The Lost War Horses of Cairo
Page 21
10. “Gibson-Craig Burial Ground,” The Scottish War Graves Project, http://scottishwargraves.phpbbweb.com/scottishwargraves-post-6118.html (accessed September 5, 2016).
11. “James Gerald Lamb Searight,” Cricket Archive, http://cricketarchive.com/Archive/Players/350/350340/350340.html (accessed September 5, 2016); “Name: James Gerald Lamb Searight,” National Archives, http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C13281310.
12. Mocavo, Findmypast, http://www.mocavo.ca/Repton-School-Register-Supplement-to-1910-Edition/957906/200 (accessed September 5, 2016).
13. Maj. Philip Searight obituary, Daily Telegraph, January 17, 2001.
14. Nicolson, Great Silence, 6.
15. Florence Nightingale quoted in Peters, Unquiet Soul, 401; Spooner, For Love of Horses, 6.
16. Christie, Death on the Nile, 333; Blunt’s “veiled protectorate” quoted in Kirk-Greene, Britain’s Imperial Administrators, 66.
17. Jarvis, Back-Garden of Allah, 124.
18. “Brave Norfolk Woman Who Gave Poor Horses a Voice,” Eastern Daily Press (Norwich UK), July 29, 2011, http://www.edp24.co.uk/features/brave_norfolk_woman_who_gave_poor_horses_a_voice_1_978670 (accessed September 5, 2016); Cole’s organization, World Horse Welfare, operates on three continents: “Our History,” World Horse Welfare, http://www.worldhorsewelfare.org/Our-History (accessed September 5, 2016).
19. Khaled Diab, “The Middle Eastern Century That Wasn’t,” Al Jazeera, September 3, 2015, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/09/middle-eastern-century-wasn-150902083410504.html (accessed September 5, 2016); Barker, Neglected War, 24–25.
20. Calcutta gharry description by Bletchly, “Cabs and Cabmen,” 187; S. Searight, Oasis, 11, quoting Honor Baines in 1991.
21. S. Searight, Oasis, 11.
22. Alan Mikhail, email message to author, May 30, 2015.
23. Lao She, Rickshaw Boy, 229. Richard Searight is quick to point out that many owners of working equines are thoughtful and compassionate. Citing one example, he tells of a mare owned by a baker who adored and cared for her. The mare broke a leg in a tragic street accident, and the owner brought her to Dr. Murad at the Cairo animal clinic. It was clear she had to be euthanized, and the hospital’s normal practice was to provide enough payment for the owner to buy a new animal and something to live on beside. But when Dr. Murad offered the man £100, he would not take it. “He told Dr. Murad he would no more accept money for the mare than if his own daughter had died,” Searight recalls. Richard Searight, email message to author, September 4, 2016.
24. Forrest, If Wishes Were Horses, 116.
1. Cupid
Part epigraph: Translation assistance provided by Dr. Mohammed Abd-Elhay of Cairo.
1. Kennedy, Life of Elgar, 140. What should always be remembered is that equine soldiers were sent abroad from the United States to serve in the Great War several years before any human ones left American soil. “During World War I, Newport News [VA] was the biggest supplier of war horses for the British Army,” wrote Mark St. John Erickson (Newport News Daily Press, November 29, 2014).
2. Badsey, Doctrine and Reform, 305.
3. Baynes, Animal Heroes, 35.
4. Baynes, Animal Heroes, 35.
5. van Emden, Tommy’s Ark, 22–23; Laurie, Cupid’s War, 34–35.
6. “Memoirs & Diaries—A Sapper in Palestine,” firstworldwar.com, August 22, 2009, http://www.firstworldwar.com/diaries/sapperinpalestine.htm (accessed September 5, 2016).
7. Baynes, Animal Heroes, 68. Before the capture of Beersheba on October 31, 1917, when thunderstorms dumped enough rain to fill shallow pools for animals and men to drink from, “several light horse regiments [of the Desert Mounted Corps] went without water for 60 hours, the New Zealand Mounted Rifles for 72 hours and a wagon team of the Cable Section for 84 hours,” writes Ross Mallett in his MA thesis, “Interplay,” 153–54.
8. Laurie, Cupid’s War, 58.
9. Hadaway, Pyramids and Fleshpots, 138.
10. Hadaway, Pyramids and Fleshpots, 150.
11. Laurie, Cupid’s War, 61.
12. “Memoirs & Diaries.”
13. Hadaway, Pyramids and Fleshpots, quoting Corp. Victor Godrich of the Queen’s Own Worcestershire Hussars (Yeomanry), 152.
14. “Memoirs & Diaries.”
15. Laurie, Cupid’s War, 91.
16. Hadaway, Pyramids and Fleshpots, 158.
17. See S. Searight, Oasis, 9, quoting Lt. Col. J. W. Winteringham of the Lincolnshire Yeomanry, who remarked on the animals he saw who were “often cruelly over-loaded.”
18. “Memoirs & Diaries.” Nor was it as if only the locals overworked their donkeys. “In the Near East,” wrote Harold Ernest Baynes, “eight thousand little donkeys, carrying baskets of stone on their backs, helped General Allenby to build his roads along the front from Jaffa to Jerusalem”—the difference here being greater numbers of donkeys to do a scope of work that fewer ones had to do for local villagers. Baynes, Animal Heroes, 130.
19. Laurie, Cupid’s War, 102.
20. Laurie, Cupid’s War, 108–9.
21. Laurie, Cupid’s War, 121.
22. S. Searight, Oasis, 10.
23. Laurie, Cupid’s War, 121.
24. Woodward, Hell in the Holy Land, 171.
25. This was not the first instance in which demobilized men had to leave their horses behind. Earlier in 1918 General Allenby acceded to requests to send men who had already served through the Egyptian and Palestine campaigns (and some of whom had served in France before that) back to the western front. This meant having to leave their horses behind. “Yeomanry regiments had an especially difficult time abandoning their horses,” writes Woodward, Hell in the Holy Land, 71.
26. Laurie, Cupid’s War, 128.
27. Laurie, Cupid’s War, 131.
28. S. Searight, Oasis, 10.
29. For the Hogue poem, see Dr. Jean Bou, “They Shot the Horses—Didn’t They?,” Wartime 44 (2008): 54–57, Australian War Memorial, https://www.awm.gov.au/wartime/44/page54_bou/ (accessed September 5, 2016).
30. Bou, “They Shot the Horses,” 54–57. According to Dr. Bou, there is little evidence that men actually took their mounts into the desert and shot them, which is, he writes, “one of the most often-heard stories related with the often mythologised light horse.”
31. Laurie, Cupid’s War, 131.
32. In one famous case a mule named Mademoiselle Verdun by American troops was brought back to the United States in spite of stiff restrictions. Born in a battlefield in April 1918, Mademoiselle Verdun was not even a month old when “she hiked thirty miles in two days, and was in the thick of every subsequent major offensive pulled off by the Second Division.…Then the question arose as to how she was going to be brought to the United States, because of an ironclad rule which had been issued against bringing animals back. The boys of Battery E decided that they had not fought in France for nothing, with the result that Mademoiselle Verdun, mysteriously missing for some days, blossomed forth at Quarantine on this side of the Atlantic, too late to be sent back to France. A relentless veterinary officer thrust Mademoiselle Verdun into quarantine but she was later freed and became monarch of the regiment at Camp Travis [Texas].” Baynes, quoting from the Boston Herald of November 22, 1920, in Animal Heroes, 124.
2. Old Bill
1. Ann Searight, email message to author, March 10, 2015; Spooner, For Love of Horses, 6.
2. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 6.
3. Chalcraft, Striking Cabbies of Cairo, 165.
4. Chalcraft, Striking Cabbies of Cairo, 165–66.
5. Mikhail, Animal in Ottoman Egypt, 179.
6. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 8.
7. S. Searight, Oasis, 12.
8. Tooley, Life of Florence Nightingale, 27–31; Chaney, “Egypt in England and America.”
9. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 8.
10. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 9.
11. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 10.
12. Spooner, For Love
of Horses, 10.
13. Brooke, Horse Lovers, 11.
14. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 11.
15. Mikhail, Animal in Ottoman Egypt, 15.
16. Specifically, Dorothy’s ideas have been echoed in the work of such women as Sally Jewell Coxe, founder of the Bonobo Conservation Initiative in the Congo, and Lek Chailert, founder of Elephant Nature Park in Chiangmai Province, Thailand. See Lek Chailert: Save Elephant Foundation, http://www.saveelephant.org/; Sally Jewell Coxe: Bonobo Conservation Initiative, http://www.bonobo.org/. Richard Searight adds, “This level of management helps lift people up out of slavery. I remember Bangladeshi workers, bonded labor men, whose horses were dead within months, yet were still paying off purchases for them five animals back. A system that helps people as well as their animals live healthier, more productive lives goes far toward improving their families’ welfare, because you go straight to the bottom of the pile, as it were. And when families are helped to thrive, along with their working animals, society benefits. Everybody wins.” Richard Searight, email message to author, September 4, 2016.
17. List of veterinary school graduates, Veterinary Journal and Annals of Comparative Pathology 20–21 (August 1885): 103. Forbis, Authentic Arabian Bloodstock, 101. Though Judith Forbis describes Branch as a Scot, based on impressions from horse fancier Henry Babson, who met Branch in 1932, he was an Englishman whose crustiness of character was without recourse to any known Scottish heritage.
18. Forbis, “Brief History,” 23.
19. Forbis, Authentic Arabian Bloodstock, 101.
20. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 36.
21. Forbis, Authentic Arabian Bloodstock, 106.
22. Mikhail, Animal in Ottoman Egypt, 164–66.
23. Forbis, Authentic Arabian Bloodstock, 103, 107.
24. Mikhail, Animal in Ottoman Egypt, 165.
25. Forbis, Authentic Arabian Bloodstock, 106.
26. Forbis, Authentic Arabian Bloodstock, 107.
27. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 12.
28. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 14.
29. Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt, 66.
30. Wallach, Understanding the Cultural Landscape, 348.
31. Fahmy, “Health and Husbandry,” 238–40.
32. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 15.
3. Old War Horse Fund
1. Forbis, “Brief History.”
2. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 17.
3. Forbis, Authentic Arabian Bloodstock, 101.
4. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 18.
5. S. Searight, Oasis, 14.
6. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 19.
7. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 20.
8. S. Searight, Oasis, 16; Queen Mary likely made the donations out of her private purse, as there is no record of these gifts in the official books, according to a letter to the author from Pamela Clark, senior archivist at Windsor Castle, January 6, 2015.
9. Quoted in S. Searight, Oasis, 16.
10. Evening News (London), September 19, 1932, 2, and November 8, 1932, 3.
11. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 20.
12. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 20.
13. Jasper Goldberg, “Egyptian Cab Drivers Protest Colonial Animal Laws, 1906–1907,” Global Non-Violent Action Database, December 12, 2009, https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/egyptian-cab-drivers-protest-colonial-animal-laws-1906-1907 (accessed September 5, 2016).
14. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 23.
15. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 22.
16. S. Searight, Oasis, 15.
17. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 68.
18. S. Searight, Oasis, 19.
19. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 68.
20. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 25, 40.
21. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 37.
22. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 71.
23. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 28.
4. Black Friday
1. Book of Poems for the Blue Cross Fund, 74.
2. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 28.
3. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 29.
4. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 29.
5. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 29.
6. Bekoff, Emotional Lives of Animals, 25, 28.
7. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 29.
8. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 34.
9. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 25.
10. S. Searight, Oasis, 16.
11. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 30–31.
12. Western Morning News and Daily Gazette (Plymouth UK), March 10, 1932, 8, and May 25, 1931, 2.
13. Western Daily Press and Bristol Mirror, February 11, 1932, 4.
14. Ashorne Hill quote from “Ashorne Hill—One Thousand Years of History,” Ashorne Hill, https://www.ashornehill.co.uk/about-us/history-of-ashorne-hill (accessed September 5, 2016).
15. Capt. J. A. Durham and Mrs. George Bryant, letter, Royal Leamington Spa Courier (UK), November 24, 1931.
16. Durham and Bryant, letter.
17. Bruce, Last Crusade, 1.
18. Gen. Sir George de Symons Barrow, letter, Bucks Herald (Buckingham UK), March 4, 1932, 3.
19. Barrow, letter.
20. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 32.
21. Illustrated London News, Silver Jubilee ed., 52, and plate 12, May 1935.
22. Chris Hastings, “Churchill’s Mission to Rescue the War Horses and How He Made Officials Bring Tens of Thousands Home,” Daily Mail (London), December 31, 2011.
5. An End and a Beginning
1. Forrest, If Wishes Were Horses, 12.
2. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 32.
3. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 32.
4. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 24.
5. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 40–41.
6. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 37.
7. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 16.
8. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 36.
9. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 40.
10. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 64.
11. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 41.
12. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 41.
13. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 44.
14. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 44.
15. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 45–46.
16. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 45–46.
6. Street of the English Lady
1. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 52.
2. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 49–50.
3. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 51.
4. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 52–53.
5. Reynard, Friends of God, 203.
6. Kane, “Politics, Discontent and the Everyday,” 121.
7. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 54.
8. The district even today is filled with butchers, though on the former site of one of these abattoirs, west of the Brooke Hospital, sits 57357 Hospital, one of the biggest and most modern children’s cancer hospitals in the world. See 57357 Children’s Cancer Hospital Foundation, http://www.57357.com/ (accessed September 5, 2016). At the time of Dorothy’s visit the street was nicknamed Sharia Sikkat al-Mazbah, or “road to the slaughterhouse.”
9. Petra Sidhom, email message to author, June 6, 2015; Richard Searight, email message to author, September 4, 2016.
10. S. Searight, Oasis, 19. Even today, according to Brooke veterinarian Dr. Mohammed Abd-Elhay, people still call the Brooke Hospital El Sitt El Engleasyya, or “place of the English lady,” now shortened to simply “English lady.”
11. Royal Air Force Command, RAF fatalities 1935, http://www.rafcommands.com/forum/showthread.php?17884-RAF-fatalities-1935 (accessed January 5, 2017).
12. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 82.
13. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 57.
14. S. Searight, Oasis, 18–19; 1961 pamphlet for Brooke Hospital for Animals, Cairo.
15. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 62.
16. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 62–63.
17. Spooner, For Love of Horse
s, 63. I’m grateful to Mohammed Abd-Elhay for sharing with me the story about Dorothy confiscating the whips of men in Bairam al-Tunsi Street.
18. Sarah Mourad, “The Stigma of Being Mentally Ill in Egypt’s Abassiya Hospital,” Cairo Post, June 2, 2014, http://egyptianstreets.com/2014/06/02/the-stigma-of-being-mentally-ill-in-egypts-abassiya-hospital/ (accessed September 5, 2016).
19. Petra Sidhom, email message to author, June 6, 2015.
20. Sidhom to author, June 6, 2015.
21. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 67.
22. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 67.
7. Going Home
1. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 58.
2. S. Searight, Oasis, 19.
3. Mohammed Abd-Elhay, email message to author, June 17, 2015. The euthanasia advertisement, “Killing animals humanely,” produced by the American Humane Education Society in 1895, has been recently reproduced in an ebook reissue of Marshall Saunders’s Beautiful Joe (275) based on the rescue and adventures of a Canadian dog. See Saunders, Beautiful Joe.
4. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 59–61.
5. S. Searight, Oasis, 19.
6. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 71–72.
7. van Emden, Tommy’s Ark, 302.
8. Yorkshire Evening Post (UK), June 1, 1934, 10.
9. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 79.
10. Citizen (Gloucester UK), August 25, 1935, 7.
11. Wolseley Russell, Yorkshire Evening Post (Leeds UK), June 18, 1934, 6.
12. Russell, Yorkshire Evening Post, June 18, 1934, 6.
13. Citizen, August 25, 1935, 7.
14. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 80.
15. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 82.
16. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 73.
17. Gen. Sir John Theodosius Burnett-Stuart bio, King’s College London, Liddell Hart Military Archives, http://www.kingscollections.org/catalogues/lhcma/collection/b/bu50-001 (accessed January 5, 2017).
18. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 73.
19. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 74–75.
20. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 74–75.
21. Brendon, Decline and Fall, 330–32.
22. Northern Daily Mail (Hartlepool UK), July 19, 1933, 6.
23. Clark, Our Journey, 384; Spooner, For Love of Horses, 83. Thanks to Dr. Mohammed Abd-Elhay and Atef Gad of Cairo for translation assistance.
24. Spooner, For Love of Horses, 77.
25. Richard Searight, email message to author, September 4, 2016.