Hashing originated in December 1938 in Selayang Quarry, Selangor, then in the Federated Malay States (now Malaysia), when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British paper chase or "hare and hounds", to rid themselves of the excesses of the previous weekend.[1] The original members included Albert Stephen (A.S.) Ignatius "G" Gispert, Cecil Lee, Frederick "Horse" Thomson, Ronald "Torch" Bennett, Eric Galvin, H.M. Doig, and John Woodrow. The inaugural meet took place one Monday after work in late-1938. Some 10 to 15 of his friends decided to sweat-out some of the excesses of a particularly liquid weekend, by running around the Club’s sports’ fields.

A recent history of the Hash notes that “Gispert was not an athlete and stress was laid as much on the subsequent refreshment as on the pure and austere r*nning. It was non-competitive and abounded in slow packs”! Indeed, at the end of the Hash it was back to the bar at the Club in a building known as the Hash House. The name was born!

The Kampala Hash started in July 1986 with 37 r*nners, all of whom were expatriates and some of who are still here (but not Hashing!). The trail was laid with shredded paper from the American Embassy and the route covered much of the Makindye suburb. Numbers grew steadily as did the proportion of Ugandan Hashers, so that the first Hash attended by more than 100 Hashers was in January 1994 and the first Ugandan Hash Master, Stephen “Pisser” Luswata, took on the mantle in 1995.

While Gispert and many of the original Hash pack died during the Second World War, the Kampala Hash has not yet lost any of its pack. Or if we have, we haven’t noticed their absence!