The plight of horses and a heroine’s legacy of care
I WAS delighted to read that The Royle Family actress Liz Smith left some of her estate to the Brooke Hospital for Animals in Cairo as I have been a supporter of this wonderful British charity for more than 30 years. I have visited the hospital three times and its clinics in other parts of Egypt and Pakistan. It not only gives free veterinary treatment to the working animals (horses, mules and donkeys) of the developing world, but is helping their owners, too, whose livelihoods depend on their beasts of burden. Brooke came about more by accident than design. At the end of World War I, the British government sold off to local buyers 20,000 cavalry horses which had been shipped out to the Middle East. In 1930, Brigadier Geoffrey Brooke was posted to Cairo with his wife Dorothy. This intrepid upper-middle-class woman was appalled at the condition of the surviving horses she saw working in the streets. They were skeletal, living on meagre rations and were working long hours in high temperatures without any veterinary treatment. She immediately raised awareness by writing to The Morning Post (later merged with The Daily Telegraph) in October 1931. This letter helped to raise the equivalent of £1million, with which she bought up 5,000 former cavalry horses still working in Egypt. Most of them were pitiful wrecks and had to be destroyed. Those in unbearable pain were put down humanely at once, while others were first given a week of creature comforts as the only holiday of their sad lives. Dorothy turned her stables into a free veterinary clinic for the native draught animals of the poor (which were worked, regardless of age or injury, until they dropped) and, in 1934, founded the Old War Horse Memorial Hospital. Known today simply as Brooke, its work has spread far and wide around the world.
ANGELA HUMPHERY, London NW3.