How a ‘crazy English woman’ devoted her life to saving Britain’s forgotten war horses
They survived the Great War only to end up starving and abused in 1930s Cairo. Until the indomitable Dorothy swept in . . .
ARRIVING in a hot, dusty and teeming Cairo, the general’s wife was thinking of what exciting times lay ahead in her role of consort to the new commander of the British Cavalry Brigade stationed there.
A glittering social life, of course, with cocktail parties, dinners and invitations to tea. All the duties, but also the kudos and fun that went with being a leading Memsahib of an expat community.
As she waited for a staff car to pick her up at the railway station, Dorothy Brooke — known to her friends as Dodo — looked around, and was horrified. Lined up nearby were rows of gharries, the ramshackle carriages that plied the rough streets of the Egyptian capital as cabs.
Harnessed to each one, head bowed, was a sad-faced, skeletal, undernourished and overworked horse. Some were barely able to stand, let alone drag a taxi, but were whipped on by owners with apparent indifference. Her heart skipped a beat.
Brooke was a horsewoman through and through. She loved riding at home in Wiltshire, as did her husband the general, a champion steeplechaser, polo player and show jumper. Both hated any cruelty inflicted upon any of these proud beasts.
But what distressed her even more that day in 1930 was that on the wasted flanks of the bigger animals she could clearly see the arrow-shaped brand of the British Army. These were horses that had been shipped in large numbers from the uK to the Middle East in World War I. under fire they had carried cavalrymen and pulled guns and supply wagons in battles against Turkey, Germany’s ally, and in defence of the Suez Canal.
British war horses, no less. They had done their duty, survived combat . . . and for what?
When the war ended, it was considered too expensive to transport them back to the green paddocks of home, even if quarantine regulations had allowed it. Nor would anyone take responsibility for humanely destroying them, though some cavalrymen quietly rode them out into the desert, put a gun to their foreheads and shot them.
The rest were ditched, thousands of them, sold off locally, and now, a dozen years later, were the brokendown nags of Cairo.
Brooke could see them all around her in the crowded streets, straining to pull trams and wagons loaded to the gunwales with goods, or standing waiting forlornly for their next bout of back-breaking labour, without shelter from the sun or even water to quench their thirst.
At night she guessed they would be confined to overcrowded, unkempt, evil- smelling stables and fed as little as their owners could get away with.
Forget the cocktail parties, she told herself. Her mission would be to save them.
As author Grant Hayter-Menzies writes in a newly published biography of Dorothy Brooke, what moved her to tears — and, more important, to action — was the sight of ‘ innocent animals that had fought wars they had not caused and been left behind through no fault of their own to suffer a misery they did not deserve’.
Taking up their cause was, as she soon discovered, entering a minefield. Locals — particularly the gharry drivers with their powerful union — were not going to welcome a bossy, interfering do-gooder from far-away telling them how to run their lives and treat their animals.
The British community also warned her off — stay out of Egyptian affairs, she was advised. It was better that way for all sides. B
UT if Brooke wavered for a second in her resolve, her mind was made up by the massive chestnut stallion she found in what passed for an animal shelter in a Cairo back street. ‘Without exception,’ she wrote later, ‘ he was the most dreadful-looking horse I had ever seen in my life.’
Lame, with swollen joints in all four trembling legs, this once magnificent charger was as thin as a rake. His ribs showed through his skin, his coat was scarred. His eyes lacked shine and depth. He was more dead than alive.
Yet, she discovered to her further horror, he was only at the shelter to rest for a day or two on police orders before going back to his owner and put to work again.
Brooke could not bear the thought of Old Bill — as she decided to call him — suffering any more. He needed to be put out of his misery. She agreed to pay a not inconsiderable £9 (more than £500 today) for him, the amount his owner would need to buy a replacement.
While waiting to take legal possession, she fed and cosseted Old Bill for two days as he lay on soft straw for the first time in years. When the deal was sealed, she had him painlessly put down.
It was this that baffled the locals. Who would pay good money for a broken- down horse and then destroy it? It didn’t make sense. But that became her cause — to end their suffering if they were so far gone they could not be saved.
When word got around that a crazy Englishwoman was handing out hard cash for knackered horses, all of Cairo seemed to be lining up to trade in their nags.
On what she called ‘buying days’, she would sit at a table in her sun hat with a local vet at her side, examining one sad, broken creature after another, then haggling over the price.
Discussions could become heated. One aggrieved owner of a mule with a broken leg was so angered by the sum she offered him that he lunged across the table at her with a knife.
The animals received the same treatment. As with Old Bill, they were led out of the sun’s heat into a cool box strewn with fresh straw, then fed on clover and bran mash — a throwback to their distant Army days, which it was obvious from their delighted whinnying that some remembered and couldn’t believe had come again. T
HOSE still with some life in them were treated for their injuries, fed properly and kept going as long as possible. The desperate cases were comforted before being humanely dispatched.
She hated the killing, but it had to be done. ‘Their suffering must cease,’ she said.
It would be easy to dismiss Dodo Brooke as a typical colonialist, imposing her high-and-mighty Western values on uncomprehending natives — and no doubt some of today’s ‘snowflakes’, with their own high- and- mighty agenda about the evils of Britain’s imperial past, will see her in that light.
But, back then in the Thirties, she understood something that is only slowly being realised by many people even now — that you best help people out of poverty not by indiscriminate handouts but by enabling them to work.
The Egyptian owners of these down-trodden horses were downtrodden downrse. themselves. They worked their beasts of burden until they dropped down dead between the shafts not because they were intrinsically heartless or cruel, but because they themselves were on the edge of destitution and desperately needed to make a living.
Brooke’s cash provided them with a way to stop the cruelty they were inflicting while still earning money. She also managed to spread the word that better care for the animals they relied on was in their long-term interest if the cycle of poverty, ignorance and suffering was ever to be stopped.
But it was inevitably going to be a lengthy process. There would be no quick fix for Britain’s lost war horses. Saving them was going to need time and commitment ... and money, lots of it.
At first, the cash came out of her own pocket and those of close friends. It didn’t last long, and it became obvious that the problem she was trying to solve was much bigger than she had realised.
Word came to her of former war horses now working in the mines and quarries outside Cairo, in awful conditions. There were also the thousands of ex-Army mules condemned to plod through the desert to and from the Pyramids with tourists on their backs.
It was fast becoming a burden she could not carry alone, as she explained in a heart-tugging letter to the readers of The Morning Post newspaper in London: ‘These old horses, many of them blind, all skeletons, were born and bred in the green fields of England — how
many years since they have seen a field, heard a stream of water or a kind word in English? they drag out wretched days of toil in the ownership of masters too poor to feed them — too inured to hardship themselves to appreciate the sufferings of animals in their hands.’
Brooke’s words — bolstered by a photo she had taken of Old Bill on his last, emaciated legs — appealed directly to the sentimental side of the animal-loving British public. letters of support poured in for her Old War Horse Fund, along with cheques and postal orders. Even the King and Queen chipped in.
With money in the bank — administered for her by the Army Pay Corps as a gesture of goodwill — she persevered with her rescue work and eventually established her own animal clinic, the Brooke Hospital.
It was in an unsavoury area of Cairo where most of her compatriots wouldn’t dare to walk, but she never showed any fear. If she saw a gharry owner beating his horse she thought nothing of wading in and grabbing the stick.
One of her stern stares quelled most troublemakers. It helped, too, that bemused locals classified her as insane. they weren’t going to risk upsetting her.
But it was never going to be an easy ride for a Memsahib presuming to tell the Egyptians what to do. A Cairo vet who had been one of her keenest supporters took against her and made trouble.
there were complaints to the British High Commission that she was interfering with traditional business practices and upsetting local sensibilities. s Attempts were made to rein her in.
Her fellow Britons didn’t help much either. Most scoffed behind her back that she was a gullible fool, and that spivs were conning her into n paying hugely over the odds for any a old nag. Brooke didn’t care. Extending compassion and kindness to all the animals that came her way was what mattered to her.
Even she, though, had her favourites it among the thousands of animals she s rescued, notably a thoroughbred b she fittingly called Dauntless. He’d H been a pampered polo pony, mount of a British officer, but was sold on until he ended up pulling a heavy h cart through the streets, despite d open sores on his neck.
He still had a party trick, though, remembered re from the good old days — holding up his fore- foot in supplication, su to be rewarded with a lump of sugar. Brooke recalled the anxious look on his face when he first tried this on her.
‘ So many people must have ignored this gesture, learned when young. It nearly broke my heart to think how often he must have lifted that tired old foot to unheeding masters before he realised it produced no results.’
He finally got the reward for his persistence, from her.
She too soldiered on in her mission, shrugging off the political constraints and the naysayers, as dauntless herself as Dauntless. Her lump of sugar was seeing an end to suffering and, where possible, a horse made well again. A handful even returned to England.
After five years in Cairo, Brooke and her husband moved to India. She left her horse hospital in capable hands, but made regular visits to check on progress. It kept up its rescue work through World War II and afterwards, despite the new nationalist, anti-British climate.
Still going, it has never closed for a single day since it opened in 1934. Brooke is now the world’s largest equine charity, offering veterinary services and training owners how to care for their animals in countries across the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Central America.
As for its founder, she died in 1955 while on a visit to Cairo — debilitated by emphysema from long years of smoking, an antidote to the stress she underwent.
there was one last sick and suffering horse to caress — another former polo pony named Rosie. She, too, lifted a hoof to ask for treats, having been taught somewhere in her dim past to say ‘please’.
Observers recalled them together, two elderly and ill ladies leaning against each other for comfort.
to Monty Roberts, the renowned American ‘ horse whisperer’, Dorothy Brooke remains a legend and an inspiration.
‘She saw suffering,’ he writes of her in a foreword to this new book, ‘and did not look the other way. She rolled up her sleeves and got to work to make the world a kinder, healthier place for the animals who serve us and love us.
‘As she well knew, compassion is the key.’
THE Lost War Horses Of Cairo by Grant Hayter-Menzies (Allen & Unwin, £16.99). To order a copy for £13.59 (offer valid to February 18, 2018) visitmailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640. P&P is free on orders over £15. Forty per cent of the royalties from the book will be donated to The Brooke equine charity.