IMPERIAL ECHOES
By Arthur Staniforth
From tea with the Mahdi to soup and custard in a mud hut – a vivid picture of what empire was really like.

ISBN 9781872142609. Paperback, 160pp
£14.95
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Fifty years after he worked in Sudan as an agriculturalist, Arthur Staniforth has pieced together in Imperial Echoes a vivid picture of the country in the final days of British (officially Anglo-Egyptian) rule. Drawing on his letters home as well as a wide range of published sources, he shows how life was for the isolated European in remote stations.

Amid the strains of a developing independence movement, the author took polite tea with the Mahdi, son of the feared conqueror of General Gordon. It was a welcome change from a monotonous home diet of fried eggs, fried meat, soup and custard in a mud hut with only a wind-up gramophone for company.

This book has the value of authenticity and contemporaneity seasoned with the perspective of the author’s later career as a distinguished international agriculturalist.

Imperial Echoes will appeal to students of tropical agriculture but to many more besides - to anyone interested in the history of the vast and tragic country when the origin of today’s troubles were already becoming visible.

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Arthur Staniforth, an agriculturalist, has also written
Farmers: From Food Producers to Park Keepers and On Boats in Wartime, both published by Trafford, and Straw and Straw Craftsmen, published by Shire Books

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