In February 1979, the Imperial War Museum, mindful that the last generation of the personnel to serve in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was becoming increasingly frail, sent interviewers around Britain to record their memories. One of the people interviewed was William Hamilton Scriven who, in the 1930s, served as a Sudan Defence Force medical officer in El Fashir, in present-day Darfur. His most vivid memory of his time in the Sudan concerned the improvised cricket pitch at El Fashir, constructed from mud and locally produced matting. He recalled helping the local District Commissioner, a keen cricketer, to arrange matches with some of the native officers serving in the Sudan Defence Force, an experiment he describes as ‘not a success’. The games, he noted, were played with ‘very ancient bats’, one of which was ‘bound with crocodile skin’, and he recalled with great joy how the local Sudanese people tended to ‘laugh their heads off’ while watching these rather shambolic fixtures.