By J.R. Breen
Contributing Writer
Gavin Mackay's longing for sausages began with a trip to Hong Kong.
``When I first came to Korea, I couldn't find British-style sausages anywhere,'' he said. ``And I didn't worry about it. Then I went to Hong Kong one time for a weekend. In the morning, we had English-style sausages. I found myself dancing around saying 'sausages, sausages, sausages.'''
Since then, Mackay, 72, and his Gavin's Sausages, a one-of-a-kind venture producing British-style pork sausages, have become something of a legend.
Mackay is coming up to his ninth year in business. He has a permanent shop in the Shinsegae Department Store in Seoul and supplies six hotels.
Every Thursday, he has a stand selling sausages at Seoul Foreign School, where he often sells up to 700 of his sausages on a stick or hot-dogs. ``The kids have envelopes with money for 'sausage day,' they just thrust them at you, and you have to check how much is inside to see what they want,'' he said.
But there is more to the man than pork sausages. Mackay also has a reputation for his promotion of Scottish dancing in Korea.
The St. Andrew's Society, a social group run by Scottish expatriates, holds three annual events, Burn's Supper, the St. Andrews Ball, and a creation of Mackay's the Muckleshunter ― a combination of the Gaelic words muckle meaning great and shunter meaning to dance.
Mackay said his Muckleshunter, which takes place on May 1, was born one night over a bottle of whisky.
``We were talking about doing another event, we had heard of an event in Hong Kong called Mucklechunter (chunter is Gaelic for talk). The whisky was out and we carried on talking,'' Mackay said. ``The next morning everyone woke up with a hangover and said, 'what did we call it,' I said 'I think we called it Muckleshunter.'''
Mackay also organizes a yearly ``mini-ball'' at the Seoul British Foreign School, which takes place at midday, and includes dancing and lunch ― rather than the all-night excursions that are the adult balls.
These ``all-nighters'' began because at the time of the first balls, there was a curfew in place, where everyone had to be in doors between 12 p.m. and 4 a.m., said Mackay.
``There was no way we could have a ball and finish by 12,'' Mackay said. ``So we said we will go through the night and have breakfast at 4 a.m.''
Mackay and his wife Maria are notable in the British community for both having received the Member of the British Empire award from the Queen for their services to Britain overseas.
Originally from the Scottish capital of Edinburgh, Mackay came to Korea in 1984 with a British defence electronics company.
After his Hong Kong experience, he made several sausage trips. When the outlet closed, he decided to produce his own.
``In 1989, I kicked off with the 1.5 pound sausage gun,'' Mackay said. ``It was just a little hand-held thing, by the end of making one sausage your wrist had had it.''
Mackay upgraded to a 6.5lb machine obtained from a visiting Scottish musician, also a butcher turned entrepreneur.
``On the weekends, I would just make as much as I could, I used to make 80-90 pounds, about 700 sausages,'' he said. He sold them at events of the St. Andrew's Society, a social organization of Scots expatriates.
``By this time I had been through about 16/17 different seasonings and I had hit the right one, which I'm still using now.''
In 2003, Mackay opened a restaurant at the location of his sausage shop, which served British style pub-food. He closed this in 2006, due to, amongst other reasons, ``working until 2 a.m. and drinking beer is not a healthy thing to do.''
Mackay often caters for events, such as international touch rugby tournaments. The next event on his calendar is the visit by British Korean War veterans, coming up in April, an experience Mackay spoke positively about.
``It is nice to see these guys bemused when they come back, seeing some Scottish guy selling sausages in the Korean economy, because this could have been communist like the north,'' he said.
Mackay, himself a former lieutenant colonel in the British army, served with the Royal Corps of Signals, and was stationed in Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the U.K.