The Lost War Horses of Cairo

by Grant Hayter-Menzies

  Men like these could be called cruel in the extreme—Old Bill could not have ended up in such desperate straits had there been a caring soul anywhere near him to put a stop to his suffering. Yet Bill’s owner had no real existence in the eyes of society, and he knew it. He had likely not been shown compassion for his own plight and had grown not to seek it. In this black-and-white world, you were alive or dead, hungry or full, asleep or awake. The deadness in Bill’s eyes, so obvious to Dorothy, would not have been so to his owner, whose own eyes were blind to such nuances because they were dead themselves.

  It would have been easy for Dorothy to conclude that some sort of mandatory education system—pointing out errors and ensuring they were corrected—only need be put in place for all owners of working equines in Cairo to take better care of their animals, so that another Old Bill need never suffer again. But she found she possessed that rare form of compassion generous enough to embrace not just animal suffering but the human causing it, and the logic to see that until the latter’s problems were addressed, the former would always be part of the endless cycle of pain.

  Dr. Ghazi’s comment—“We have to consider the men these animals belong to”—had shocked her at first, because all she could see was a horse that in England would never have been allowed to reach such a state of misery. It was now that Dorothy began to develop what for her time was a radical plan. If the owners of former war horses were to be induced to part with them, she reasoned, it had to be for more than the price of the animal; it had to be for sufficient payment for the owner to purchase another work horse. And if veterinary care could be offered at a nominal price, if not free of charge, for their sick animals, and subsidies provided for the period of the animal’s hospitalization, this would incentivize poor men to bring their horses or mules in for care, because they would not need to worry about how they would survive while the animal was healing. Here, then, was a prime opportunity—perhaps the only one Dorothy would have—to educate the animals’ owners in understanding how proper care could make a difference not just in the animals’ welfare but also in that of themselves and their families. This, in turn, might induce the men to spread the gospel: that the best success lies in making sure all working animals are treated with care, respect, and compassion, just as their owners are, in order to halt the cycle of ignorance and suffering.

  As mentioned, these considerations were revolutionary for the time and place, and not common in our own. In the twenty-first century, conservationists who include the human element in their animal welfare work are still few and far between. Those who do stand out all the more, integrating the needs of humans and animals who live in close proximity, encouraging a continuum of cooperation for the benefit of each other, of their families, communities, and nations, and ultimately a more harmonious world. They also work in an era when there is comparatively less need to justify such work on behalf of animals, work that in Dorothy’s time was still seen to be the special province of the eccentric. Dorothy’s idea of blaming poverty, not the humans who suffered from it and were, cruelly, blamed for its consequences, would become so deeply entrenched in the fiber of the organization she founded, and so effective in daily life, that it is still in successful use today, educating owners while improving the physical and emotional health of their equine partners in labor, making everything better for everyone.16

  Within six months, Dorothy’s photograph of Old Bill, the starved, overworked, and spiritless English war horse to whom she had given painless peace, would appear in the pages of newspapers lying open on the breakfast tables of thousands of people in Britain, people who paused over their tea and toast to contemplate visible proof of what many had only heard rumors of—that equines who had served in the Great War had indeed been left behind to a far worse fate than anything they had faced in a war that they had helped Britain win. And with him, Old Bill’s fellow war horses, mules, and donkeys would not only stir hearts and consciences; they would open the pocketbooks of an entire nation to fund Dorothy’s solution to their suffering. For the moment, though, a hard question remained. How was she to find all the other war horses, let alone purchase them and compensate their owners if and when she did, in the middle of a world gripped by the Great Depression?

  The chairman of the Cairo SPCA managing board, whom Dorothy was to meet, work with, and part from in equally unusual circumstances, was a short, sturdy, opinionated Englishman named Dr. Alfred E. Branch—A.E.B. to his friends.

  Born in Colchester, Essex, in 1862, Branch was educated at the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in London. Founded in 1844 by royal charter, which recognized “veterinary art as a profession” and the need for regulation of veterinary standards and ethics, the RCVS was staffed by professionals who had graduated from the Royal Veterinary College of London and the Veterinary College of Edinburgh. Passing the test of membership in the RCVS conferred recognition that a veterinarian was qualified to practice per the highest recognized standards. Branch passed his First Examination with “Great Credit” in July 1885.17

  What brought Branch to Egypt is unclear. Perhaps the fact that as of 1881 Egypt was under British authority, and the attraction of a posting in a warm and sunny climate where the cost of living was low, made him, like many young Britons, eager to go abroad. However he got there, Egypt was to work a certain magic on young Branch. Somehow, and in short order, he acquired a massive knowledge of the Arab horse and its bloodlines, along with a better than working knowledge of Arabic, and through this knowledge, and the fact that the bluest of equine bloodlines belonged to the most royal of Egyptian princes, he would make useful friends in very high places indeed.

  We know Branch was in Cairo by 1892, when he became involved in the Horse Commission, formed, writes Judith Forbis, out of “necessity to continue breeding Arabian horses for the overall good of the country.”18 With the founding of the Royal Agricultural Society in 1908, Branch was appointed administrator, where his main task, writes Forbis, was “to persevere and perpetuate the Arabian horses descending from Abbas Pasha I, Ali Pasha Sherif and others of Egypt’s royal family,” in addition to his other duties. The Agricultural Society was a locus of research into agricultural practices and animal diseases and treatments thereof. “Gruff but good-natured,” Branch took to his many jobs with gusto, forming in the process close friendships with Prince Kemal El Dine Hussein (1874–1932), for whom Branch’s son, Newton Kemal, was named, and Prince Mohammed Ali Tewfik (1875–1953), who would serve as regent for the youthful King Farouk and live to see the end of the royal dynasty. Both princes were descendants of the first Turkish khedive (viceroy), Mohammed Ali, who had transformed Egypt and especially Cairo into a society leaning more toward Europe than Asia, the West rather than the East, with benefits and drawbacks for the people and the animals of Egypt. Under Mohammed Ali, Egyptians were sent to Europe to be broadened and westernized. The khedive’s relatively enlightened descendants, in turn, brought men like Branch to Egypt, not simply for their knowledge but because they knew they could get things done in what even to Egyptians seemed a slow-moving version of reality best summed up in the Arabic expression maa’lesh—“whatever.”19

  Branch did not live happily in a “whatever” world. His order for solving a particular problem needed to be instantly be put into place, or there was hell to pay. It was a side to him that Dorothy certainly came to see—“He liked to have his own way,” she would write later, “and his own ways were often peculiar to himself”20—and it was a bullheadedness that was cleverly harnessed by the Egyptian authorities, starting with his first official appointment. Branch was assigned as director of the Cairo Zoo, where his home sat “in the middle of what had once been the vast pleasure gardens of the Sultans,” recalled his son, Newton Kemal Branch.21 In 1878 a census was taken of the animals living in the complex, which was more a royal menagerie than a scientific collection of animals brought together from exotic international locales. The Cairo Zoo held over 630 animals in total, from a giraffe and a hippopo
tamus to 300 “varied birds” and a large contingent of blue, white, and plumed peacocks, gathered in what Alan Mikhail describes as the “first bureaucratic listing of a collection of animals in Egypt owned solely for purposes of display, recreation, and exhibition rather than for any productive agricultural, laboring, or economic function.”22

  It had come to the government’s attention that animals in the Cairo Zoo were either suffering from malnutrition or were disappearing from their cages altogether. In other words, somebody inside or outside the zoo was stinting on feed to appropriate the money elsewhere and was selling off or even eating some of the animals. With unerring aim the zoo’s head keeper was first to be fixed in Branch’s sights. In what would become a known characteristic, Director Branch told the head keeper that if the animals’ physical health and body fat content did not improve spectacularly on an extraordinarily tight timeline, the keeper would be the first to pay the ultimate price, which would involve being thrown into the den with lions so in need of the nourishment his overfed body would provide. This threat rapidly achieved the desired results. In another example, when Branch discovered that the man who was supposed to take care of the chimpanzees was a hashish addict who habitually offered smokes to the apes and neglected their needs, Branch locked the keeper in a special cage (presumably without his drug of choice), marked with a placard designating the occupant “Homo hashhash. Rare specimen.”23 The humiliation of this punishment can be best appreciated when we realize that zoo caretakers were routinely allowed to use empty cages as rest areas during their shifts. These were cages that they, unlike the animals they looked after, could enter and exit at will. So it became clear that under Branch’s regime, the Egyptian staff of the Cairo Zoo were as apt to be placed behind bars as the peacocks, giraffe, or monkeys if they did not toe the line. And as a result the zoo soon reached heights of professionalism it had never known before.24

  Branch’s wife was also a person who meant what she said. Ada Loomis Hill from New Haven, Connecticut, had charmed Branch, eighteen years her senior, atop a horse-drawn bus while he was on leave in England. As Mrs. Branch, Ada was delighted to live in the flower-covered bungalow in Cairo, surrounded by a wild variety of animals, including the peacocks whose discarded feathers were used by ordinary sparrows to make extraordinary nests, bundles of iridescent color high in the sunlit trees. Like her husband, Ada brooked no abuse of the animals among which she lived. When the Branches’ Sudanese cook, having had too much to drink, tried to prepare one of the peacocks for the dinner table, Ada reacted with aplomb worthy of her husband. “Mother bounced an iron skillet on his bald head,” recalled son Newton, “and, for the next 20 years, they shared a deep respect for each other.”25

  Branch’s most truly important moment on the stage of Egyptian animal welfare took place two years before the Brookes’ arrival. In 1928 African horse sickness broke out in Upper Egypt, the corridor of Nile Valley between Cairo and Aswan, over five hundred miles apart. Spread by insect bites, the pulmonary form of the virus can kill an infected animal within twenty-four hours. In our time annual vaccines control the disease, but in the 1920s the only way to contain an outbreak was to quarantine visibly sick animals, along with any others that may have come into contact with the insect vectors transmitting the illness. By the time Dr. Branch took charge of the situation, some twenty-three villages were already infected, and the danger of further spread was very great. Branch “threw out patrols across Egypt,” writes Judith Forbis; in these controlled areas, he had some forty-five thousand horses, mules, and donkeys specially branded for identification and their temperatures recorded in precise detail, comparing from day to day to monitor for any signs of disease progression. By any standard it was an extraordinarily organized response to an epidemic, unfolding under conditions very difficult to control, and one previously unknown in Egypt. Branch made sure that all details of each animal’s owners were also recorded, so as to be able to scientifically map out areas of infection and non-infection. All equid owners were warned, as only Branch knew how to do, that if an animal marked by his team as belonging to one restricted area was brought outside of that area or allowed to stray beyond that boundary, it could be euthanized instantly or removed to more stringent quarantine, depending on the circumstances. Nobody cared to test Branch’s authority in the matter. Branch himself made it clear “to the headmen of each village that they would be caned in public if any horse or mule was caught straying out of bounds,” his son Newton remembered. As a result Branch is credited with having saved the equine population of Upper Egypt from perishing in an epidemic and Egypt itself from financial ruin. This, of course, only increased his prestige and, for some, his fearsomeness.26

  Though her schedule was largely taken up by her social duties, Dorothy had managed to spend what remained of her time at the SPCA, where more Old Bills had come limping through the gates. “Invariably they were arrested cases,” Dorothy wrote—meaning that these animals, like Old Bill, had been forcibly removed from owners because they were seen being worked publicly despite incapacitation.27

  Dorothy continually tried to talk the SPCA staff into euthanizing some of the most desperate of these animals, and when they didn’t, she bought them herself and had them put down. When this method soon became too expensive, Dorothy asked friends to help financially. Some gave freely; others preferred not to get involved. “How inconvenient the stirrings of a conscience can be,” Glenda Spooner remarked with the understandable bitterness of one who had watched Dorothy too often plead in vain. It was growing more clear each time she visited the SPCA paddocks that there was a dire need for an organized effort to help the abandoned equine veterans of the Great War. How to make this help available, given the costs involved, was part of the problem. The other part was far more difficult to work out—what was to be her role, if any, in this effort? Just what that role was would come to her in the least promising of settings.28

  When Dorothy was not visiting the SPCA she liked to go horseback riding, accompanied by Geoffrey and her daughter Pamela (the future Mrs. Blenman-Bull, who went by the nickname Pinkie), in the desert wastes that bordered clipped and orderly Heliopolis. Surrounded as she was by every comfort, Dorothy had a thirst, which many in her circle might well have viewed as perverse, to see the opposite side of every situation—to step outside her comforts to where there were no comforts for anyone, beast or man. Like many people for whom compassion is more than just a passing fashion, Dorothy could not forget poverty or pain once she had witnessed them herself, and like such people, her memory of them never left her, especially in circumstances that for most people would conveniently screen them from view. In the walled gardens of their villas, Heliopolis residents were spared many sights they would rather not see, but had they gone out with Dorothy on her rides into the countryside, they would have had to face, as she did, the realities of the real Egypt surrounding them—the poor hutments, the street beggars or street vendors whose sparse offerings placed them only a notch above begging, the starving stray dogs and cats, and the horses, mules, and donkeys, battered by lives of unending toil.

  On these morning rides, off hovering in the distance, Dorothy would have noticed the craggy outcrop of the Mokattam Hills, which Gustave Flaubert took the trouble to visit on Christmas Day 1849, only to write, “there was nothing to see.”29 To those who knew better, the Mokattam Hills constituted a microcosm on the edges of the universe of Cairo. Called “Broken Off Mountain” in Arabic, Mokattam today is the location of both a comfortable suburb of Cairo (Muqattam) and, at the base of the mountain, the slums of Cairo’s Christian trash collectors, known as zabaleen (“garbage people”). Since just before the outbreak of World War II, young people from this community have driven donkey carts to collect trash from the streets of the city, which they bring back to Mokattam for sorting, a part of the job typically taken on by women.30 The animals are often neglected in a specially miserable myriad of ways. They are worked for hours in intense heat and, back at Mokattam, in s
urroundings piled high with combusting garbage that can resemble a vision of hell. These animals are often singed and even burned by these flames while working in the sun, in an atmosphere fetid and caustic. For food, they get whatever scraps are left over after people and pigs are fed. Hungrily eating whatever they find among the rubbish in which they live, they can develop bowel obstructions and colic, which, if not treated immediately, leads to painful death.31

  At the time when, in the first year of the 1930s, Dorothy was riding through the deserts around Mokattam, quarrymen there were putting horses and mules to much harsher uses and conditions at the summit as they dragged huge loads of limestone from hilltop quarries. All who knew about these animals shared the same opinion: the Mokattam Hills were where horses and mules were routinely worked to death.

  In the era before obscuring smog became the accepted norm in Cairo, the broken mountain would have appeared picturesque in the morning light; indeed, from its heights, one could look back at the rumpled golden carpet that was Cairo to the three pyramids, their broad planes reflecting light and their angles casting sharp shadows on the opposite bank of the Nile. But Dorothy had heard too many stories about the abuses inflicted on the horses who worked in the hot, squalid conditions of the quarry pits, and the sight of the mountain on her morning rides would have provided no particular pleasure, any more than the Pyramids would to anyone who had seen the squalid and cruel conditions suffered by many of the animals that carried tourists to see them. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why Dorothy took her rides in the featureless deserts east of the city. The landscape provided a bare canvas on which to paint her daybreak emotions. And out of deserts have come many a visionary seized with a new and compelling view of reality to share with the world at large.

  It was while she was riding in these wastes one such morning, pondering how to help the animals at the SPCA and the ones laboring in the pits of Mokattam, that her horse took her across a patch of random weedy field. And there, among the dust and dead vegetation, she saw the skeleton of a beast, “lying on a pile of rubble.” She noted the large size of the bones. She knew they were not so big as to belong to a camel, but they were not the fine bones of a native Arab pony. Then she glimpsed the skull. “The teeth were very long and protruding,” Dorothy remembered. “It lay on its side and had without a doubt belonged to an English horse.” A decade or six months ago, this animal had wandered out here, laid itself down, and not risen again.32