The Lost War Horses of Cairo

by Grant Hayter-Menzies

  Glenda Spooner writes that it was not long after her arrival in India that Dorothy found working equines there just as much in need of care, their owners as much in need of education, as those at her hospital in Cairo. As if starting all over, she carved out time in her crowded officer’s wife’s social calendar to try to make a difference in these animals’ lives, even commissioning largescale plans for a hospital complex in Rawalpindi.3 Spooner tells us that these efforts were not to come to fruition, at least not at that time, perhaps because in Rawalpindi Dorothy was dealing with a completely different situation to what existed in Cairo. Spooner tells us that Dorothy did the best she could in Rawalpindi, but that always at the forefront of her thinking was the Cairo clinic, which she made a point of visiting every year, despite the arduousness of the journey.4

  Fortunately in Dorothy’s absence the hospital in Sayyida Zeinab proved to be in better than capable hands. Col. John Hodgkins, a retired RAVC surgeon who had served as veterinarian in the battlefields of France, had been put in charge of hospital administration alongside Col. Douglas Smith, RAVC, who in later years explained to Dorothy’s granddaughter just how critical Colonel Hodgkins was to the hospital’s very existence.5 During Hodgkins’s ten years at the hospital, “he trained up his staff, trained a whole generation of Egyptian vets,” recalled Colonel Smith, “reinforcing a code of good hygiene and animal management which has lasted to this day.” Hodgkins was never a vet to give up on an animal, even when others saw no point in trying to save it; through this willpower as much as through skill, Hodgkins would help several patients pull through.6

  A small, compact man, “by nature…shy and retiring,” Hodgkins was good-natured and generous; he often gave kudos to the syces, typically a despised class of worker, and happily trained any family members who showed interest in working with equines or for the hospital.7 But he could be pushed to the wall, as would happen during World War II, when lack of staff threw most of the hospital’s work on his shoulders. Dr. Murad Raghib, later chief veterinarian of the hospital, remembered Colonel Hodgkins running up and down the wards in a frenzy. “Get a move on!” he shouted at the grooms. “Hurry up! Hurry up!” Yet when dwindling funds and supplies meant cutting back on virtually all the hospital’s expenses, Hodgkins would not hear of any economies being made at the expense of his patients, Dr. Murad recalled. And if he had to shout at anybody, it was for always the animals’ sake. Completing this strong team was George Gibson, whom Dr. Murad would call “the principal doer,” assisting Major Heveningham.8

  “Links with Cairo University were encouraged by students from the University’s veterinary department having a spell of training at the Hospital,” writes Sarah Searight. One of these Cairo University students was to become a mainstay of the old war horse hospital, though the route he took to get there was circuitous at best. In 1938, three years after the Brookes departed for India, a young man named Murad Raghib arrived at the hospital. He was, says Dorothy’s grandson Richard Searight, “to take on my grandmother’s spirit, her mantle as it were.”9

  A Coptic Christian whose father was employed by the Government Veterinary Service, Raghib was one of a handful of students enrolled in the Veterinary College of Cairo University, founded in 1908 as a secular center of civil education. For Raghib 1937 was a hard year: his father’s death and the weight of becoming overnight the sole source of support for his mother and siblings was especially draining as Raghib tackled his final exams. In a society so reliant on animals for transportation, it may seem there would always be a job waiting somewhere for a veterinarian, but the story is not so simple or easy. The profession was not only looked down on in the 1930s, but it had not gained much in public esteem over sixty years later.

  Dr. Mohammed Abd-Elhay, Brooke Hospital veterinarian, who was born in 1984, describes navigating a similar rocky road on his way to a career of helping and healing animals many years later. “For all my life and since I was a kid I wanted to be a vet,” says Dr. Abd-Elhay. “Being a vet wasn’t a very popular profession in Egypt; you were more likely to get mocked and underpaid, so nobody really likes it except some fools like me!” Friends and family were discouraging, cracking jokes and predicting a life of difficulty for him. So he challenged them by beginning veterinary studies, “only to find it a really unpleasant place for students or animals,” he explains. “But there was no way to pull back. It took me ten years to finish vet school; I was really lost sometimes and didn’t know where my life would go. I discovered that not all vets work in National Geographic settings. I could see that I would eventually end up doing some unpleasant job for money, which wasn’t an option for me. I’m a person who works to serve a higher purpose and get satisfaction by making a difference.”10

  At one point in his studies Dr. Abd-Elhay found a relatively quiet job taking care of cattle in the countryside—an ideal situation for a vet student who is also a published poet, but not for a man who turned out to be allergic to ruminants. “One day I was at the vet school and I asked a friend about a training place to make use of my free time,” says Dr. Abd-Elhay. His friend referred him to the Brooke Hospital in Cairo. He was given a tour, “and that day I felt like I found my purpose in life. There I learned that I really could be a vet with a message and dedicate my time and effort to it.” Dr. Abd-Elhay trained at the hospital for two weeks, then with the Donkey Sanctuary and with ESMA (Egyptian Society for Mercy to Animals), situated near the Pyramids. After more volunteering and working for a year for ESAF (Egyptian Society of Animal Friends), a vacancy opened at the Brooke Hospital in Cairo in 2013, and Dr. Abd-Elhay was hired.11

  If a modern-day Egyptian vet’s journey to a job he loved seems filled with obstacles, Raghib’s journey some six decades earlier was even more so. Yet, as with Dr. Abd-Elhay, a friend of a friend smoothed part of the way. The Cairo University dean was a colleague of Major Heveningham and arranged for Raghib to be introduced to and taken on by the hospital on a volunteer basis. When it became clear that Raghib was unable to work for nothing, given his duties to his family, the hospital’s treasurer, Major Burrill, found him employment on a pig farm owned by an English officer. After only eighteen months, however, Raghib was taken ill and was bedridden for several months. Then his mother died, and with his siblings to support, Raghib, who had not given up on his dream of working for Dorothy’s hospital, continued to volunteer there by day while working a paid job at the Cairo SPCA by night. It was only in early 1944, the penultimate year of the war, that Raghib—known as Dr. Murad—would be paid for his work at 2 Bairam al-Tunsi Street, and not long after that he would meet Dorothy, who was finally free to return to Egypt in 1946. “Without this man,” said Brig. Hassan Sami, a close friend, in 2003, “Brooke would have never survived.” Though a “tyrant about veterinary methods,” wrote Brooke employee Lynne Nesbit in later years, Dr. Murad was “saintly in his attitude to animals.” And it did not hurt, she added, that “every female supporter who came within three feet of him fell in love with the man.”12

  The outbreak of World War II unfolded strangely in Egypt, where the influx of British personnel helped calm some people’s fears of Axis invasion and yet inflamed the wounds of others who detested and distrusted the British. In the years 1940–45 the war refocused and reshaped what had been until then scattered pieces of anti-British feeling, Egyptian nationalism, religious factionalism, and social unrest. These competing responses tipped and twisted the flat Nile Valley landscape so that the disparate shards formed a pattern that, to those able to see it, spelled out the long-dreaded, long-awaited end of the old British order and a future that to some far-sighted Egyptians included neither the British nor the Egyptian royal family, but something revolutionary and new.

  Other than a swift and alarming reduction in funds and supplies, the biggest hit Dorothy’s hospital took with the outbreak of war was when its British staff left for military service almost as soon as hostilities were declared.

  Major Heveningham was posted in 1940 to the Transjordania
n Frontier Force, which had an extensive cavalry; Gibson entered the Royal Navy somewhat later, in 1943. What faced the Brooke Hospital during the war was a double threat: a sudden lack of trained personnel and inadequate supplies. While the former could be cobbled together from Egyptian sources, at least for the short term, the hospital owed its existence to donations, largely from abroad. Now it faced a crimp in that pipeline, as well as an increasingly public disaffection within the country as a whole for anything British. Without cash, supplies would dwindle, and without supplies—from food to medicines—the Brooke Hospital could not function. Yet somehow it did. Though Burrill, treasurer of the hospital committee, served as an officer at GHQ (General Headquarters of the British Army) in Cairo, he was always able to work part of what time he had at the Brooke. As the committee member who kept the accounts of donations received and funds expended, he had a combination of experience and talent that could not easily have been replaced or even temporarily covered by another employee. And, of course, Colonel Hodgkins was always on site, as he would be until felled by a heart attack in autumn 1945.13

  Staff cutbacks meant leaning on volunteers, the backbone of any charitable organization. There were plenty of jobs to do for a volunteer, especially in the stables, easily performed by anybody who had any familiarity with horses. These volunteers offered something else just as vital during the war years as money and food: they maintained the hospital’s credo of giving suffering animals a quiet rest, whatever the human conflicts raging outside the stable walls. Naval nurse Mary Carr-Ellis, a hospital volunteer, recalled for Sarah Searight her experience of the “wonderful atmosphere of peace and calm and care,” noting especially, as Dorothy had done years earlier, how happy the patients appeared to be at the prospect of enough to eat and drink, a soft place to lie down.14

  During World War II, “drugs were expensive and rare,” writes Searight, all the more so when African Horse Disease, the sickness that Dr. Branch had prevented from destroying the equines of Upper Egypt in 1928, overtook Cairo’s equines in 1943, possibly due to the movements of people and animals from the country to the city, depending on competing rumors of approaching Axis forces. The hospital was put under quarantine, unfortunately preventing intake of any new animals, yet out of the broader tragedy of the epidemic was born a key feature of Brooke’s future services. Sarah Searight notes that animals were kept from the city markets. Instead, Brooke veterinarians were themselves sent to these markets outside the city center to provide mobile care, a salient feature of the hospital’s work and also one that would later be crucial to the more wide-ranging clinics scattered across several Egyptian cities and then several developing nations.15

  Most of the time, a shadow puppet show, like those then seen in the Cairo bazaars, flung flitting, imaginary figures of the war across the pale scrim of city and citizens, but never so darkly or realistically as in 1942. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had made gains in Egypt that May and June, exciting Mussolini’s yen for drama to such extent that he boarded a plane for Libya, another transport ship bringing his white horse, which he intended to ride into Cairo in triumph, not far behind.16 Pro-German propaganda broadcasts had threatened an Axis air raid of Cairo that June, and while Prime Minister Mostapha El Nahas scolded “scare-mongers” in the Egyptian Parliament, Cairenes were scared. The British line that appeared impregnable was suspected of more than a few chinks in its armor. In the end, it was Alexandria that actually took direct bombings on June 29, and the resulting deaths and destruction were sufficient to flip Cairo, already on edge, completely on its head. GHQ burned so many files (to the despair of future historians) that July 1,1942, came to be dubbed “Ash Wednesday.” A curfew was set over central Cairo, which did nothing to deter long lines of bank account holders eager to cash in and get out of town. Cecil Beaton, who was in Egypt as a commissioned war photographer, referred to the chaos, later determined to be an overreaction, as a “Flap,” a calming yet sarcastic term that might better refer to a breakfast table disagreement.17

  Not that this panic was without foundation. A bomb had fallen on the city two years earlier. At that time people had dumped everything they owned into carts and headed for the hills. Yet in testimony to how integral the Brooke Hospital had become to serving their needs, before they left, they stopped at 2 Bairam al-Tunsi, where the vets gave the horses or donkeys a checkup, water, and provisions to last until they returned, acts of kindness for which the hospital by now was well known. The Brooke Hospital’s vets also did their part for the war effort. In the “Flap” year of 1942 Dr. Murad assumed the job of overseeing trench digging as well as fire drills at the hospital, “causing considerable interest and some consternation in the crowded neighborhood of Sayyida Zeinab.” Colonel Hodgkins’s task was to demonstrate the wearing of gas masks, again attracting a great deal of local attention. Whatever fears the hospital’s neighbors may have had for their own safety, at least they knew that they and their horses would have a fighting chance should the war come to their district.18

  Colonel Hodgkins kept Dorothy, then in England with Geoffrey, constantly apprised of all that was going on at the hospital, so that from her residence in Salisbury Close she could know what was happening in “English Lady Street.”

  Even, as Glenda Spooner writes, “while Rommel was at the gates of the city,” Hodgkins was dutifully penning reports, “full of enthusiasm and of all the little details she so loved to hear.” These details would have included what can only be described as a triumph under any conditions, but especially during time of war: citywide efforts to rough up and sand the streets of Cairo, so that donkeys, mules, and horses, beaten in order to force them to drag heavy loads up inclines, would have less chance of suffering the kinds of injuries that caused the hospital to euthanize so many animals far too much of the time.19 Only a week before his death, Colonel Hodgkins had written to Dorothy with a number of ideas for how to “furbish up” the hospital once the war was over and life could return to an even keel again (he was not to live to see the coming storms of Egyptian nationalism and anti-British violence that the hospital would have to weather).20 The day before Hodgkins died, remembered Dr. Murad, the colonel had called him on the telephone, setting out explicit instructions on the protocol required for receiving a dignitary from Sudan.21

  Not only were thousands of humans conscripted into the second global conflict of the century, but animals were once again called to serve. The war machine had been thoroughly mechanized—it was largely due to this push, as we’ve seen, that horses and mules were disposed of in Egypt in 1919. But as Sarah Searight points out, “horses, mules and donkeys still had a prominent role to play in World War II, especially as pack animals.” Jilly Cooper characterizes Britain’s response to the renewed need for equines in war and the clumsiness with which they went about it as reminiscent of “a foolish housewife, who as soon as she buys a washing-up machine, promptly chucks away her washing-up bowl and Fairy Liquid,” then is bereft when the machine breaks down.22 Total mechanization had theoretically carried the British military into the twentieth century, but even modern machines could not manage the desert and jungle terrains that made up the Second World War’s diverse theaters of action. Cooper tells of the nightmare voyage in 1939 of nine thousand requisitioned horses, shipped off to Palestine despite lack of adequate veterinary staff to look after them. These horses were sent by rail across France in open cars during one of the coldest winters in memory, as if it were 1914 all over again. Hundreds of them died, and those that survived were tossed on sea transport that nearly capsized in a storm, so that in the end eight thousand animals made it to dry land, only to be put to patrol service that was by any measure anticlimactic. They were luckier than horses serving in the Russian cavalry, who froze and starved in snowy fields or were urged in suicidal charges toward German guns that mowed them down by the thousands.23

  Mules had no better a fate in World War II. Bright, intelligent characters whose responses to a given situation were never predictable, they
seemed to know they had once upon a time been the mount of choice of the kings of Israel and high prelates of the Catholic Church, treasured for their versatility and adaptability to varying loads and circumstances. They served faithfully as they bore ammunition, weapons, supplies, and just about anything that could be put on their backs, often in quantities that in peacetime would have been considered far too much for them to carry and in terrain that was risky at best, even for a sure-footed and logical mule. Such were their individual personality traits, combined with the heroism of their effort in the war, that when men had to part with them it was somehow more devastating than leaving a horse behind. Cooper describes a case of unwilling abandonment at Dunkirk in May 1940. When rescue vessels arrived, there wasn’t space for the mules, who had to be left to the Germans. She speculates, with good reason, that there were not a few mule drivers in tears as they sailed away to safety, their animals stranded on the beachhead.24

  There were innumerable heroes among the mules of World War II, but the prize must go to Mitzi, who served in the Burma campaign, having had her vocal cords severed, like all the rest, so her braying wouldn’t alert the enemy. Though Mitzi was ornery, she served her driver, Douglas Roberts, with sturdy, even heedless, bravery. Running from Japanese troops, Mitzi and Roberts ended up in a river that nobody was able to cross. As Roberts gripped her tail, Mitzi fought the current. She pulled him to the other side and up on the bank to safety, only to die from the effort. That was courage for which a human soldier would have received a posthumous medal. Mitzi’s body was left behind as Roberts was evacuated to a hospital, her only reward the saving of his life.25

  The situations in which these World War II animals served were admittedly quite changed from 1914–18, yet the same threat hung over them as over the equines Dorothy had spent thousands of pounds and thousands of hours saving—what would happen to them after the war ended? In the war’s first year, Dorothy seized the opportunity and sent a letter to Anthony Eden, secretary of state for foreign affairs. Born in 1897, Eden (later British prime minister) had lost two brothers in the Great War, in which he had served himself, in France, becoming the youngest brigade-major in the British forces. He had seen what war horses and army mules were exposed to in battle. Interestingly, he later served as member of Parliament for Leamington Spa, locale of staunch RSPCA and Old War Horse Fund supporters in the early 1930s. So Eden probably knew Dorothy and Geoffrey, if not socially then by the work they were doing in Egypt, and when he received Dorothy’s appeal—that none of the horses, mules, or donkeys serving in the war effort would be subjected to a repeat of 1918–19—Eden assured her that this would be the case.26