Dorothy Brooke

A plaque to Dorothy Brooke and her husband, the distinguished Olympic equestrian, Major-General Geoffrey Brooke DSO, was installed at Malmesbury House on 15 October 2020. Dorothy Gibson-Craig (Brooke) was born in Salisbury in 1883. She married her second husband, Geoffrey Brooke, in 1926, and moved with him to Malmesbury House in 1939. By then Dorothy, upset by the years of deprivation and suffering experienced by the thousands of surviving war horses that had been sent to the Middle East during World War I, had already set up the precursor of the charity that bears her name. The legacy of the Old War Horse Memorial Hospital that Dorothy founded in Egypt in 1934 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. By the time Dorothy died in 1955 her charity was famed worldwide by all who had equestrian interests at heart.