The Sausage King by Laurie Graham

 

Had you been living in London in the late 19^th century William Harris’s little red carts would have been a familiar sight. Drawn by Shetland ponies, they delivered Harris’s famous sausages throughout the metropolis.

Harris, the self-styled Sausage King, started his working life as a butcher’s boy in Woolwich, but soon set up on his own account with a sausage stall in Old Newgate market. By all accounts his sausages were very good, but his greatest talent was for self-promotion. He experimented with recipes and listened to the opinions of his customers. He wrote his own advertising copy. When sun bonnets for horses came into fashion, he provided his ponies with little parasols. And on the basis that there is no such thing as bad publicity, he enjoyed his frequent brushes with the law and his court appearances.

Harris’s retail business expanded as far afield as Brighton and Southend, with a sideline in restaurants (standing room only) offering what was then a novel dish, Sausage & Mash. In Portsmouth he negotiated a contract to supply the Navy. His was a big success story, but his personal reputation was mixed. He was known for his Christmas-tide generosity, giving packs of sausages to firemen and policemen in any of the cities where he had shops. As a family man he was arguably less loveable.

 His sons were all named after him and numbered, Williams 1,2 and 3, to distinguish them. Similarly his daughters were all named Elizabeth. He was a domineering father who kept his sons out of school so they could learn the trade. When the School Board summoned him and the case was reported in the press, he paid the fine cheerfully. It was, he said, cheap advertising and worth every penny.

I first became aware of William Harris’s story when I moved to Smithfield in EC1 and started taking my morning coffee just by the junction of St John’s Street and Cowcross Street. On the gable end of a building, I noticed Harris’s name and a bas relief of a wild boar.

In 1897 Harris acquired a building lease for the site and constructed the building that now houses an unlovely Pret frontage. That building became the home of Harris’s large family and of his flagship store. There, ever the showman, dressed always in a swallowtail coat, white tie, diamond shirt stud and silk opera hat, he made and sold his celebrated sausages. And there he died in 1912, finished off by a bout of bronchitis. Such was his fame that his death was reported around the world and the business, under the gaze of that wild boar, continued until the 1950s.