Remembering war horses

Watch Brooke's short film featuring poet James Robertson reading Black Nannie’s Awa’, above.

This is the story of Black Nannies Awa’, a poem we found after my mother passed away about a real-life war horse, which is at the heart of Brooke’s Every Horse Remembered campaign. 

After someone dies and you’ve reached the stage where you can tackle the stuff, there’s almost always a surprise. Something, frequently small and easily overlooked, that casts a new light on a life you thought you knew and understood so well and even, perhaps, on your own life. It can be a shock, a revelation or a mystery, sometimes a bit of all three. 

My mother’s surprise came in the form of a poem on an A4 sheet, folded in four and slipped in amongst the bills, medical records, MOT certificates and the like, that chart our everyday lives.

It could have ended up in the shredder but, as luck would have it, I unfolded it to discover, typed on the letterhead of a Canadian insurance company, an emotional, intensely moving poem, Black Nannie’s Awa’.  

It was written by my great-grandfather, William Smart, expressing his despair and desolation at his horse being requisitioned for World War I.  

With only 25,000 horses at its disposal, the army was dramatically under-horsed for the conflict and over 120,000 horses were requisitioned from their owners in the first few weeks of the war. 

The story could have ended there. I might have just shown Black Nannie’s Awa’ to my brother and sister and filed it away as a nice family memory. But, in one of the twists of fate that have preserved the poem over the years, despite not being remotely horsey, I work for an equestrian streaming service.  

So, I recognised a significance in the poem that others might not have seen and knew straight away who to call. 

Both my grandparents on my mother’s side were Scottish. My grandmother, Harriet, hailed from Inverkeilor and my grandfather from St Andrews. They came to England in the 1920’s to work as housekeeper and gardener to a family in Langley, near Slough. 

We knew through family lore that Harriet’s father, William, was referred to as the Ploughman Poet. We had his profession confirmed on Harriet’s birth certificate and even had a couple of his poems. But we’d never seen this one before.  

And the Canadian letterhead? Whilst Harriet had moved South, most of her ten siblings had, along with over 400,000 of their fellow Scots, gone west, part of the mass emigration from Scotland to Canada in the period between 1900 and 1930.  

So, the poem must have been shared with either my mother or grandmother by one of the Canadian relatives.  

Brooke is a charity dedicated to improving the quality of life for working horses, donkeys and mules all over the world. It was formed by Dorothy Brooke (born in Melrose) after her husband was posted to Cairo to command the British Cavalry Brigade in 1930.  

She saw the fate of former war horses like Black Nannie that had never been returned home and were now languishing in poor conditions in Egypt.   

Dorothy set up the Old War Horse Campaign of Rescue and began raising the funds needed to buy the horses from their owners, the first stage in lifting them out of a life of pain.  

Within three years, she had purchased five thousand former war horses. Most were old, exhausted and had to be humanely put down. But, thanks to her compassion, they ended their lives peacefully.  

In 1934, Dorothy went on to found the Old War Horse Memorial Hospital in Cairo, with the promise of free veterinary care for all the city’s working horses and donkeys.  

Today, Brooke is the world’s largest working equine welfare organisation, with headquarters in the UK and offices in Africa, Asia and Central America.  

For the reading of the poem, we realised we needed outside help to ensure it was rendered faithfully to the language in which it was written.  

I contacted the Scottish Poetry Library, who has been extremely helpful with the project, nowhere more than in introducing me to the poet James Robertson, whose wonderful reading of Black Nannie’s Awa’, is set to the extraordinarily moving film put together by the team at Brooke. 

My debt of gratitude to James extends beyond the reading. When I first transcribed the poem from the original typed version, I assumed that the line “the day that her photo was taen at the yett” was a terrible typo for “vet” and amended it accordingly.  

When James saw the original and my transcribed version, he gently informed me that yett is a Scots word for a farm gate, thereby narrowly avoiding a potentially disastrous cross-cultural faux pas. 

So, after a journey that started in Inverkeilor and has taken in a transatlantic round trip, ending up in my mother’s house in the suburbs of Northwest London, Black Nannie’s Awa’ has resurfaced in a wonderful way that none of us could ever have imagined  

And as for Black Nannie herself, well, we’ve no way of knowing if she made it home and William got his chance “tae purchase her freedom”. But it’s nice to think that perhaps, just maybe, Black Nannie and Dorothy Brooke’s paths crossed in Egypt all those years ago.  

And, even if they didn’t, they have now.

Each November, Brooke reflects on the heroic bravery of working horses, donkeys and mules in the past and present, to honour these animals and give them a life worth living for generations to come. 

8 million horses, donkeys and mules died in World War One, with most who survived never returning home and kept overseas for hard labour.

Broadcaster Angela Rippon will lay a wreath on behalf of Brooke at the Animals in War Memorial in Hyde Park on 8 November 2024, to remember animals who served and sacrificed themselves during conflict.

The service will be livestreamed on Brooke's Facebook page.