The Lost War Horses of Cairo

by Grant Hayter-Menzies

  Though he had sent a representative to Dorothy’s funeral in 1955 and supported the hospital’s work, President Nasser had it in for the British, and the feeling was mutual. He would be emblazoned on the cover of the March 29, 1963, issue of Time magazine, along with a sensible Arab proverb, “Keep your tents separate and bring your hearts together.” Yet it is likely he was thinking of his fellow powers in the Middle East rather than of the Europeans whose interests in the region had admittedly largely benefited themselves. Nasser had made promises to the Egyptian people that he had to keep. One of these was to nationalize all foreign-owned property, and without doubt the most controversial act carried out was that of seizing the Suez Canal in July 1956.

  As much a lifeline to global trade and political influence in the 1950s as it had been during the two world wars, the Suez Canal nearly became the crisis point for another. Israel, Britain, France, and the United States were drawn into the fray for a welter of competing strategic and economic reasons. Their threats prompted Egypt to freeze all foreign funds, which in turn led to the retaliatory freezing of all Egyptian assets abroad, spelling disaster for organizations like the Brooke Hospital. French and British troops, joined by Israeli soldiers, invaded and occupied the Canal Zone, and Egypt eventually withdrew under enormous international pressure. However, its nationalization policies held firm where foreign interests on Egyptian soil were concerned. Egypt also demanded that foreign nationals like George Gibson, cornerstone of the Brooke Hospital, must leave. All were expelled after being compelled to sign a document requisitioning any Egyptian property to which they held title.

  It was a harsh blow to lose Gibson, in whose departure was abruptly discarded a quarter century of accumulated and hard-won Brooke experience and wisdom. Shortly after, the hospital itself was sequestrated. Yet the Brooke’s luck held out: its sequestrator was none other than Major Ahmad Murad, a sturdy, broad-chested member of the Cairo Brooke committee. Major Ahmad was also secretary of the Gezira Sporting Club, which meant he was an Egyptian with friends in very high places. “Major Ahmad was a vital link with the Egyptian authorities,” confirms Sarah Searight.29 Others preferred to see a less tangible protector. “It is my opinion,” a supporter wrote to Kathleen Taylor Smith, “that nobody dared to touch the hospital, and I dare say that Mrs Brooke saved the hospital even after her death.”30

  Though the property was sequestrated like any other foreign holding in Egypt, there was definitely something different about the way the hospital and its governing body were reconstituted. According to Ann Searight, a granddaughter of Dorothy Brooke, after sequestration the hospital “became an independent Egyptian Society with its own Board and Membership, though exclusively funded by Brooke UK (to all intents and purposes).”31 So while the London office continued to direct funding streams toward the hospital, its fully Egyptian governance fulfilled the sequestration rules and kept the doors open for business, and when it was desequestrated in 1959, the hospital was the first such charity to be thus released from the regulations established after the Suez crisis. If it has never closed even for a day since it was opened in 1934, it is because the hospital had earned Egyptian trust and friendship from the beginning, despite the occasional stumbling block put in front of any foreign NGO in Egypt and dependent like any other on the variable political weather conditions to which Egypt has always been susceptible.

  This new system was put to the test a decade later when the hospital was threatened not just financially but physically by the outbreak of the Six-Day War between Egypt and Israel in 1967.

  The conflict led to food shortages in Cairo, which, of course, had a damaging effect on tourism, which in turn led to many cases of equine malnutrition. The hospital staff remained in Cairo and treated all sufferers, despite the very real possibility of invasion by Israel. (Years later long-term fallout from the Six-Day War was to interfere when veterinarians from the Brooke Hospital asked for government permission to take an ambulance to help animals impacted by Israeli-Palestinian warfare and were turned down on the grounds that their work could be seen to be aiding the state of Israel—another example of human politics prolonging animal suffering.) When Israeli jets dropped bombs on Cairo airport, only a little over thirteen miles away from the hospital, even the newer portions of the complex rattled under the blasts, frightening staff and animals. Yet their work continued without abeyance, as it had always done, as it always would, no matter the circumstances.32

  Sarah Searight points out that throughout the administration of President Nasser (who died in 1970), the hospital struggled to stay afloat. This was in part due to the lingering aftereffects of the disappearance in 1956–57 of people and structures the hospital had depended on for so long—administrative resources like the British Army’s veterinary arm, seasoned employees like George Gibson, higher-ups in the British command who could be resorted to as needed. It was also a by-product of Egypt’s postrevolution political situation. “Adventurous foreign policies [of the Nasser government] did little for the Egyptian economy in the 1950s and 1960s,” wrote Sarah Searight. Egypt remained a nation all the more reliant on draft animals to do their pulling and hauling.33 Along with adventures in foreign policy were economic and social problems emerging under President Nasser, under whom a bureaucracy had been created to which even the bloated employment rolls of the defunct kingdom under King Farouk could scarcely compare, compounded by the fact that few employees showed up at their offices except to collect their pay. The paradise that was to open up to all who attained a college education had failed to materialize; students who couldn’t afford or access electric light at home would sit with books, paper, and pencils, studying under streetlamps late into the night.34

  The overall situation tended to widen rather than fill social fissures, at the same time giving the impression to the outside world that Egypt was swinging very much its way. This apparent change lent Cairo a multicultural, cosmopolitan sophistication that attracted more foreign tourists than before. A burgeoning tourism influx made money for men with horses while it placed heavy demands on these equines to carry or pull visitors out to the Pyramids, into the desert oases, or through the winding alleyways of the exotic Old City. As always, this demand meant that there were many overworked or injured animals who needed the Brooke Hospital’s care. This is why, in part, it was determined that there was a need for the hospital’s services not just in Cairo but in other tourist centers located well outside its boundaries.

  The first expansion of the Brooke Hospital was to Alexandria. There, longtime supporters of the Cairo clinic, Gen. Ahmad Shawqi and his niece, had overseen for some years a twin but independent establishment. This clinic was reconstituted as a branch of the Cairo hospital in 1965. Though far smaller than its parent, the Brooke Alexandria was expanded in 1992 and in that same year treated more than two thousand patients. The next expansion was to Luxor, similarly motivated by the demands of the tourist trade. Amid the temples and palaces of the ancient city, animals suffered. Sarah Searight explained the terrible phenomenon, whether started by tourists or offered by their hosts, of rushing at great speed in carriages from one temple to another. Tourists were encouraged by drivers and guides eager to make a tip for guaranteeing this time-saving convenience. When Dr. Murad visited Luxor on behalf of the Cairo hospital in the late sixties, he was horrified by what he found. Out of the sixteen carriages waiting at the station for the arrival of the tourist train, Dr. Murad counted “at least fourteen destruction cases,” meaning over 80 percent of the carriage horses in just that row would have been better off dead than alive—an echo of Dorothy’s first sight of ex–war horses at Ramses Station in 1930.35

  Dr. Murad, who was typically well ahead of everyone else in strategizing terms, cleverly made a case for having a Brooke clinic in Luxor, which touched the city fathers not just in the municipal pocket book but in terms of self-respect. He pointed out that foreigners coming to Luxor from the United States or Great Britain, who knew healthy horses from sick and neg
lected ones, would see these unfortunate animals waiting for them at the station and refuse to ride in carriages drawn by them. Moreover, these people who had paid no small amount of money to travel to Luxor had friends who would ask them about their travels, and they would tell their friends of the misery they had seen in Luxor, where draft animals were so poorly cared for. It might even get into the foreign newspapers, and from there, nobody could tell where the scandal would end, though canny gentlemen like those who governed Luxor must realize that it would do no good for business or reputation to allow this abuse to continue. Dr. Murad’s warning did the trick.36

  Aswan and Edfu, south of Luxor, were the next sites where Brooke expansion was deemed critical. The building of the Aswan High Dam—one of President Nasser’s great projects, begun in 1960 and completed ten years later—had endangered the temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel along with dozens of other ancient sites. UNESCO formed a project to move the temple to the Lake Nasser shore to prevent it from being swallowed up in the rising waters in a feat as vast in its own way as Nasser’s dam. The newly re-sited temple and other archaeologically significant locations in Nubia drew tourists, and as they needed transport to these sites, working equines were required in greater numbers than before. By the 1980s these animals’ sufferings clearly mandated a branch of the Brooke Hospital, a project that in this instance had the blessing and support of the provincial governor. As with Luxor there was a mobile clinic for cases in the marketplace or outlying districts.

  It was the same for nearby Edfu, site of a spectacular Ptolemaic temple dedicated to the god Horus, deity of the sun, and many ruins that made the town a popular travel destination. For the opening of the Edfu clinic in 1992, Brig. Hassan Sami came down from Cairo. A gentle, compassionate man, Brigadier Sami was an army officer, as his rank implies, who had been a friend of Dr. Murad’s for many years. In the early 1980s, Dr. Murad was readying himself for retirement from 2 Bairam al-Tunsi Street, and Brigadier Sami was hired as deputy director, though by roundabout means. “Brigadier Sami took over from Dr. Murad very gradually,” says Dr. Petra Sidhom. “He was in the army, he was studying philosophy and psychology to be an army instructor. He never wanted to replace Dr. Murad, but Dr. Murad was clever about it. He asked Brigadier Sami to fill in for a week, then two weeks. Finally, Sam slipped in and took over from Dr. Murad,” becoming general director.37

  Though not a veterinarian, Brigadier Sami was an organizer who, like Dorothy, intimately knew the problems of Cairene equines and their owners and also had a great love for animals. Of the men who worked their animals to the point of exhaustion, he said, echoing Dorothy’s own view, “They can’t even deal with life. How can they deal with their animals?” It was important, he explained, to understand the psychology of the owners and the animals and to appeal to the former on the basis of that understanding. “Our target is to listen to the suffering of animals, and to teach and educate owners how to treat their animals to maximise their own economic benefit,” he said. “Good health is equal to good money,” which was reasoning of interest to any owner surviving from day to day on what his animal made for him.38

  Sarah Searight relates an anecdote about the opening of the Edfu clinic. After Brigadier Sami had opened the clinic, an impoverished elderly lady approached him. Was it true, she asked, that this was a hospital reserved strictly for animals? Sami assured the woman that the clinic was intended for treatment of animal patients only. She asked him who owned the clinic. Upon being told that Brooke was a charity, providing free care, the old lady could scarcely believe his words. Brig. Sami assured her that it was true, and that no, it was not run by mad people but by veterinary professionals who cared about the welfare of working equines and the education of their owners. That being so, the woman pointed out that though the poor who were aided by the charity could never repay the debt, God would richly reward the charity on their behalf.39

  Dorothy’s original concept—what Brigadier Sami termed listening to the suffering of animals—which had resulted in her reputation as the “mad sitt” of 2 Bairam al-Tunsi Street, still prompted some conservative-minded Egyptians like this elderly lady to question the sanity of a venture that gave the same care to working animals as that which working humans would receive in a hospital (that is, if they could afford it at all). Yet it’s clear from the woman’s parting words that through her bewilderment, she grasped the necessity of what the clinic was there to do for the suffering animals of Edfu. And she went away enlightened, perhaps to tell the other women in her street about what she had seen, what the officer had said, and to open other people’s hearts, as hers had been opened.

  By the time the Edfu clinic opened, Dorothy’s grandson Richard Searight had become organizing secretary of Brooke, succeeding his aunt Pinkie. Pinkie’s act was a tough one to follow. “She had my grandmother’s same system of getting things sorted,” remembers her nephew Richard Searight. “If she wanted something done, she’d ring you up at the same time each day, simply to chat about various subjects, and then bring the conversation round at the end to that thing she wanted done. It was gentle, but persistent. And nobody could resist.” Just, he adds, like Dorothy.40

  Richard Searight’s own gentle and persistent vision and guidance helped put Brooke on a better financial footing, and so did his willingness to share just what services the Brooke Hospital for Animals performed each day for the working equines of Cairo and their owners—even when it meant sharing sights that many who saw them had never seen and who could not perceive the world the same way again.

  In 1989 the BBC program 40 Minutes broadcast “Cairo Vets,” a documentary giving an overview of the Brooke Hospital’s work in the Egyptian capital. BBC producer Mo Bowyer had visited the Brooke clinic located in Luxor and had come away both shaken and inspired by the work to be done and the work that was done, each and every day, to help animals in that city. Through Bowyer’s auspices, 40 Minutes became the vector for the Brooke Hospital and the charity as a whole to share what it did with the television viewing public and show to what uses donor dollars were put—not unlike what Dorothy’s famous appeal letter in the Morning Post had achieved in 1931. “The greatest thing that could have happened,” says Richard Searight, “was when the documentary was sold to the BBC. That broadcast and the subsequent ones made all the difference.” “Overnight—actually, over two weeks—our supporter list grew from a mere 4,000 to more than 17,000,” says Lynne Nesbit. It was not unlike that morning in Heliopolis in 1931, when butler Ahmed carried in stacks of mail to be opened on Dorothy’s long dining table. “Six overflowing sacks filled our two little offices” in London, Nesbit recalled.41

  Just obtaining permission to film in Cairo was a trial worthy of some of Dorothy’s early struggles to set up her hospital. When the Egyptian government demurred, Richard Searight knew from experience what to do. “Mo and I went to the Ministry of Information, together with Brigadier Sami,” he says. “And while Mo and I, formally dressed, chatted happily with the officials about nothing to do with the film, Brigadier Sami built the logistics off to one side. We received permission and nobody stopped the process of making the film.” This was, again, Dorothy’s technique in action. “Many overseas charities have problems dealing with the culture in which they are situated,” Searight says. “As my grandmother knew, when in Egypt, you do things the Egyptian way.”42

  The profound effect “Cairo Vets” had on television audiences is difficult to overstate, even from this remove, when we are accustomed to almost daily gore on any news channel or social media platform we watch. No punches are pulled. Right into the film, a little donkey, once white, covered in scars and dirt, is brought in to the Cairo clinic, trembling and prone. It proves to be dying of tetanus after it had been left, according to its sheepish owner, flat on the ground in that condition for two days. Its life could have been saved had it been brought in sooner. The sad vets lecture the man, whose primary concern is, of course, for how he is to make his living if his donkey dies. The
re is no question that the donkey must be euthanized. Yet it isn’t the owner who interferes but all the other equine patients of the hospital. They begin to crowd with obvious concern around the mortally ill animal and have to be shooed away so the dying donkey can be put down. Apart from anything else, this harrowing scene makes clear that the Brooke Hospital was a place of not only human but also animal compassion.

  Other footage is just as terrible to see, showing a failing donkey, harnessed in tandem, still trying to help pull a load too heavy for two, kept partly upright only by its joined harness and the strength of its mate, its eyes glazing over even as it stumbles along. It is “dying in harness,” as narrator Michael Dean quietly describes.

  And there is the horse treated in a street by Brooke vet Dr. Salah Wahib Fahmy. In 2010 Dr. Salah was presented with an award for Most Inspirational Vet by Brooke president Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cornwall for his thirty years of compassionate care for the working animals of Cairo. It is easy, twenty-six years earlier, to see this compassion and also the despair that often lives right beside it. In the “Cairo Vets” scene, Dr. Salah, visiting UK-based veterinarian Dr. Graham Munroe, and Richard Searight talk to the horse’s owner, squinting against the intense heat of a Cairo noon. They ask him how the horse had got itself injured. He cut his leg on a rock, the man says. How long ago was that? Dr. Salah asks. Over two weeks, the man replies. Dr. Munroe shakes his head in disbelief; Searight looks quietly on, having seen and heard this all too often. Dr. Salah bandages the horse’s leg, after cleaning and disinfecting the septic wound, and gives the owner more bandage rolls to use. Dr. Munroe asks the man to change the dressing often, and he agrees. The men move on, Dr. Salah with his purple disinfectant spray, and they are dealing with another couple of animals when they hear a commotion. Around the corner a horse is being whipped as it tries to pull a heavy cart, the wheels of which have been chained—a backstreet test of a horse’s strength that has been banned in Egypt because of the real physical harm that could be done to an animal abused in this manner. Shouting and laughing men surround the desperate animal, and there, beside the horse, is the man Dr. Salah has just given the bandages to. In fact, it is the same horse. The camera follows Dr. Salah as he rushes into the crowd and stops the “contest,” crying out at the owner, “You animal! Why should I care if your horse lives or dies if you do not?” The vet tries to reason with the owner, who stands abashed. The bandage has come off; Dr. Salah holds out a patient hand until the man hands over the unused roll; then he redresses the wound, a look of despair and a few tears on his face.