Duchess traces legacy of Army wife who led campaign for ailing war horses in Egypt
IN 1931, the wife of an Army officer was so horrified to find Britain’s war horses working into old age on the streets of Egypt that she wrote to this newspaper pleading with readers for help.
The result was £20,000 in donations and a refuge for 5,000 horses, saving them from suffering and allowing them to live out their lives in peace.
Yesterday, the Duchess of Cornwall visited the site of the sanctuary, now the Brooke Veterinary Hospital for injured donkeys and horses brought in from the streets of Cairo.
The Duchess was shown around the stables, where she stroked animals’ noses and asked after their welfare. She was introduced to an injured horse, painted by henna and brought in by his owner, and patted two nervous donkeys recuperating in the hay. “You poor thing, well you are in good hands,” she said to one.
The wife of a major general, Dorothy Brooke, whose picture is still on the wall, arrived in Egypt in 1930 and found the ageing horses “dragging out
‘We got to see the Sphinx, which was very exciting. You’re very lucky to have such wonderful treasures’
wretched days of toil in the ownership of masters too poor to feed them – too inured to hardship themselves to appreciate, in the faintest degree, the sufferings of animals in their hands”.
The next year, having established the problem stretched to thousands of elderly horses used to transport British troops in the region during the First World War, she wrote to The Morning Post, now The Daily Telegraph.
“They are all over twenty years of age by now, and to say that the majority of them have fallen on hard times is to express it very mildly,” she wrote.
Lamenting that “many are blind – all are skeletons”, she said she was setting up a fund to buy the horses, restore any she could back to health and bring a “merciful end” for the rest.
Readers sent the equivalent of £20,000, allowing her to buy 5,000 animals and set up the Old War Horse Memorial Hospital.
The Prince of Wales and the Duchess finished their four-day tour of Jordan and Egypt last night. The Duchess spoke of her “very special memories” of Egypt, after making one of her first overseas tours there in 2006 after her marriage to Prince Charles.
Interviewed by budding filmmakers at Camera Chica, a workshop project, at the Jesuit Cultural Centre in Alexandria, she was asked about her day at the pyramids. “We had a wonderful tour,” she said. “We got to see the Sphinx, which was very exciting. One of the best memories I think. You’re very lucky to have such wonderful treasures.”
The teenage directors asked the Duchess for her “favourite movie”. She said it was Gigi, the 1958 musical comedy by Vincente Minnelli.
The Duchess also spoke to Ahmed Yassin, founder of Banlastic Egypt, which campaigns to ban single-use plastic, about the importance of recycling. She said: “One of the things I do notice here is plastic bottles.”