Before her arrival in Egypt in 1934, Glenda Spooner, who was to edit Dorothy’s diaries and serve as one of her greatest supporters, had had a life stranger than fiction.
Born Glenda Graham in India in 1897, where the first sounds she heard were the shouts and clashes of a riot, she was to similarly find herself, or insert herself, in situations of high drama, first as an actress with the theatrical company of actor Graham Moffatt, later as supporter of women’s suffrage just after the Great War, and then in a career in advertising on Fleet Street. Glenda would also become the author of several books for young people about ponies (with which she worked as a professional dealer) and horses. A devoted supporter of Ada Cole’s International League for the Protection of Horses, Glenda also had a love for aviation, and it was through this passion that she came to know Captain Hugh “Tony” Spooner. Tony Spooner already had another heroine in his life: he was brother to the English aviatrix Winifred Spooner, who in 1929 was awarded the Harmon Trophy as outstanding aviator of the year. After cheating death on so many occasions in the air, Winifred died of pneumonia at age thirty-two in 1933. On the heels of this tragedy Tony met Glenda in Cairo in 1934 at an International Air Race; they married shortly afterward. Then, only ten months later, in March 1935, Tony died in a freak plane crash near the coastal town of El-Arish.11
Before Tony’s death, he and Glenda had witnessed the return to England of an old war horse whom Dorothy had rescued. The Leamington branch of the RSPCA had sent Dorothy a very large gift of £1,000 to be used for whatever purpose she saw fit. Dorothy applied her windfall to finance the return of an elderly war horse she called Valiant, who had survived the war, years of hard labor, and finally the death of the gharry horse who had been his bonded mate. What made Valiant’s return to England all the more moving was that he had been accepted to parade alongside other old war horses rescued from Europe at the prestigious Olympia International Horse Show in London. Spooner wrote, “[Valiant] walked round the arena looking simply wonderful, keenly interested in all he saw, his spirit unbroken, his temperament unspoilt by all the starvation and ill-usage he had endured.”12
Intrigued by Dorothy’s work, when Glenda and Tony went to Egypt afterward, they met Dorothy and toured the premises of the Old War Horse Memorial Hospital. Not only was it love at first sight between Glenda and the hospital’s patients, but she developed a deep respect for Dorothy and her work. A key trait that seems to be shared among many who devote themselves to animal rescue is that of a personal history of having endured and overcome profound loss. Saving and caring for an animal in distress becomes a kind of compassionate therapy that works both ways, for the suffering animal and for the suffering human. The timing of losing Tony and finding the Old War Horse Memorial Hospital could not have been more significant for Glenda Spooner. She arrived on the scene just as 2 Bairam al-Tunsi Street was being made ready for patients, and even through the stars in her eyes we can see just what a huge job it was to bring the place up to both Dorothy’s and the Ministry of Health’s standards. “There was a tremendous amount of work to be done,” Spooner wrote. “The walls, caked with filth, had to be scraped and cleaned before the whitewash could be applied. The mangers had to be restored and above all disinfected. Most were broken and half eaten by crib-biters and hungry animals. The stone floors had to be relaid and side drainage installed. It had to be borne in mind that everything [Dorothy] had achieved could be nullified if the Ministry of Health, who had to be invited in to inspect, took it into its head to reject the premises.”13 Maj. Roland Heveningham, the hospital’s chief veterinarian, recalled what a challenge lay before Dorothy. “We took over some derelict buildings,” he said, “with makeshift stabling, a combined office and pharmacy in a disused native house and one syce on duty to receive any animal brought in.” This was a very small start for a charity with such a huge job before it, but it was a start. What emerged from this odd assortment of neglected buildings were premises unified by a coat of fresh whitewash and a thorough cleaning, the stables airy and bright and with roomy boxes for the patients, each piled high with soft straw. A pamphlet produced in the early 1960s describes the hospital’s layout. Though in 1934 she had yet to add an operating theater or ambulance garage, the description given is much as it would have been in her time: “Three large wards containing 42 loose boxes (24 fly-proof), One isolation ward (3 fly-proof boxes), One dressing station and operation theatre, Two large kraals for convalescent animals, with boxes for mares with foals, Offices, dispensary, farrier’s shop, ambulance garage and forage shed.” The premises were virtually self-sustaining.14
Spooner describes Sayyida Zeinab as a dangerous slum, but to Dorothy, who had had a knife thrust at her in the relatively safe yard of the SPCA, it held no frights she hadn’t experienced already. She was aware that proximity to the public abattoir a quarter of a mile down the street would expose the hospital to what Spooner termed the “quarrelsome and really dangerous men” who sold animals there, but she could console herself that there was a police station not far away, in fact quite near the abattoir’s entrance, the chief of which was to become a good friend. Dorothy liked and respected Cairo’s policemen. “The Egyptian police were a very fine body of men,” Dorothy wrote, “smart, well-disciplined, and brave as indeed they had need to be.” They likely did their best to live up to that description where Dorothy was concerned.15
In any event most of the owners who came to the hospital’s gates were harmless men seeking help in one way or another, not to cause trouble. Dorothy met some whom she described as “genuinely poor but not heartless and cruel.” She made many friends among them, helping some find jobs and helping to ease their difficult lives in other ways—another similarity to Florence Nightingale. The “blackguardly ruffians,” as she called them, were to be found among the men who handled their animals roughly and caused fights on buying day, and it was because of them that Dorothy was glad for a police presence. The troublemakers tried sneaky tricks on each other in order to move ahead in the line, which led to arguments and fistfights. “I had no objection to the owners half killing each other,” Dorothy wrote, “but I could never stand by and see the horses knocked about.” When man-to-man fights turned into free-for-alls and the police jumped in to break it up, “the bewildered horses were pushed and punched in a way that infuriated me,” Dorothy wrote. “Frequently the policemen’s heavy bludgeons missed the men they were aimed at by inches only to fall upon the horses’ boney quarters and backs,” animals already in pain and barely able to stand.16
Perhaps the knife that had flashed in her face across the SPCA buying table, and certainly the suffering she had seen in stables and streets around Cairo, had hardened her nerves. Though it’s difficult to imagine, given her upper-class origin and her natural abhorrence of scenes, not to mention the fact that many of the men may have had knives on their persons, Dorothy was no longer afraid to confront unruly owners and even involve herself in confrontations. She wrote:
My success in the brawls up the road was almost entirely due to the fact that word had gone round that I was mad. The mad “sitt” (lady) was the name I was known by, not only to every decrepit horse owner in Cairo but over a large part of Egypt itself. To the average Egyptian, a woman who spent all her time and great amounts of money seeking out old, crippled horses, giving them soft bedding, all the food and treats they could eat, the full care of a staff of stablemen, and then euthanize them a few days later, had to be crazy.
Spooner herself tells of seeing Dorothy vault from the buying table to protect the animals from squabbles among their owners and the police. “I had no need to do more than walk into the middle of the milling mass of men and horses and to command them to stop their nonsense,” Dorothy explained. “They literally wilted before my wrath.” Indeed, older men in Sayyida Zeinab still tell their children about the English lady who once grabbed away their whips.17
If a given troublemaker did not have the street smarts to wilt on command, Dorothy would grab his a
rm and glare into his eyes. This would usually do the trick. If the power of the white memsahib over groups of “natives” was waning, like the British empire itself, with each year, there was something about a foreign lady exhibiting bold eccentricities in the streets of Cairo that could still command astonished respect from even its staunchest criminal element.18
Dr. Petra Sidhom recalls that decades later, when her German mother and Egyptian father visited Cairo, certain expectations of behavior were still imposed on foreign women in the city and judgments were made about those who did not behave as they were supposed to do. “My mother was blond and blue-eyed,” says Dr. Sidhom, “so she stood out anyway. But when she objected to horses being struck by their owners, which happened all the time, she told me she had more than once made a spectacle of herself in public.” One day her parents were riding along in a gharry carriage, taking in the sights, when Dr. Sidhom’s mother noticed the driver was beating both horses with a stick. She said something to the driver; he ignored her. Her Egyptian husband said, “Please, we’re in the middle of the city.” She was wearing an expensive white dress. “But she couldn’t stand it,” says Dr. Sidhom. “She climbed into the front where the driver was, took the stick from the man, broke it, threw it away, and told him to stop. People began to gather, wondering what this foreign lady was doing. So many years earlier, then, it was a really courageous thing that Mrs. Brooke did,” she adds. “She would have had to be prepared to deal with a lot of disrespect, when people were half-amazed and half-laughing at her, and saying, ‘It’s only an animal, what are you doing?’”19
“Compassion gave her the authority to interfere,” says Dr. Sidhom, speaking of both her mother and of Dorothy. “When you are so convinced of something, it gives you full authority. She didn’t need backup of any man or police.” Perhaps this authority, more than the ordinary Egyptian’s fear of the mad or the subtle powers of the memsahib, is what protected Dorothy in the streets of Sayyida Zeinab.20
Presumed madness and compassion were excellent armor, but Dorothy did have a good policeman as backup if needed. The commander of the local police station was Abdul Moneim Rushdi Effendi (the latter a courtesy title), known to Dorothy simply as Rushdi, an Arabic name meaning “true faith.” The name was apt. “He was our friend from the beginning,” Dorothy recalled, “and not only supplied us with a police guard all day and all night for all the years we were there, but on buying days, he marched up eighteen to twenty of his best men to keep our crowds in order and to ensure our personal safety.”21 A handsome man with a neat moustache, tarboosh never off kilter, and nary a crease in his white uniform, Rushdi offered an amused expression that wasn’t quite a smile but served as one on most occasions. He had a droll sense of humor: he enjoyed telling Dorothy that Sayyida Zeinab averaged about two murders on a given day, information she received with as straight a face as she could manage. This was meant to be reassuring, as without Rushdi’s police force it was anyone’s guess how many more murders there could be. Dorothy accepted the information in the spirit with which it was offered, marveling, too, that Rushdi managed to keep back the tidal wave of crime as well as he did. She saw him lose his composure only once, and it had more to do with his duty to her than to the mayhem in the streets. There was a murder case so uniquely violent that it required the commander to send out more men than he could well afford. Because this left the hospital unguarded, if only briefly, for a period of time, Rushdi saw this as an insupportable failure of responsibility on his part.
Murders aside, and even with Rushdi’s assiduous presence at the hospital, there were a few instances where Dorothy could not sort out a situation herself. On just one occasion, though, she had to call on the official known to her as the Omda or chief inspector of police (al-Omda is Arabic for “mayor”). Dorothy was driving her car near the hospital, at her feet an attaché case crammed with cash donations amounting to several hundred pounds, when her way was blocked by a crowd. On investigating, she found that a water trough for horses had been damaged by a passing vehicle. The water was leaking out, and there were several thirsty work horses needing a drink. Milling around the horses were owners angry at the inconvenience. There were arguments among the men as to who was responsible for the accident and what was to be done about repairing the trough, while their horses stood with heads drooping in the heat. Dorothy sent word to the hospital for staff to come refill the trough, using the only water available, from a tap nearby. This, however, started another uproar, for when the owner of the tap saw what was happening, he interfered, shouting at Dorothy’s staff and at her. Now afraid that there might be a bigger demonstration, and conscious of the fortune on the floor of the car, Dorothy took the attaché case with her into the Omda’s office, which was located not far from where her car was stranded. She found him in the middle of judging a murder case. After she explained what was occurring outside, the Omda dropped what he was doing and walked into the street with her. On his own authority, he cleared the area and got into Dorothy’s car to escort her to the hospital, never suspecting, as she later related, that a bag stuffed with a fortune in British pounds lay safely under his feet. Such was all in a day’s work in the street of the English lady who spent all her money buying horses only to kill them.22
7. Going Home
Those that were past enjoyment of any sort were put down at once. But at least they pass on to the sound of an English voice, speaking kindly.
—DOROTHY BROOKE
Even before it could open for business, the Old War Horse Memorial Hospital had to be inspected and approved by the Ministry of Health. Knowing the most critical area was that part of the property set aside for euthanization and cleanly disposing of remains, Dorothy had put all her reliance on the advice of an expert in configuring drainage and establishing standards of disinfection. Her trust proved well placed. When ministry officials came to examine the hospital, “I held my breath during their minute inspection of the floors and drains,” Dorothy wrote. “My relief cannot be described when all was pronounced satisfactory.”1
This hurdle cleared, Dorothy could concentrate on who would run the hospital on a daily basis and, particularly, on who could be trusted to do so while she and Geoffrey were on leave. She hired Maj. Roland Heveningham as chief veterinarian; along with Col. C. R. Spencer, Heveningham would also carefully document each patient in photograph albums that are still archived at the Brooke Hospital for Animals in Cairo. Everyone with any experience with horses came forward to help, including Geoffrey’s personal groom, Fred Baraby, who would pay visits on the patients and check on their general comfort. Soon the hospital even had its own guardian, Mohammed Aziz. A gravely handsome older man with a face as stonily inscrutable as Rushdi Effendi’s was open and bright, Mohammed Aziz kept a strict eye on all security measures and stayed close to Dorothy.2
During her hours spent at the Cairo SPCA Dorothy had learned a great deal about veterinary medicine, and she had also picked up hints of how to run a similar organization. Though she had a hand in everything to do with the hospital, she realized that somebody had to be put in charge of the small army of syces who looked after the horses’ everyday needs. Syces attended each buying day, leading the patients back to the paddock area; they fed and watered them in their stalls and took away those selected to be put to sleep. These men knew their jobs inside and out, but like any group they needed a supervisor to organize their activities each day. Dorothy discussed this with her committee members, who all concluded that the person in question should first of all be English. Egypt was no longer Britain’s to boss around, but there remained as much an English as an Arab stereotype in which any situation requiring organization could only achieve it under English control. English horse experts proliferated throughout what had been the British Empire; they had held this preeminence for so long, whether in India or Egypt, that an understanding of hierarchy had developed between English and native horse people, and the English were usually the ones in charge. This part of the committee’s
recommendation would not have been difficult to fulfill, but Dorothy was unsure of the other laundry list requirements: that the supervisor not only speak Arabic fluently and have experience with accounting, but he must be able to oversee euthanizations.
George Gibson (circa 1908–72) was English and had horses in his blood. A short man with the bandy-legged, rough-and-ready stance of a jockey, George had actually ridden as one in Egypt, likely finding work through his brother, a well-known Cairo jockey himself. The death of their father brought George back to England to be of help to his mother, and by the time he returned to Egypt he couldn’t find work anywhere and was living with his brother. Dorothy first heard of George through an English police officer and on the strength of that contacted him for an interview. At first, the job seemed like a dream come true. George knew a lot about horses. He knew how to manage Egyptian syces. He had learned to speak fluent Arabic. But euthanizing a horse was something he neither had done nor thought he could do. “I liked him all the better for this,” Dorothy wrote of this first meeting—she couldn’t have brought herself to put down an animal, either. In fact, this was what she was looking for, a man who shied from the job not through squeamishness but through compassion, who took no pleasure in doing what had to be done, but did so because it was far more cruel to leave an animal in such condition alive to suffer.
As early as 1895 the American Humane Education Society was including material in copies of Anna Sewell’s seminal novel Black Beauty, describing in detail how to put down an animal humanely, as a way of normalizing the topic and to spread the word about humane methods of euthanization. Using an illustration of a horse’s head, looking forward, with a dot placed between its ears, the pamphlet recommended shooting the horse first, bludgeoning it if shooting was not practical or a gun not available. It is unclear when Dorothy refers to the “humane killer” whether she means a gun or a captive bolt pistol (invented in 1903)—euthanasia by injection was not to come until later in the Brooke Hospital’s history. But improved practices don’t mean it isn’t difficult even for a professional veterinarian to euthanize a patient. “Putting an animal to sleep has never been an easy thing,” says veterinarian Dr. Mohammed Abd-Elhay, who works for the Brooke Hospital for Animals in Cairo. “The decision is much more difficult than the act. Once you find it in your heart that you are taking the right decision, the deed itself feels exactly like setting a trapped animal free from its cage.” A recent patient, an elderly donkey named Chewie who had been rescued by Egypt Equine Aid, was very like the once strong, now battered old horses that George Gibson would have had to put down. “One can’t imagine what kind of life a donkey like Chewie had lived,” Dr. Mohammed says. “My last memories of him were from three days before he was gone. I was leaning on the fence at his yard gazing at him for I don’t know how long. He was just sitting there on the sand with his head down and giving his thin body to the flies, like an old sailor on a wooden chair by the sea, unaware where he is.”3
The Lost War Horses of Cairo Page 12