and to Egypt, ever since her arrival in the country in 1946 and her first tour of 2 Bairam al-Tunsi. She had already proved her worth as an organizer, serving as chairperson of the Humane Treatment of Animals Committee of the National Council of Great Britain, for which Dorothy stood as representative in Salisbury.13 In addition to the daily management of its affairs, the new Brooke committee would be able to shoulder the fund-raising function that had been Dorothy’s special province for so many years. Kathleen would eventually take Brooke’s message farther afield on lecture tours she organized and presented throughout the United States. This was part of the effort to broaden Brooke’s scope to North America, which would eventually lay the groundwork for Brooke USA, installed in Lexington, Kentucky, in 2015.14

  In spring 1955, as Dorothy again prepared for her annual trip to Egypt, she asked Kathleen to accompany her. “How glad I am that I went to Cairo when she asked me to,” Kathleen wrote later. There was an urgency about the journey, as if there would not be enough time to do everything Dorothy had planned. As soon as they reached the hospital, Dorothy made sure Kathleen was given another tour of the premises and shown the improvements, or where improvements still needed to be introduced. It was made clear that all of these things would be her responsibility in the future. Dorothy also arranged for Kathleen to be driven down to the public markets to see the work Brooke vets were doing there, “giving first aid and instructing owners, urging them when their animals needed ‘in-patient’ treatment,” Kathleen recalled. George Gibson, who had greeted Kathleen at the hospital after the war, was still there, heading out every day in the hospital’s ambulance to rescue animals who could not be walked in for treatment.15

  While Kathleen absorbed as much of the hospital’s operational structure and its lengthening list of needs as she could, Dorothy began to fade and finally keep to her bed for lengths of time—an unheard of situation in prior years. Yet she remained obsessed with the administrivia that her committees in Cairo and London were supposed to be handling, unable to relinquish the reins. She had fears of another political upheaval. The 1952 revolution had certainly given fair warning. Sensing that more difficulties were to come in the not so distant future, Dorothy proceeded to work on ways in which she could increase the size of the hospital’s emergency fund, so there would be cash on hand to live off of in the event of another crisis. Nor was she satisfied with her achievement of installing water troughs at the Pyramids: she insisted that more be placed around the city, which eventually was accomplished through ceaseless Brooke lobbying. Dorothy also reached out to Gen. Sir Richard Hull, commander of British troops in Egypt and the last chief of the Imperial General Staff, seeking his reassurance of the safety and care of any horses remaining in the Canal Zone should there be a revolution. Despite what she had been promised by the highest levels of British government, Dorothy clearly did not entirely trust that horses would not yet again suffer the consequences of warfare. She would not rest until Sir Richard vowed to see to the horses’ safety.

  And, finally, Dorothy’s thoughts turned increasingly toward her own mortality. She told Geoffrey that if she should die soon, she did not want him to attend the service—it would only upset him, and she would not be there to comfort him as she would wish to do. It was a commentary as much on her love for him as on her innate need to organize events and people so that everybody was happy.16

  When it came time for Kathleen Taylor Smith to return to England, Dorothy was too weak to go back with her. Taken care of in Cairo by daughter Pinkie and by Geoffrey, Dorothy was often in her bed, where she took pleasure in the only animals she still had the power to help. “She amused herself by keeping what she called ‘maison ouverte’ [open house] for the birds,” writes Glenda Spooner. These birds regularly collected on Dorothy’s windowsill—sparrows, doves, bulbuls with calls like the rattling of glass beads, and rainbow-colored bee-eaters, too—to dine on the bread crumbs that were left for them there.17

  The bee-eater was an appropriately indomitable bird to be paying calls on the indomitable Dorothy Brooke. Before it devours its prey, which, as the name implies, is most often bees,
the bee-eater thwacks the insect against a hard surface to defuse its stinger and remove its venom. And it has a gentler side: when raising its young, not only do both parents take part in the process but other members of the colony as well. It is a bird that has learned that cooperation, and always taking care to remove the stinger, are the habits of a good life—characteristics that Dorothy might have recognized as similar to her own.

  And, of course, there was one last, lovely, poignant brush with a horse. The mare was a broken-down, abused, and elderly former polo pony that Dorothy called Rosie.

  As Spooner wrote, the mare was the property of a farmer who, perhaps not understanding when George Gibson asked him to wait until he drove the ambulance out to fetch her, sent the miserable animal on a walk of fifteen miles into the city, his son rapping her with a stick the entire way. That day Dorothy happened to be at the hospital for a visit and was resting in a chair when she saw Rosie stumble up the street. She sent for water, then took Rosie’s bridle and led her to the stable herself, two elderly and ill ladies leaning each on one another as they went. Dorothy was heard speaking softly to the suffering mare, whom she caressed and coaxed. Returning to the hospital the following day, Dorothy brought with her a treat at the sight of which “Rosie lit up like a torch.” It was what Dauntless had loved, too—sugar. And as Dauntless had done, Rosie lifted a battered hoof, having been taught somewhere in her dim privileged past to say “please.” Nobody could witness the two together without tears.18

  Shortly after meeting Rosie, Dorothy was confined to bed for good. Yet every day she asked, “How is my darling Rosie?” Dr. Murad told Sarah Searight in later years that “[Dorothy] used to specially nourish destruction cases. ‘Don’t destroy them till I’ve left Egypt,’ she would say.”19 She had never gotten over Old Bill, or Dauntless, or the thousands of other lives she had brought to a peaceful end. She could not cease worrying over Rosie. One of her last requests was that Rosie be allowed to live a month in the comfort she was forced to walk so far to find. And indeed, in the irony that was never far from anything Dorothy did during her life, Rosie was to actually outlive her, if only by a few weeks.20

  In her last days Dorothy had grown more focused on hospital work, determined to get as much done as she could while her strength held out. Though she was ill, she still had a sense of humor. The secretary of the Cairo hospital committee was a Mr. Saxby. Needing to speak to him urgently on business, Dorothy sent Saxby an old visiting card on the back of which she had written, “I’m in bed but I must see you.” Saxby hurried to her bedside and received his instructions, and then he found himself called back just as he was leaving the house. Dorothy wanted him to return the card on which she had written her note. “You might be run over by a tram or something,” she said, “and it would be most compromising for our ambassadress.” It turned out she had used the visiting card of Lady Stevenson, wife of the newly installed British ambassador Sir Ralph Stevenson, on which to ask a gentleman to come see her in bed.21

  The evening of Saxby’s visit, George Gibson also paid Dorothy a visit. He found her as gaily engaging as ever. But later in the night, her temperature fell dangerously low, a worrying symptom that Dorothy took with characteristic good cheer. “I’ve defeated the doctors again,” she assured Geoffrey. “I said I would.” Not long afterward she died, nine days past her seventy-first birthday, on June 10, 1955.22

  In a letter sent to Kathleen Taylor Smith shortly before her death, Dorothy had written of horses like Rosie and the heaven she hoped awaited them, her words echoing the imagery of gardens and water that constituted the Islamic paradise: “But give glad tidings to those who believe and work righteousness,” states the Quran, “that their portion is gardens, beneath which rivers flow.”23 “How I wish I could bring them back with me into a lovely green field, with trees and a stream,” Dorothy mused. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful. I always hope they find one when they wake up after we have said goodbye to them. I pray they do.”24

  Dorothy’s burial, with a representative of President Nasser present along with the governor of Cairo and British ambassador Sir Ralph Stevenson, took place in the Cairo War Memorial Cemetery.

  Located in the Coptic district not far from 2 Bairam al-Tunsi Street, its European-style marble markers overlooked by the flowing fronds of date palms, the property had originally been designated the New British Protestant Cemetery but had been opened in 1920 to take the remains of Great War dead. Thus Dorothy’s ashes are companioned, one might say even guarded, by many of the soldiers whose horses, mules, and donkeys she had helped at her hospital.

  Far more in need of protection, however, was her lifework, which not long after she died would be threatened again with political upheaval.

  “Animals have neither nationality nor politics,” wrote Glenda Spooner, echoing Dorothy’s own belief, “and to allow these controversial elements to enter into work of this description is not only lamentable but petty.”25

  This is a fact we all know, or believe we know. The abuse of animals has occurred not only through direct use of them in human war. Even when far from the front lines, they suffer collateral damage, often in settings to which our need to collect, classify, and display consigned them. In August 2014, the Daily Mail reported on these other victims of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “The lions sit dazed in the shade of their damaged pen,” writes Sam Webb, “while nearby the decayed carcasses of two vervet monkeys lie contorted on the grass of a Gaza zoo.” Horrific photos revealed mummified animals dead for weeks, even months, frozen in a rictus of despair. “The impact on animals in war is huge,” says Louise Hastie, former shelter manager for an animal welfare charity in Kabul. “Many just do not get that it isn’t isolated just to companion animals such as cats and dogs but livestock and working animals, and war has a massive overall impact on all living creatures which in turn causes further problems for people as well.”26

  If this scene sounds familiar, something similar happened at the Baghdad Zoo over a decade ago. Eight days after the conclusion of the 2003 Iraq War, South African conservationist and “elephant whisperer” Lawrence Anthony entered the ruins of the complex, where he found the grounds littered with carcasses and wandered by half-starved, traumatized animals. He saved as many lives as he could, including what was left of Saddam Hussein’s herd of prized Arab horses. Lest these conditions be presumed endemic to the Middle East, an example occurred right under the European Union’s nose. Writing in April 2014 of the sufferings of captive animals in war-torn Ukraine, Jillian Kay Melchior of the National Review put the situation in words that could apply to all animals caught in the crossfire of war: “Exotic animals are among the unlikelier victims of a nation in crisis.” The unlikelihood that these animals should even be in harm’s way, not just caged and helpless but thousands of miles away from their natural habitats, is just part of the broader tragedy.27

  For some animals, human conflict could spell the end of the line. As of this writing, rare northern bald ibises, whose breeding colony lies near the ancient city of Palmyra, northeast of Damascus, are now as endangered as the temples and palaces themselves by the pernicious presence of the self-styled Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which first occupied the site in May 2015. “Culture and nature, they go hand in hand,” Asaad Serhal of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Lebanon told the BBC, “and war stops, but nobody can bring back a species from extinction.”28

  When she saved so many of the abandoned war horses of Cairo, Dorothy Brooke had done what she could to right some of the wrongs of 1919. But her grand experiment in compassion for working animals, though planted deep in Egyptian soil was, like that soil, just as apt to experience inundation, in this case from the political upheavals that washed over Egypt as regularly as Nile floods. Because of this political instability, the animals the Brooke Hospital worked to help continued to face further threats from troubles purely of human origin. These troubles would remain until well into the twenty-first century, and the jury is out as t
o whether they will ever really abate, or whether animals will ever really be safe from them.

  At Dorothy Brooke’s death in 1955 the staff of the Brooke Hospital could look back on their organization’s history with satisfaction and pride. By the middle 1930s the hospital’s original mission—to rescue all known living war horses and army mules left behind after the Great War—had been achieved. The hospital had grown beyond its original mandate because Dorothy saw how many native equines were just as much in need of aid, their owners just as much in need of education.

  Nothing before that had been easy. Dorothy had fought and triumphed over substantial resistance put up by Dr. Branch and the myriad of problems carrying out her mission in a place where compassion toward animals was not the norm, and perceived foreign interference was not welcome. Her challenges had only grown with time. She had kept the hospital open during World War II and throughout the anti-British climate following Black Saturday and the revolution of 1952. The Brooke Hospital proved by every part of its work and the dedication with which the staff carried it out that it was not an alien concept implanted by a member of an alien culture, like mission schools in China or India, or a fly-by-night concern to exploit a vulnerable nation, but had been deeply integrated into, and accepted by, Egyptian society, from peasants and peddlers to the officers in uniforms at the top of the social pyramid—in fact, without the support of this topmost tier, even when social and political changes made it difficult for them to do so, Dorothy’s dream might never have been sustainable. This appreciation had thus far proved a powerful defense for the hospital during the storms that had swept over a changing Egypt. However, not long after Dorothy’s death the strength of the Brooke’s reputation would be tested heavily, when the hospital could be said to be especially vulnerable without her special, respected presence to protect it.