The Lost War Horses of Cairo

by Grant Hayter-Menzies

  Dorothy, writes Glenda Spooner, “had not forgotten how similar vows…had been broken.” When Eden was succeeded by Leslie Hore-Belisha, Dorothy sent him a letter of concern as well. In October 1940, she received a reply from the War Office, stating that “in the event of cavalry horses becoming surplus in the Middle East, the pledges regarding their disposal which have in the past been given in Parliament, will be observed.”27 This did not, of course, appear to cover the Yeomanry and draft animals, and Dorothy was smart to take nobody at their word. Just around the time she had arrived in India, in 1935, Dorothy had received an alarming cable from a friend, alerting her to a plan underway to dispose of British cavalry and artillery horses in Egypt, essentially replicating what had happened at the end of the Great War, and again in Egypt, of all places. Dorothy pulled together a collection of documentary and photographic evidence of what awaited these animals, should they be put to the same fate as their elders, and sent it to the authorities whose decision this was to make. “At the eleventh hour,” says Spooner, “the order was rescinded.” Not only this, but the proof of the suffering these horses might well have endured had such an impact on thinking in London that the subject, as referred to in the War Office letter from five years later, had been raised in the House of Commons, and assurances were given there that “in future no English army horse would be disposed of to the inhabitants of any foreign countries under any conditions whatsoever.” This influence, reaching into the halls of power, of a compassionate woman over the bellicose affairs of men, reminded Glenda Spooner yet again of the work of Florence Nightingale.28

  Like a general calling in reinforcements, Dorothy also enlisted the good offices of General Archibald Wavell. Wavell was not only commander in chief in the Middle East but also had been a supporter of Dorothy’s work for some years. He, too, assured her in no uncertain terms that “no branded horses were to be sold, all were to be either humanely destroyed or brought home.” Another reassuring voice was that of Major Heveningham, who, as mentioned, served with the Transjordanian Frontier Force. As he wrote to Dorothy in November 1940, “I have not, nor ever will, forget our experiences when doing that great work of mercy out in these parts and consequently when horses first arrived out here I made contact with every possible officer and official to ensure that horses ‘cast’ [culled] for any reason at all, were all humanely destroyed and not sold.”29

  When Dorothy was able to return to Egypt after the war’s end, she found that Colonel Hodgkins’s plans for “furbishing” the hospital were well justified. Though 2 Bairam al-Tunsi Street was still the same place she had left, “cream-coloured, creeper-clad, its broad asphalt pavement edged with neatly clipped evergreen trees and square-box hedges,” wartime shortages meant there had been no new paint, and that numerous repairs had been postponed. She had bigger plans, though, than patching plaster or resurfacing floors—she intended to build a real operating theater to the latest standards to replace the crude shed that up to then had been used for surgeries. All of this was a lot to worry about when money was as short as it had been during the war, but when Dorothy stepped through the modest entrance of the Brooke Hospital in spring 1946, seven years after she had last seen it, it was as if she had returned to paradise. “I have rarely known anything that has given me happiness equal to visiting the hospital again,” she wrote. “To find myself there at last with so many old friends is almost too good to be true.”30

  There to greet Dorothy, besides two small dogs, hobbling happily on three legs each, was Dr. Murad, new among the familiar faces of Gibson, Burrill, and Egyptian staff, though he was not to have a chance to really meet and talk with her until at a tea party she gave at the hospital shortly afterward. He evidently expected her to be some sort of Amazon powerhouse, barking orders, organizing everybody’s day. Dorothy was a superb organizer, but Dr. Murad’s impression was rather that her iron hand was well concealed in its velvet glove. Far from being the stereotypical foreign memsahib, Dorothy was subdued, thoughtful, funny. “She spoke to us so quietly,” he recalled. “And she was always optimistic. That wasn’t easy in 1946. But even then, she could make us laugh.”31

  Not long after her return to Egypt, Dorothy received a visitor who was to play a vital role in the future of the Brooke Hospital. Kathleen Taylor Smith was born in Canterbury, Kent, in 1900; she had married and had a son, and she was living the quiet life of wife and mother when the war disarranged settled patterns and plans. While her husband Robert was in the service, Kathleen worked at the local soldiers’ canteen as committee treasurer. In 1945 Robert was posted to Cairo, where Kathleen joined him a year later. There, as she adjusted to the heat, sandstorms, unfamiliar sounds and smells, and the postwar anti-British sentiment painted on walls and glaring from the faces of Egyptians she met in the streets, Kathleen fell in love with Egypt. She worked as secretary to the music officer of the British Council, a charity founded in England in 1934 to offer educational and cultural opportunities and exchange in foreign countries, but the music of the written word was as strong in her, if not stronger. A poet of often striking artistry, Kathleen also wrote witty, keenly observant letters later collected into a book, Speaking of Palm Trees. She saw clearly what was wrong with British-Egyptian relations; she did not blame Egyptians who demonstrated their anger against the British, though she never condoned violence on either side. “How I wish it were in my power,” she wrote in June 1946, “to do some work which would bring Egypt and Britain together, or some work of real benefit to the poor of the country, brave and loveable as so many are, and who have so little.”32

  These words, indeed, could have been spoken by Dorothy Brooke, of both animals and people, when she arrived in Cairo sixteen years earlier. So it comes as no surprise that when the two came to meet, on April 8, through the kind offices of Brooke treasurer Burrill, their elective affinities led to mutual affection and trust.

  They met at the hospital, where Kathleen was given a tour that sounds incredibly thorough. This may have been what Dorothy did for all visitors, but perhaps she sensed that this woman with a generous heart (Kathleen had brought along some of her friends, who later subscribed to donate to the hospital) was different from those who could only handle so much of the truth of what she and her staff had to face on a daily basis. As such, she spared Kathleen very little. Dorothy told her that what she had discovered in 1930 was not simply the tragedy of war horses who had been sold away from all that was familiar in language, care, or custom. They were sold without the bits and harness they had been accustomed to all their adult lives, receiving Arab bits that never fit comfortably. These led to painful sores and damaged teeth, with a consequent disinterest in food, even when the animals were hungry. Many animals, their mouths hurting, simply starved to death (a problem Brooke still works to remedy today). Dorothy told Kathleen that while the sale of English horses in Egypt had been a catastrophic failure of duty and decency on an individual scale, the volume of horses disposed of had resulted in a “market [that] was so flooded in this way with cheap horses that they were bought for next to nothing and worked to the death.”33

  Not least to be considered, Dorothy explained to her, was the plight of the owners. “Where the people are so poor,” Kathleen wrote, “the animals are bound to suffer.” Instead of lashing out at these men for their neglect and sometimes cruel treatment of their animals, the Brooke tried to teach them that an animal that is given care will deliver longer and more efficient service to its owner than if it is neglected—that, indeed, neglecting an animal on which a man’s livelihood depended was exactly the same as neglecting his family.34

  Kathleen Taylor Smith had visited the SPCA in Cairo, where the Brooke Hospital’s work had first begun, and had seen the good work being done there along with a guest book displaying signatures of such august visitors as Lord Cromer, British consul-general in Egypt, as well as military heroes Lord Kitchener and Lord Allenby. Yet something about the Brooke Hospital stayed with her. Sensitive as she was to the fact that Brit
ish occupation of Egypt was living its last days, she was nonetheless impressed that the Brooke—and Dorothy—had managed to bridge two worlds and two cultures so often in conflict, tapping a mutual love for animals and a mutual understanding that to care for them meant not disposing of ancient customs but leavening them with education to improve the lives of animals and their owners. As if to cap off this cross-cultural exchange founded on compassion in common, Kathleen noticed that the subscribers’ list for 1946–47 was headed by none other than Prince Mohammed Ali Tewfik, Dr. Branch’s old friend. This was a wise perception, because Dorothy’s active search for ways to work with, rather than against, her Egyptian hosts was to prove useful to the survival of the hospital in the next decade.35

  The woman who would write, as Kathleen did on leaving Egypt in 1947, “I only know you need to live in Egypt and love it to understand its special problems and how these have arisen,” would become organizing secretary for the Brooke Hospital for Animals, visiting her beloved Egypt yearly until 1973. When she gave Kathleen a tour of the hospital that April day in 1946, rickety and war-worn though it was, Dorothy must have known that she had found another compassionate spirit to carry on the work beyond her own lifetime. As in so much of what Kathleen wrote, we can hear some of Dorothy in her last letter from Egypt: “Imagine what the world would be if love spreads all over it.”36

  Dorothy herself wrote of this love in one of her reports to the hospital’s subscribers, describing the end of a busy day:

  The sun is setting when, after visiting between forty and fifty patients, we take our leave with a feeling that our efforts have not all been in vain. The teaching of the hospital is beginning to bear fruit but it is rather like tilling a vast waste, there are so many thousand owners to be converted. Those we do reach, increasingly appreciate the hospital and slowly but surely we are awaking a sympathy and a consciousness that animals have feelings like small children, and that it is the responsibility of every owner, so far as his small funds permit, to consider the welfare and comfort of his animals.37

  This was a lovely dream at twilight. Would it withstand the heat of day?

  9. Their Portion Is Gardens

  They can’t even deal with life. How can they deal with their animals?

  —BRIG. HASSAN SAMI

  In late March 1946, on her first outing in the streets of Cairo, Kathleen Taylor Smith wrote, “A fine looking old man in a turban, his face like that of a Hebrew prophet, sits selling papers at the corner of this street. On the wall, over his head, is chalked: ‘Down with England. Evacuation with Blood.’”1

  “What a shock this gave me,” she added. In fact, tears sprang as she remembered what the world had just been through, and been saved from, thanks to Britain and the Allies, and of how easily Egypt could have fallen to Nazi Germany but for those foreigners whom the graffiti artist wanted swept “in blood” from Egypt. Kathleen was also well aware, even at that stage of her stay in the country, of what would make Egyptians feel this way. Still, she admitted to the old man that the sign bothered her.2

  “No, indeed, it is not good,” he agreed. “I will wipe it off.” But he didn’t try very hard. When Kathleen was next in that street, she noted that though there was evidence of his effort to erase the slogan for her sake, his own belief in it was manifest in the half-hearted way in which he had gone about it.3

  Try though even well-meaning and worldly Egyptians might, there was no way of completely erasing that sentiment. It went deep, down to cultural nerves that cannot be probed without pain, which no anesthetic can numb. Many Egyptians were angry with King Farouk, believing he had caved in to British pressure to unseat Prime Minister Nahas, an anger that was more than simple outrage against the British. War has always had a tendency to open hearts, minds, and mouths to subversive ideas in those of the population who disagreed with war in the first place and, in the second place, with war’s dictatorial interference in civilian affairs. When the chessmen shifted places and the Soviet Union joined the Allied effort, this military alliance had social consequences for structures based on old-fashioned, hierarchical structure. If millions of voices were stilled by both world wars, those of the living began to question that hierarchy, and nowhere more so than in the countries where Britain still held colonial control. In Egypt the powder trail was being laid. “Every extremist, nationalist group, whether right-or left-wing, flourished in the general dissatisfaction,” writes Artemis Cooper.4 These groups merely stirred dissent already fermenting among dissatisfied peasants, who heard rumors of extravagance that few had seen but all could credit. It was at fever pitch among young students whose Egyptian nationalism grew in proportion to their educational opportunities, or their outrage at perceived or real restrictions, and also among the rank and file in the crowded streets of Cairo, where the “Evacuation in Blood” message would have been retraced in chalk or ink no matter how many times it was removed.

  Five years after Dorothy had returned to Cairo and to her yearly trips to keep an eye on the hospital, the first trouble began around that locus of tug-of-war territoriality, the Suez Canal, and treaties in which Egypt had long believed it had received the short end of the stick. General unrest was focused on the British presence in Egypt, with cash incentives publicly offered for the assassination of British officers. Nor was the situation aided by British retaliation laden with colonialist codes of control over crazed natives. Egyptian propaganda held up its own side with alacrity, blaming the British for profaning holy places like mosques and cemeteries. Riots and threats were daily occurrences, and at last, on Friday and Saturday, January 25–26, 1952, hell opened. Well-rehearsed, well-dressed male mobs began assaulting foreign-operated and foreign-patronized nightclubs, hotels, shops, and banks. Shepheard’s Hotel, a Cairo icon, went up in flames. British nationals were hunted down and hacked to death, as was the Canadian trade minister, Joseph MacLeod Boyer of New Brunswick (a Great War hero in the battlefields of France). “Every cinema, bar, cabaret and wine-merchant in the city centre was destroyed,” writes Artemis Cooper. Officers of public safety were seen slicing up fire hoses in use to put out the flames. Collusion with the rioters only whipped up both ruthlessness and panic. The madness streamed out toward the Pyramids and engulfed pleasure spots known to be frequented by foreigners and well-to-do Egyptians. As happens in many riots, aside from lives lost and property destroyed, some of it forever, thousands of ordinary Cairenes were put out of work, some for good, by anarchy deluding itself that it was the answer to working men’s prayers. The king, too, was facing the end of the line. Exactly six months later Farouk was given orders to leave the country, which was now in the hands of the army, with Gen. Muhammad Naguib as leader of the Revolution Command Council. He was sworn in as first president of Egypt in June 1953. This was more of a fragile truce with the British than a solution to the problems that had led to Black Saturday, and it would only hold for a few years.5

  As early as 1951, writes Sarah Searight, “most members of Cairo’s British community, civilian and military alike, were talking of departure.” Until he left Egypt in 1952, Dorothy’s son Rodney Searight lived in Cairo, where he was general manager of Shell International Petroleum. For a month or more each year Dorothy would stay with him and his family. After he and many other British nationals left, she proved she had no intention of letting a revolution come between her and the patients at her hospital. “An obstacle is a mountain to the feeble,” Dorothy said, “but a stepping stone to the strong.”6 There is a photograph of her leading President Naguib on a tour of the Brooke Hospital in April 1953. The president, in full uniform, salutes the crowds in the street while Dorothy strides beside him, glowing in the bright sun. Even the tough-looking security detail surrounding Naguib seem softened, more human.

  There is another photograph of Naguib in the paddock with some of the donkeys, standing with hand outstretched and lips puckered in equine greeting as an alert little foal, legs apart in interest and apprehension, stretches out a nose alongside her mother
. Naguib, who when under house arrest a year later would raise animals in his garden, was as much in his element in the paddock as on the revolutionary council—indeed, given what happened later, perhaps more so.7 Naguib threw his support to the hospital, writes Sarah Searight, and until he died in 1988, the former Egyptian president made a gift to the charity every year. After his 1953 visit President Naguib sent Dorothy a note of appreciation. “The Hospital and its great deeds stand as the proof that in our world there are angels amongst its inhabitants. May God direct people here and in other countries to follow the same.” Fouad Abaza Pasha, president of the Agricultural Society, told Dorothy he wished there could be a hospital like hers located in every district of Cairo—a significant indicator of the level of trust she had earned throughout Egyptian society.8

  During this charmed interlude between one uprising and the next, Dorothy was able to realize plans she had dreamed of back in the 1930s. Since first arriving in Egypt, Dorothy had seen plenty of evidence that impoverished peasants in the fields outside Cairo and quarrymen working in the Mokattam Hills were not the only source of suffering for equines—tourists played a role as well, just as they do today. Out they went to the Pyramids by the thousands, and the only way to get there was via horses or camels, who were made to “stand on the wide cement and, therefore, baking hot pavement at the foot of the hill up to the Pyramids,” wrote Glenda Spooner. “These animals wait here for tourists who all through the Cairo season stream out to see the Pyramids, the Sphinx and all the other tombs in that area. It is hot, exhausting work and until Dorothy Brooke thought of it, the animals were tethered and worked by the hour without a drop to drink.”9