This year Henry Poole & Co is proud to celebrate the firm’s 170th anniversary on Savile Row. To mark this achievement, Poole’s have collaborated with historic Yorkshire cloth mill Hunt & Winterbotham to produce an exclusive ‘Four Seasons’ bunch. The names Hunt & Winterbotham were first united in the 1860s when the Prince of Wales first became a customer of Henry Poole. The Henry Poole 170th Anniversary Bunch is specially chosen to give our customers a full range of cloth weights from which to order a City suit, sport jacket, top coat or tweeds.
Henry Poole & Co is the founding father of the bespoke tailoring trade on Savile Row. Established by military tailor James Poole in 1806, the firm’s fortunes were made during the Napoleonic Wars. James’s charismatic son, Henry Poole, inherited the company in 1846 and was the first bespoke tailor to open grand new premises with an entrance onto Savile Row. The patronage of the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) made Poole’s of Savile Row a magnet for the crowned heads of Europe. Henry’s friend the Emperor Napoleon III awarded Poole’s its first Royal Warrant in 1858. The house would go on to earn over forty royal warrants by appointment to the Emperors of Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Prussia, Japan and Ethiopia as well as the Kings of Spain, Denmark, Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria.
By 1890, Henry Poole & Co was the larges bespoke tailor in the world employing over 300 tailors and cutters in premises on and around the Row. Poole’s holds the record for dressing British Prime Ministers Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Rosebery, Lord Salisbury, H. H. Asquith and Winston Churchill. Less well known are Poole’s services to literary and artistic greats such as Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope. Sir Henry Irving, Bram Stoker, Count Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Serge Diaghilev. In the first half of the 20th century, Poole’s tailored suits for men who made world history including General de Gaulle, J. P. Morgan, William Randolph Hearst, Buffalo Bill and Lord Astor. The firm has served every British monarch from Queen Victoria to Queen Elizabeth II. Today, Poole’s tradition of bespoke tailoring is continued by chairman Angus Cundey and his son, managing director Simon.
