The confusing thing about this is that the Headingley referred to is not the one in Leeds but an amalgam of Headington and Madingley, so as to keep the reader unsure whether the story being told took place in Oxford or Cambridge. Actually it was Cambridge. The clue refers to the spectacular occasion on which a group of people claiming to be the Sultan of Zanzibar and his retinue fooled the Royal Navy into giving them a guided tour of a destroyer. One of them, improbably, was Virginia Woolf in drag.