The Lost War Horses of Cairo

The Passion of Dorothy Brooke

Grant Hayter-Menzies

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781760631444
• eBook ISBN:
  9781760638818
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Biological Sciences

In 1930 wealthy Scottish socialite Dorothy Brooke followed her new husband to Cairo, where she discovered thousands of suffering former British war horses leading lives of toil and misery. Brought to the Middle East by British forces during the Great War, these ex-cavalry horses had been left behind at the war's end, abandoned as used equipment too costly to send home. Grant Hayter-Menzies chronicles not only the lives and eventual rescue of these noble creatures, who after years of deprivation and suffering found respite in the Old War Horse Memorial Hospital established by Dorothy, but also the story of the challenges of founding and maintaining an animal-rescue institution on this scale. The legacy of the Old War Horse Memorial Hospital and its founder endures today in the dozens of international Brooke animal-welfare facilities dedicated to improving the lives of working horses, donkeys and mules across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Prologue

Dorothy

Egypt, thou knew’st too well,

My heart was to thy rudder tied by the strings,

And thou shouldst tow me after.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

If we were scanning the manifest for a particular ship sailing from England to Port Said, Egypt, in October 1930, we would notice nothing very much out of the ordinary.

Reading down the columns, scored in blue and red lines on paper of a pale official green, we would meet merchants and colonial officials on their way “out” east, teachers and remittance men and missionaries and what Max Rodenbeck terms “the Imperial Fishing Fleet . . . the flotilla of debutantes who set out from home each winter with the express aim of trauling for a husband in the British colonial service.”¹

They came from Belfast and Glasgow, Fareham and Portsmouth, London and Edinburgh, like a lot of other people sailing east that season. And among them we would see the names of a couple who by all available information were pretty much like most other people on that sailing. They were Geoffrey Brooke, a British cavalry officer, and his wife, Dorothy. Both were in their late forties.

The Brookes were en route to Cairo. Though Egypt had become a sovereign state in 1922, British forces after the close of the Great War had kept a foot in the door, protective of Egypt and of the Suez Canal as gateway, among other things, to India. As such, they had left behind small occupying forces like the British Cavalry Brigade, which Geoffrey Brooke was coming out to Egypt’s capital city to command.

The Brookes were similar in appearance and personality, each tall, lanky, and lithe. Brought up riding ponies and horses since childhood, they seemed to take on equine characteristics themselves. With Geoffrey, a champion jumper in younger years, this was especially apparent; photographs of him on horseback give the impression of a man who was as much horse as human, so that it is difficult to see where one begins and the other ends. Despite being well into what was, in 1930, considered to be middle age, the couple shared a gracile stance characteristic of blooded horses, a relaxed ease often seen in upper-class people who amid privilege had been trained never to take anything for granted, to live a combined credo of the Golden Rule drilled into them in their nurseries, alongside unfailing noblesse oblige.

Had you seen them walking together on the deck of their ship, you might think the Brookes a pair who had been together for most of their lives—indeed, for so long that any individual idiosyncrasies long ago blended into equal halves of the same person. They were certainly soul mates who shared, among other things, a deep love of horses. But they had only been married four years earlier, after lives spent with others had broken up and sunk, like the old world of czars and sultans and country houses to which both had been bred, after the world-altering devastation of World War I.

We know that for Dorothy, it was love at first sight. And events were to bear evidence that, for Geoffrey, it was very much the same—love that kept its promise to stay firm through better or worse.

Both Brookes came from backgrounds deeply rooted in the British Isles.

Geoffrey Brooke, who could have been describing himself when he wrote, in his novel Horse Lovers, “he was decidedly slim in limb and body, punctiliously neat in dress,” was born June 14, 1884, in Dublin into the Protestant Anglo-Irish landowning class. His family connections brought him within reach of Continental aristocracy—one of his cousins was the peppery, exuberant, and brave Daisy Princess of Pless, English-born consort of a Prussian aristocrat, who wrote of Brooke in her diaries. Brooke’s trajectory took him farther afield than Central Europe, all the way to Russia, where in 1906 he was assigned to the British Embassy in St. Petersburg, serving with the Sixteenth Royal Lancers.²

Not long after he arrived, Brooke met a Russian noblewoman, Baroness Vera von Salza, a general’s daughter born in Tsarskoye Selo who was fourteen years his senior, and they were married in London on October 14, 1908. Already married and divorced—as her English marriage license manages to fit into the small box provided for “Condition,” she was “previously the wife of Stanislas Lucien Alfred Gabriel Mechin Baron Mechin to whom she was married in Russia and from whom she obtained a divorce in France”—Vera had grown up in wealth that was to be cancelled abruptly by the Russian Revolutions of 1917– 18.³ That future cataclysm was unimaginable to the young couple, as to most Russians, but the events that led to the demise of imperial Russia and a clutch of other kingdoms came quickly enough when the assassination of an Austrian archduke in Sarajevo suddenly jerked the seal ribbons of dozens of international treaties.

On that day, June 28, 1914, the world as everyone then knew it began to slip like a broad, deceptively placid river, moving ever faster toward the brink of a raging waterfall. Established realities changed forever that Sunday. Levers and gears set in place by the abuses of empires old and fading and young and foolhardy, and a general failure of diplomacy so criminally incompetent no punishment could compensate for the destruction it unleashed, clicked and began to function as a machine that created, with all the mechanical precision of the age, a comprehensive, all-destroying worldwide war. So began the toppling of thrones across Europe, the snuffing out of lights in ballrooms and boardrooms that people had assumed would burn forever, replaced by signal flares and exploding gunpowder and miles of war-torn desolation.

Poets like John Masefield, in his midthirties when the war broke out, already saw what was coming for “generations of dead men” when he wrote that first August of

The harvest not yet won, the empty bin,

The friendly horses taken from the stall,

The fallow on the hill not yet brought in,

The cracks unplastered on the leaking walls.

Whether in “the misery of the soaking trench” or “freezing in the rigging,” these men would know only a puzzled despair in that moment of death, “when the blind soul is flung upon the air,” dying for an idea “but dimly understood.” Just as poignant is his image of “friendly horses” being taken from their familiar stalls and also, like the human soldiers, flung into a void.⁴

Geoffrey had played a significant role in the conflict, serving as lieutenant-captain and then staff captain of the Third Cavalry Brigade the year the war began. He became brigade-major of the Second Cavalry Brigade the next year and in 1918 served in that capacity with the Canadian Cavalry Brigade. In the war he rode two of his prize mounts: Alice, who was injured and taken home, and Combined Training, who was wounded but stayed with his master and was fit enough to win the King George V Gold Cup for Geoffrey for show jumping in 1921.⁵

It was in this final year of the war that Geoffrey, who had already been recognized for bravery (one of the first officers to be gazetted for the Military Cross, in 1915), took part in a battle that assigns him a place in history and connects him to one of the most savagely bloody sallies of the war. At the end of March 1918, as commander of the Sixteenth Lancers, Geoffrey led what is considered the last major cavalry charge of military history, in which nineteenth-century equine culture flung itself at twentieth-century firepower, in the form of German machine gunners from the Twenty-Third Saxon Division entrenched in Moreuil Wood southeast of Amiens. The cost to men and horses was enormous, but the Saxon Division was forced from the Wood (twice, since they regained it the next day), and with this battle the slow but steady disintegration of Germany’s Spring Offensive began. For his part in the charge, Geoffrey was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, as well as the Croix de Guerre.⁶

Emerging intact from a war that had swallowed up so many other men, whole or in part, Geoffrey returned to England and passed Staff College in 1920. Between then and 1923, when he served as chief instructor of cavalry at Weedon in Northamptonshire, Geoffrey and his Russian wife (with whom he had had a son, Peter, in 1909) were divorced. As was often the case with couples who by some miracle had made it through the cataclysm together, the Brookes found themselves too changed to continue that bond after it was over. Geoffrey seems to be describing their marriage and Vera’s intense personality in the wife of Archie Languid, characters in his 1927 novel Horse Lovers. Mrs. Languid “was an erratic, self-centred creature, incapable of deep affection, and a good many years his senior” who had a passion for gambling and disliked living in the country, “whereas Archie’s chief interest in life lay in his estate and his horses. . . . A makeshift, peace-at-any-price domestic policy gradually developed into sullen warfare, and eventually resulted in the breaking of the nuptial ties.” The break was perhaps not helped by the fact that Vera Brooke’s family, and thus Vera herself, had lost everything they owned and the lives of several family members to the revolution. Vera’s later life is not known, though she did leave Geoffrey with several Fabergé objects, mere remnants of her family’s former Russian splendor.⁷

For his part, as a bachelor again Geoffrey began to pour his encyclopedic knowledge of horses into books in a literary stream that enlarged to a cataract. Starting in 1924 and continuing for another thirty years, Geoffrey would publish several volumes, nonfiction and fiction, on horse training, hunting with horses, riding and stable-craft, polo ponies, the foibles and virtues of the horse set, and everything in between. He wrote of horses with a sensitivity that stands out all the more, considering what he had witnessed them endure in battle. “The real lover of horses is a student of equine psychology,” Geoffrey wrote in 1924, “and finds in the horse those qualities so beloved by man—courage, unselfishness, fidelity. What more does one ask for in a friend?”⁸

Geoffrey might well have continued in this course, focused on his stables, his writing, and his surviving comrades at arms as they reminisced every year on Remembrance Day. But he was to meet a woman who, while so similar to his own nature and interests, was just unique enough to change the course of his life completely.

Dorothy Evelyn Gibson-Craig was born in Melrose, Scotland, on June 1, 1884.⁹

She arrived a few days after the seventy-first birthday of Queen Victoria, whose Golden Jubilee marking her fiftieth year on the throne would be celebrated three years later. In a more than coincidental sense, Dorothy, whose nickname among family and friends was Dodo, was born with one foot in the twentieth century, the era of greater rights and freedoms for women, and the other in the nineteenth, when compassion for the rights of animals first took deepest root, alongside abolition of chattel slavery and child labor, as a social concern.

Young Dorothy, who was followed by siblings Cecilia (Cicely) Dulcibella, Eardley Charles William (later sixth/thirteenth baronet), and Marjorie Violet, was a daughter of Henry Vivian Gibson-Craig and wife, Emily Dulcibella Wilmot, and granddaughter of Sir William Gibson-Craig, second baronet. The family seat, Riccarton, was a massive gabled stone mansion in Edinburgh, much influenced by the Scottish Baroque style made de rigueur by the historical novels and histrionic tastes of Sir Walter Scott. The house was demolished in 1956, a year after Dorothy’s death, and its grounds are now the location of Heriot-Watt University, but its cemetery remains the property of the Gibson-Craigs. Many of the family members interred there fought or died in the two world wars of the twentieth century—a link with soldiers and warfare that was to thread itself throughout Dorothy’s future life and the work to which she devoted it.¹⁰

In 1905 Dorothy, who had grown up to be a willowy beauty, became the wife of Lt. Col. James Gerald Lamb Searight of the Royal Scots (Lothian Regiment). Born in 1878, Searight, whose family nickname was Gerry, was a thin, angular man who had served in the Boer War in South Africa (1899– 1902). How they met we do not know, but Dorothy married Gerry in Great Kimble Church in Buckinghamshire. Gerry suffered from an illness contracted in South Africa and was in many ways still an invalid when he married Dorothy. Her willingness to marry a man believed to be terminally ill has much about it that foreshadows her future work with sick and dying horses in Egypt. As it happened, Gerry did live on, dying in his eighties in 1959, and the Searights had three healthy children over the next several years: two sons, Rodney, born in 1909, and Philip, born in 1916, and daughter Pamela (Pinkie), born in 1915.¹¹

Despite his long life, Gerry’s health never completely righted itself. This, however, did not stop him from wishing to be of service at the outbreak of the Great War. Gerry served as lieutenant-colonel, commandant, in the Royal Defence Corps. This home-based unit was composed of garrison battalions formed in 1917 in which soldiers who, for reasons related to age or health, were not considered fit to take part in the fighting overseas but able enough to do their bit at home. This was a job that allowed Gerry to remain close to home yet play a significant role in defending the nation. He was judged by others to have carried it out extremely well: for his service, Gerry was awarded the Order of the British Empire.¹² Dorothy demonstrated bravery of her own by remaining in London with her children; her youngest, Philip, had an abiding early memory of having to dart under a table in his nursery when zeppelins floated, eerily clanking in the dark, over the city, a trial run for the Blitz of 1940.¹³

Dorothy and Geoffrey may have met some time shortly after the end of the war, perhaps as early as 1919. These were the years composing what Juliet Nicolson terms “the great silence”—when, between the deafening noise of war and the frantic music of the Jazz Age, the “English habit of maintaining difficult feelings was to suppress rather than discuss them, as if by remaining silent the feelings would disappear.”¹⁴ Under this thinnest of veneers applied for the most irrelevant of reasons boiled storms of bereavement, bitterness, passion. Whatever was happening between Gerry and Dorothy, it seems to have been well concealed, at least from those around them, and perhaps from each other, in the approved English way; yet storms of the heart are rarely containable. Geoffrey divorced Vera in 1922, and after Dorothy and Gerry were divorced, Geoffrey and Dorothy had a Registry Office marriage. They lived at Tidworth, Wiltshire, where Geoffrey served as colonel of the Sixteenth Lancers until called up to take the Cavalry Brigade post in Cairo—which brings us to four years later, when their ship docked in Port Said and they disembarked in the autumn heat, so at variance from the damp cool of the English October they had left. They had a four-hour train journey ahead of them to Cairo.

Some of those 124 miles ran along the Suez Canal, tribute to the genius of human ingenuity and bone of contention in past and future wars. Dug in 1859 to link the Red Sea and the Mediterranean and obviate the lengthy and expensive sea journey around the horn of Africa, the canal, worked by the forced labor of thousands of Egyptians, was completed ten years later. It opened to great fanfare, with the khedive (viceroy) of Egypt, Isma’il, barging down the waterway with the Empress Eugénie of France beside him, their ship surely a wondrous sight to desert Bedouin who from a distance would have glimpsed sails and prow floating magically through desert dunes. Though plagued by cost overruns, the canal proved as great a boon to shipping as predicted, but, as mentioned, it was also and almost from the start a curse to peace. After helping the khedival government put down a native uprising in northern Egypt, Britain was recompensed with occupation of Egypt and Sudan, along with responsibili...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• A Soldier’s Kiss
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• The Lost War Horses of Cairo
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Picture section
• Copyright