O’Hagan, the Demon Bastard of Fleet Street

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON: Ebbo Bastard

By PAT PRENTICE

It seems that the memory of Bill O’Hagan is savoured among many former denizens of Fleet Street, so I feel it is only right to reveal that he was a real Bastard.

And like his father, it appears, he was also loved for his ability to wield a sausage.

The Sausage King’s father was one Ebbo Bastard, a popular Springbok rugby player from Kokstad, Natal, who saw Second World War action in the Western Desert with the Natal Mounted Rifles.

He not only scored at rifles and rugby union, but also managed to seduce a lady called Una, who had been married to a farmer called Peter Young. She left him to marry Ebbo.

Some time later, the men fell out at a brie, and much later, possibly at Ebbo’s home, Young shot Bill’s father dead, but was also wounded. Ebbo was 37; Bill was aged about five or six.

Accounts vary, but newspaper stories at the time reported a Wild West-style shootout.

Bill thought his father had been armed with a shotgun and Young with a rifle, but the details tended to change as many drinks were subsumed.

The widowed Mrs Bastard readopted her maiden name and after an interesting childhood, which included sausagery and playing in a Boss band, Bill O’Hagan, an avowed critic of apartheid, arrived in England, where he helped to run Gatwick News.

Bill’s tale of how he left the paper was that colleagues stole his share of the enterprise whilst he was inebriated and that he started to hitch along the motorway to London.

According to Bill, Freddie Laker recognised him and picked him up in his white Rolls-Royce.

Having told Laker that he had just lost everything he’d ever had, the airline entrepreneur and O’Hooligan decided that he should be dropped in Fleet Street to try his luck.

Some time later, when I was moonlighting on a subbing shift at the FT, a portly crimson-faced jolly stranger tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I could sub him £20, which he would repay.

I weakened, and we spent it all later in The Cockpit and Smithfield, where, in the early-morning drizzle, I leapt into a cab. He told me (truthfully, I later learned), that he was sleeping on an Embankment bench.

The next evening he tapped me on the shoulder again to return my £20 — and that, too, found its way across the bar.

Soon afterwards, O’ Hooligan took up residence at — and sometimes under — his desk at The Daily Telegraph, where I officially moonlighted as late night editor, or dogwatch sub as it was more accurately called.

On one day off, O'Hooligan took a trip to the Forest of Dean, where he discovered a butcher making venison sausages. He bought some and told colleagues, and was soon running a profitable sideline, appearing regularly with his esky full of bangers to sell to Fleet Street’s nightshift. A small inadvertent porky led many to believe that he was making them himself.

From there, and a dispute with the now enlightened boycotting butcher, Bill’s business plan morphed into a Save Our Sausage empire, in which O’Hooligan began creating his own famous bangers. The enterprise was occasionally temporarily hijacked, amid waves of unethically released alcohol fumes by less straightforward rivals.

But none could really skin Bill.

Nor, it seems, could anyone kill the memory of his father. The Ebbo Bastard Trophy is now regularly squabbled over by KwaZulu-Natal teams.

Some time ago, I heard of a putative plan to make a TV series about another journalist of a somewhat less talented, genial, and engaging tabloid persuasion.

How much meatier would be a string of stories about the Demon Bastard of Fleet Street...

© Pat Prentice

11 December 2024