In 1934, a forty-eight-year-old British woman named Dorothy Brooke arrived in Cairo. Her husband was a brigadier in the British army stationed there. She found that the horses sold off after the First World War, the ones that had carried artillery and supplies across the Western Front and the Sinai, had not gone home. The army had sold them locally. They were sixteen, seventeen, twenty years old now, and they were still working. Hauling stones. Pulling carts. Walking up and down the streets of Cairo until they collapsed.
She wrote a letter to the Morning Post in London. It said:
Out here, in Egypt, there are still many hundreds of old Army Horses sold of necessity at the end of the war. They are all over twenty years of age by now, and to say that the majority of them have fallen on hard times is to express it very mildly.
She raised twenty thousand pounds. She bought as many of them as she could and gave them a humane retirement. Then, because she could not undo what she had seen, she founded a hospital that would treat the working horses and donkeys of Cairo for free, forever. It is still running. The charity is called Brooke. It now operates five static and twenty-five mobile clinics across Egypt and treats around 160,000 working equines a year.
We are a Delaware company with a Scottish name, operating in Cairo too.
The caller's hours in Cairo are invoiced to the client at the rate we pay for them. What we mark up is the dialer they use and the lists they call. The closer is paid after the client's money lands, and not a penny before. Dorothy wrote down what each horse cost her and what it cost to keep it. We are copying the format, ninety-two years late.
This page is going to tell you we care about her charity. You can feel your shoulders tighten already, because every brand on the internet is telling you about a cause. So we are going to be plain about where we actually stand.
We have not given anything yet.
The dials are logged and dated on this site. Nothing has left our account for Brooke, and we are not going to dress that up. The commitment is written down before there is money in it, so we cannot quietly walk it back once there is. When we do give, the record will be public, and the unglamorous parts will stay in it.
The reason it is Brooke and not something more abstract is that the cause is operationally true. Our cold callers work from Cairo. The city they work in has a serious working-animal welfare problem. The animals Brooke treats walk the same streets our team walks to work on. The cause is not an add-on bolted onto a sales page. It is in the same postcode as the operation.
There are things we will not do. We will not put a founder photo with a donkey on this site, ever. We will not write captions that ask you to feel something. We will not mix the cause into a sales pitch. We will not claim we have given more than we have. When we publish what we give, we will publish the unglamorous parts too.
In 1934, Dorothy Brooke wrote to a newspaper because she wanted somebody to hold her to a count. She wrote down how many horses she had bought, how much she had spent, and what they cost to keep. The ledger was the point. A cause without a record is a feeling. A cause with a record is a promise you can check.
Ninety-two years later, we are starting ours. It is empty today. An honest empty page is better than a full one we made up.
Back to the Cairo Ledger →Brooke. UK Charity Commission 1085760. Founded 1934 in Cairo.