The amazing true story of Dorothy Brooke - the socialite who dedicated her life to saving war horses

Born in 1883 to a family of Scottish gentry, Dorothy Gibson-Craig was a divorcée in her forties when she married Major General Geoffrey Brooke in 1926. An admired cavalry officer and recipient of the Distinguished Service Order in World War I he, like her, had been brought up among beloved dogs and horses to which she would dedicate her life.

Dorothy had heard stories about former war horses abandoned in various corners of the globe, including in the Middle East, but could scarcely credit them; it offended every sensibility to think that animals who had helped win a war—one they had not caused—should be left to such a miserable fate.

It was the Brookes’ move to Cairo in 1930 that would see Dorothy’s passion take on new meaning. It was there, where Major General Brooke commanded the British Cavalry Brigade that, 12 years after the First World War’s end, Dorothy came face to face with the lost war horses of Cairo.

At Cairo’s SPCA (animal protection agency), Dorothy encountered the first of thousands of elderly, neglected former war horses, survivors brought to the Middle East by British forces to fight in Egypt, Palestine and Mesopotamia. Equine veterans who helped win the desert campaigns, they were then left behind.

Old, worked with untreated injuries, starved, one particular steed, with the brand of the British Army visible on his rear flank, had been seized by Cairo police as a neglect case. “Obviously he had been a good horse once,” Dorothy recalled later. “He had been happy and well fed as the other poor animals had never been. 

He had been born in England, had known our green fields, been groomed and cared for. He had moreover served in Palestine and suffered hardships in that campaign that few horses have endured in modern times. And then we had sold him to this.”

Horrified to learn the horse had been brought in on prior occasions, and returned to his owner each time, and that the SPCA board could do nothing if a horse was judged still able to work, even if it could barely stand, Dorothy offered money to purchase him. But the owner was absent. And until he took Dorothy’s payment, the horse was, by law, his.

For the next two days, Dorothy drove to the SPCA from the suburban enclave of Heliopolis to spend hours with Old Bill (as she named him). She spoke to him, and his battered ears pricked up at hearing English words. But his eyes were dead. She offered him bran mash and every delicacy she could think of. She caressed him.

But none of it mattered. Only when the owner arrived and took the money, and Dorothy opened Bill’s stall, did she see his eyes brighten in the darkness, as if he knew his angel of rest had arrived.

Dorothy had Old Bill humanely euthanised. And she resolved that never again would this happen to another horse. Thanks to this suffering animal, Dorothy’s dream of helping other neglected equines would be realised.

Mounting a campaign in 1931 with an appeal letter to the Morning Post (which was acquired six years later by the Daily Telegraph) that has become famous in the annals of animal welfare, Dorothy purchased as many former war horses and army mules as she could locate—some five thousand, all told—most in such desperate conditions they had to be euthanised immediately.

Others she nurtured and saved, founding in the process an animal hospital in a poor area of Cairo, offering free veterinary care for all working equines and education for their owners.

Following its inception in 1934, the Brooke Hospital for Animals survived the Great Depression, wars and revolutions, intrigue, and the frankly Herculean task set before it. And it spawned Brooke, Action for Working Horses and Donkeys, a worldwide charity aiding working equines and their owners.

“From this community of suffering,” wrote Dorothy, still working for her charity right up to the day of her death in June 1955, “I have never tried to withdraw myself.  It seemed to me a matter of course that we should take up our share of the burden of pain that lies upon the world.”

Dorothy’s guiding spirit, through the ongoing work of the charity she founded, helps cool that pain still.

The Lost War Horses of Cairo by Grant Hayter-Menzies is published by Allen & Unwin (£16.99). To order your copy for £14.99 plus p&p call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk