The Times: Tailor to the generals wins the battle with Savile Row

A St Albans firm making officers' uniforms has 'seen off the biggest West End names'.

GEOFFREY GOLDING, grandson of East End Jewish Russian immigrants, is Britain's biggest military tailor by a mile. He makes officers' uniforms for 50 of the Army's regiments and corps.

In 20 years he has dressed thousands of officers, including bright-eyed second lieutenants graduating from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, right up to generals and field marshals. He also makes immaculate bespoke suits, a point underlined this year when his company was awarded the royal warrant for services to the Royal Family.

But you will not find G D Golding (Tailors) in the London telephone directory. Walk up and down Savile Row you will search in vain for the company name because Golding, aged 57, has achieved all this from the business he established unaided as a 19-year-old in an unfashionable shopping street in St Albans, Hertfordshire.

Even today the floodlit royal coat of arms mounted above his shop casts its light across the road on to a greengrocer's, a fish and chip shop and a knife grinder. Golding spurns the idea of moving his shop and workshop and transporting his workforce of 25 to an upmarket London location.

"I am enormously proud of what we have achieved here," he says. "As a military tailor we have seen off the biggest West End names, leaving them poor seconds and thirds, and we don't bend the knee to any of them on the civilian side, either. I regard myself as the Gainsborough of classical British tailoring and that's not an empty boast - I'll put my suits up against Savile Row suits any time."

But he admits that his break-through moment came the day he began his advance into the regimental ranks.

Golding says the story began when he was eight 'That's when I started saving for my own business. My father, a bit of a gambler, had fallen out with some hard cases in the East End, moved to St Albans, married, and became an alterations tailor working from a two-up and two-down terraced house.

"We were a family of four, poor, with lino on the floor and a bath hanging on a hook on the wall outside. But many of my father's customers were well-off and when I saw carpet on their floor that's what I wanted too."

That childhood dream began a quest to make his mark in life.

Young Geoffrey made money by chopping and selling firewood. He traded stamps, worked on a fruit and veg market stall and did paper rounds years ahead of the legal age for such employment."

Education was never going to be my escape route," he says. "I left school with no qualifications because I was dyslexic, at a time when you were either 'bright' or 'thick'. But I had saved hard and at 15 I had £2,500 in the bank - perhaps £20,000 in today's terms."

The future was always going to be tailoring. Golding cut and sewed alongside his father and then on his own account. He was making suits for adults at 16.

He got jobs with bespoke tailors locally and then in Savile Row, where he first became aware that tailors also made uniforms.

"I opened my shop at Christmas 1963 and within a year I had two apprentices. I had rivals, but none of them was thinking big. I advertised my alterations and repairs in newspapers for 30 miles around and got responses from all over. I converted them into customers for suits, dinner jackets and so on, and I was on my way."

But it took Golding 15 years to gain that first official regimental appointment: "I offered quality, I was persistent, but the Army was rooted in tradition. Companies like Gieves & Hawkes were entrenched as official tailors. Then in 1978 I phoned the Household Cavalry, the creme de la creme of the regiments, and for once the drawbridge wasn't up.

"I was invited to attend that afternoon at Horse Guards to see the regimental adjutant. By a tremendous piece of luck, he was an officer I knew. He had once had a problem with a uniform made by another tailor and I had sorted it out for him. The ice was broken straight away."

The out-of-town tailor was in the right place at exactly the right moment: the adjutant had just had a spat over quality of work with an existing supplier. Supported by a recommendation from the regiment's Master Tailor, Golding joined the Household Cavalry's list of appointed tailors that afternoon.

"I celebrated," he remembers. "I knew if my uniforms were good enough for the Household Cavalry, they were good enough for everybody."

It still took time to win the other regiments round. "But I believe that if you bang your head against a brick wall long enough the wall will come down," he says. And it did, although the firm had to fight Savile Row for business, regiment by regiment, and still has to battle fiercely to hold on to it.

Golding leads his troops over the top every day, measuring and fitting many clients himself at their workplaces, or in St Albans, or at his second shop in Camberley, Surrey, opposite the gates to Sandhurst.

Complacency would be fatal, he says. 'There are tailors who try to undercut us, to sneak in under the wire." But he believes experience is on his side. "We have a massive reputation with the regiments, and the Royall Navy and RAF," he says. "We have become custodians of military tailoring tradition, right down to the smallest button or piece of braid.

"In our workshop we have gathered historical detail which, I suspect, cannot be found in any book on uniform or regalia. There are so many unwritten rules of dress known only to military tailors and nobody else."

Army business has boosted sales of his suits. "When senior officers go into civilian life, when they move into the boardroom alongside the captains of industry, they take us with them," he says.

'That phone call to the Household Cavalry won us a national reputation that helped to bring us the royal warrant this year."

This article reproduced with our gratitude to The Times Newspaper