Dick Stanbury was a career diplomat who as a district commissioner in the Sudan Political Service in the late 1930s found himself judge, administrator and police chief at the age of 21, governing areas the size of Wales, and even, at one point, driving a train from Khartoum to Port Sudan during a railway strike. Asked once how he would like to be remembered Stanbury responded: Cornishman, man of God and son of Empire. To that one could add erudite Classicist, first-class cricketer, enthusiastic polo player and amusing raconteur. Like many of his generation he also had an unflinching sense of honour and duty.

He was born in Madras in 1916. His father was in charge of the police training garrison at Vellore in what is now Tamil Nadu. His mother was the glamorous product of generations of civil servants working in India, so at an early age he was inculcated in Kipling and the ways of the Raj. At the age of 8 he was taken on the three-month voyage back to England and, along with his brother Ralph, was placed in a preparatory school. He did not see his parents again for five years.

In 1929 he was sent to Shrewsbury School and emerged with a Classics exhibition to Magdalene College, Cambridge. In the interim he had played for two years in the school First XI and it was cricket that was his first love.

Cambridge in the Thirties was a hotbed of communism and anti-Fascist sentiment, but Stanbury had much more interest in keeping wicket for his college, although he managed to graduate with a first in Classics in 1937, but not before he had played county cricket and kept wicket for Somerset for two years, in 1935 and 1936.

In 1937 he entered the Sudan Political Service and for the next 13 years he was a district commissioner in nine districts encompassing most of the regions in Sudan.

Yirrol in the south became his defining district. As a “bog baron” he developed a deep fondness for the Dinka tribesmen, although not so fond that, like a number of his contemporaries, he felt compelled to take a Dinka girl as his wife. This led the tribal chiefs to question whether he had blood or water in his veins. But he did impress them when he arrived at a church service at a missionary station on Christmas Day, carrying a native Dinka beauty on the pillion of his BSA motorcycle clad only in a string of beads around her waist.

Yet it was the effects of the southern Sudan that eventually caused him to be invalided out of the service. He once described his life there as “20 per cent fun, 80 per cent illness and discomfort”. There was one curious incident when he was thought to be suffering from blackwater fever, which was usually terminal, when, as he lay exhausted, he heard a loud hammering outside his hut. He discovered that the locals were making his coffin. A doctor eventually arrived and diagnosed “just” a bad attack of hepatitis. Ten years of malaria and dysentery finally took their toll and in 1950 he found himself recuperating in Somerset.

His second career on the political desk of the Foreign Service meant a three-year posting in Cairo where he found a country in transition from monarchy to a republic under President Nasser. British influence was on the wane and he bore witness to a savage backlash against the British presence during the burning of Cairo in 1952. His fluency in Arabic, combined with thick, curly, dark hair and a smattering of carefully placed expletives, once saved Stanbury and a colleague from being lynched by an angry mob at a road block. While in Egypt he met Geraldine Grant and in 1953 they were married in London. He continued to play cricket and kept wicket for the Gezira Club (a sports club in Cairo) against the first Pakistani side to tour the British Isles.

On another occasion he was playing in a match for the Nomads amateur cricket club against St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, in 1959, and insisted on “standing up” to a quick bowler and took a ball right on his mouth. There was blood and teeth everywhere. The young doctor batting urged him to go to hospital immediately. “Not until after the match,” spluttered Stanbury through his bloody lips, insisting on seeing the team through to victory before seeking aid.

In the late Fifties he worked at the British Embassy in the British Protectorate of Bahrain and established a personal friendship with Sheikh Eisa. He also met the future ruler of Kuwait, Shaikh Sabah al-Salim, and the Sultan of Oman.

His last foreign posting was in Buenos Aires as counsellor and adviser to the British Ambassador. He worked a great deal with the Argentine Army and Navy and had a significant contact with the Peronists, including their terrorist wing, the Tupamaros. It was his job to liaise with the various British embassies in South America and consequently his duties took him to Santiago, Lima, Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo.

After retiring from the diplomatic service he took up farming peaches and strawberries in Portugal for a period in the 1970s before eventually settling in East Sussex where he and his wife ran a Portuguese pottery business. There was also an attempt to import and grow orchids.

He used to quote Osbert Sitwell and say: “Why is the laughter always in the next room?” On the contrary, it was normally created by him and followed him like a faithful retainer.

Stanbury is survived by his wife and their son and daughter.

Richard Stanbury, diplomat, was born on February 5, 1916. He died on June 29, 2008, aged 92