As President of the Brooke, an international animal welfare organization, HRH The Duchess of Cornwall was keen to see the exhibition and pay tribute to the millions of horses enlisted by the British Army. The Duchess viewed her own contribution to the exhibition’s ‘Remembrance Wall’, where visitors can decorate their own paper horse. The wall has been designed to commemorate the horses enlisted by the Army. HRH chose to depict in watercolour ‘Sefton’, a Household Cavalry horse seriously injured in an IRA nail-bomb attack in London in 1982.
War Horse: Fact & Fiction successfully draws together the many aspects of War Horse to explore the phenomenal journey from book, to stage to screen with exclusive objects from Michael Morpurgo, the National Theatre and Steven Spielberg’s film War Horse. The exhibition also includes archive material from the Brooke. The charity was founded after Dorothy Brooke rescued ex-warhorses that had been sold into a life of hard labour in Cairo. She rescued 5000 horses and in 1934 founded the ‘Old War Horse Memorial Hospital’ in Cairo which HRH The Duchess of Cornwall visited in 2006.
The exhibition is free and opens to the public on Saturday 22 October 2011 at the National Army Museum, London. For more information, please visit: www.nam.ac.uk or telephone 0207 730 0717.
