Saffer Bastard who Saved the British Sausage

With today’s trend of showering chefs and food personalities with praise and accolades, it is surprising that a rotund, moustached man from KwaZulu-Natal named Bill should remain in the shadow. Because the late Bill O’Hagan is still known among the British as the man who brought a “sausage renaissance” to their grey island.

Granted, delivering any form of “renaissance” to Britain’s drab cooking pots doesn’t sound like much of a challenge. But what makes Bill’s story compelling is that he took the Brits’ beloved pork sausage — the “banger” — and, with South African flair and good taste, transformed it into the kind of sausage the locals felt they had always deserved.

Bill, who passed away in 2013, was the son of the legendary Ebbo Bastard, the troublesome Springbok flanker who was part of the iconic team that defeated New Zealand on their own soil in 1937. Little Bill was still a toddler when his father was murdered. Later he took on his mother’s surname. After all, a name like Bill Bastard might well have been something of a millstone in later life.

During his school years Bill worked weekends in a butcher shop, where his love for and knowledge of sausage making began. In 1970, at the age of 24, Bill landed in London to pursue his journalism career, which he had started in Johannesburg. And he was so shocked by his first encounters with the local pork sausages at breakfast that he considered the great British breakfast “a fabrication and cultural deception.”

Since the wartime rationing years, British sausages had largely consisted of scraps of unidentifiable meat varieties and parts, padded out with mouldy bread and old grain, stuffed into a casing. For a sausage lover like Bill, this was unacceptable.

Working night shifts at The Daily Telegraph, Bill spent his days making sausages: proper cuts of meat, no with starches or artificial flavourings, and real pork casings to hold everything together.

For years he sold the sausages to friends and colleagues, but when Bill opened his first shop in Greenwich, London, in 1988, O’Hagan’s sausages quickly entered the national vocabulary. His culinary creations were sold in places such as the Dorchester Hotel and prestigious stores like Harrods and Harvey Nichols. With his frequent appearances in the media and on television in the 1980s and early 1990s as the man who had resurrected British sausage from the dead, Bill was likely South Africa’s first international food personality.

O’Hagan’s remains synonymous with quality sausages in Britain today, although the business itself appears to have been rather on-and-off since Bill’s death.

Little is known about his descendants or the carriers of Bill’s legacy. Yet he deserves to be recognised as an unsung South African food hero, the man who put back the bang in the British banger.

And a good old Bastard, at that.