THE BIG INTERVIEW


“I was lucky I found at a young age what I wanted


to do for a career,” Andrew says. That age is a vague, single digit one, when a boy with the name of Madan living in a village in Tunapuna, Trinidad, began to let his playmates climb trees without him, as he preferred using “rusty old scissors” to cut clothes out of newspapers. “My nickname was ‘Madman’, so they would say, ‘Madman, what are you doing?’ I would say, ‘I am making myself clothes’.” He describes his family’s circumstances as “very


humble”. His father worked as a gardener, barman, cleaner, car park attendant and charcoal maker – “everything to make ends meet”. His mother cooked for the wealthy and got paid in food rather than money so she could better feed her five children. Habits of self-discipline and saving were inculcated by a father who “didn’t spare the rod” and a job at age nine, delivering fresh bread on his bike before school. Andrew left behind newspaper clothes for ever when he fashioned his first pair of real trousers from his mother’s pillowcase. Eventually, and not without some difficulty, Andrew managed to persuade his parents to let him work under a village tailor. At 14, having successfully avoided going to senior school, he was making trousers for the men of the village as well as fellow schoolchildren and earning 45 cents a pair. When Andrew then asked his boss – who was himself making $5 for each of Andrew’s trousers – to teach him to make jackets, his request was refused, and his boss further threatened, “I will see to it that no one [in the


Andrew was able to convince his boss that he needed to be present at fittings to see if they could be improved


village] takes you.” A period of enforced idleness ensued until, after several refusals, Andrew’s father managed to find a tailor in Port of Spain to give the teenager an apprenticeship. Within four months he was making jackets. Andrew’s employer had trained at the Tailor & Cutter Academy in Soho’s Gerrard Street and was fond of bragging about the fabulous craftsmanship he had seen on Savile Row. Not realising how ambitious and determined his apprentice was, the tailor “excited my young mind with this mysterious place where the captains of industry, the prime ministers, presidents, Hollywood stars went to have their suits made.”


A


ndrew compared himself to a young athlete hungry for glory. He had found his goal and was determined to get to Savile Row – “not to England, not to London but rather to the


street famous for the world’s best tailoring”. Making $4 a suit and three suits a week in Port of Spain and working from 7.20am when he swept the shop until 9pm most days, Andrew managed to save $1,000 in three years, which was enough to buy a return ticket to Southampton. “I had never learned geography, so I didn’t know where the heck I was going,” he says. On a late July afternoon in 1970, a 17-year old Andrew paced up and down for five hours waiting for


Andrew managed to save $1,000 in three years, which was enough to buy a return ticket to Southampton


Andrew Ramroop would go on to make several suits for Princess Diana, most famously the midnight blue cashmere jacket she wore for her 1995 Panorama interview with Martin Bashir


luxury liner the Northern Star to arrive, largely alone as “Mummy had to go home and cook”. But, at the last minute, the whole family turned up to say goodbye. “I was in pieces,” he says, though the realisation that one of the six passengers travelling with him was the world heavyweight wrestler Golden Ray Appollon must have helped divert him a little. He remembers the culture shock of arriving in the UK. “Even though I spoke English, it was a very different English. It took a little while … to understand how people speak … And then, growing up in the hills and forests, I wasn’t used to having houses joined up together. I wasn’t used to seeing smoke coming out of chimneys. It was a very, very foreign environment. But I had a focus and I had made myself two suits. I wore one [brown-checked] and carried another [green- checked with an inverted box pleat instead of a vent], and I came to Savile Row looking for a job.” That first Monday morning Madan Ramroop, as


he was still known, managed to get himself hired by Anthony Sinclair but, when a white English candidate named Richard came in just after him asking for the same position, “I was fired in about 20 minutes”. He then went to Jim Welshman who liked the double breasted that Andrew was wearing enough to call Colin Hammick. By 10.30 that same Monday morning, Andrew was working for Huntsman. But he never forgot that first morning’s firing and, many years later, Andrew took great satisfaction in buying Sinclair’s business and giving that same Richard a job working at Maurice Sedwell. At Huntsman, Andrew sewed in the workroom but


really wanted to be in the front. “I had heard of all the big names who came to Savile Row and I wanted to be a part of that. In fact there was a tradesmen’s entrance and we had to come through there. You couldn’t even walk through Savile Row. You had to walk through the back, on Heddon Street.” Andrew soon understood he needed to learn more of the Savile Row style of cutting fitting art and design, so he started saving to afford the £900-a-year fees – enough to buy a house in those days – to attend London College of Fashion, taking on an evening job making trousers and working as an alterations tailor on Saturdays amid the bright patterns and wide lapels of the King’s Road. He managed to complete the three-year course at LCF in two years and received a diploma of distinction created just for him. In 1974, he returned to the Row, looking to work


SAVILE ROW STYLE MAGAZINE 33


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