Dorothy Brooke and the Fight to Save Cairo Lost War Horses

Born in June 1883 to an aristocratic Scottish family, Dorothy Gibson-Craig was brought up with dogs and horses. In 1926 she married Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Brooke, recipient of the Distinguished Service Order in World War I and a writer on equine culture. She followed her new husband to Cairo, where she discovered thousands of malnourished and suffering former British war horses leading lives of backbreaking 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 like used equipment too costly to send home. In Dorothy Brooke and the Fight to Save Cairo’s Lost War Horses 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 Brooke’s Old War Horse Memorial Hospital, 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.

Grant Hayter-Menzies is the author of several books, including From Stray Dog to World War I Hero: The Paris Terrier Who Joined the First Division (Potomac Books, 2015) and Shadow Woman: The Extraordinary Career of Pauline Benton. Monty Roberts is an American horse trainer and the New York Times bestselling author of The Man Who Listens to Horses: The Story of a Real-Life Horse Whisperer and others.