About this item
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.
About the Author
For a decade, Grant Hayter-Menzies has specialized in biographies of extraordinary women, publishing the first full length lives of stage and screen stars Charlotte Greenwood and Billie Burke, Chinese-American author Princess Der Ling, diarist Sarah Pike Conger, wife of the American ambassador to China and friend to the controversial Empress Dowager Cixi of China, Pauline Benton, the American-born master of Chinese shadow theatre, and most recently Lillian Carter, mother of President Jimmy Carter.
Grant's most recent book is the first biography in over eighty years of Rags, the mascot terrier of the First Division in France during WWI. Grant's newest book is a biography of Dorothy Brooke, the Englishwoman who in 1930 Cairo, Egypt discovered and saved thousands of elderly and abused warhorses, mules and donkeys abandoned by British forces at the termination of WWI.
[Author photo: Bryan Melvin]
