Back in the early 19th century, the way men were dressing in London was undergoing a sea change. Mr George “Beau” Brummell, a close friend of the Prince Regent, was leading the sartorial charge, and thanks to the collapse of the French silk industry following the Revolution, English tailoring found space to grow and the charm of humble wool began to take over. From there, the beginnings of Savile Row were about to take shape.

When exactly the street became known is hard to pinpoint, but it’s generally agreed that it was Henry Poole & Co that was the first tailor to open on the exalted street in 1846, after moving there from a nearby shop in Brunswick Square. Known for dressing emperors, prime ministers, tsars and princes, Henry Poole & Co has a storied history, and its customer ledgers are predictably packed with fascinating characters.

In a new book, Henry Poole & Co: The First Tailor Of Savile Row, author Mr James Sherwood worked to restore these customer ledgers, presenting a tome that charts some of the tailor’s most interesting clientele. Still, restoring over 100 years’ worth of receipts and information wasn’t easy; we asked Mr Sherwood how he went about it, what he found inside, and how Henry Poole & Co formed Savile Row as we know it today.

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It says in the book that it took a decade to restore the ledgers…

When I first encountered the Henry Poole customer ledgers they were in critical condition. There were 126 ledgers, each roughly A3 size and containing over 1,000 pages making each volume a dead weight. They had suffered water damage during WWII, black mould was eating into some editions and the leather covers were disintegrating into a red dust that was toxic to breathe in. So, as you’d imagine, the ledgers were rarely touched lest more damage was done to them or to the archivist.

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How did you go about getting them back to normal?

We called in bookbinder Mark Winstanley, who owns the Wyvern Bindery in Clerkenwell. Mark took on the project to restore and rebind the ledgers as a labour of love, and he also knew working with books dating back to 1846 would be invaluable for his apprentices. The project took 10 years because the work was labour-intensive, we weren’t in any particular hurry and it suited Poole’s and Wyvern Bindery to budget for a number of ledgers every year. As the books came back to 15 Savile Row, I started the task of going through each thousand-page ledger looking for the names of men and women who had made history. There were plenty of names – military heroes, US industrialists, international politicians – that I had to look up in the London Library to supplement my knowledge, and that took time.

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How did you decide who to include or exclude in the book?

In the ledgers, I discovered about 500 names of men and women who significantly changed history. Editing the list down to 60, I wanted to reflect the global reach of Henry Poole & Co in the 19th and 20th centuries so we included Russian, German and Japanese emperors, US presidents, Indian maharajas and European statesmen. Some characters were included because their stories are so fascinating – Lucius Beebe, Prince Victor Duleep Singh and Buffalo Bill – and some because they contain a pinch of scandal, hence Prince Rudolf of Austria, Prince Albert Victor, Catherine Walters and Stephen Ward.

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What was it that attracted such a cohort of fascinating and successful men to come to Henry Poole & Co for their tailoring?

Before the movie boom in the 1920s, royal men led fashion and none more so than the Prince of Wales (King Edward VII), a Poole’s customer since the early 1860s. Whenever there was a coronation, wedding, funeral or christening connected to the British royals, the extended European and Russian family would pour into London and, I believe, a visit to Henry Poole & Co was up there with Cowes Week and the Royal Opera House on their social calendar. A lot of the American millionaires – the Vanderbilts, Astors and Goelets – also came to Poole’s because it was the Prince of Wales’ tailor.

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Is a tailor defined by his customer?

For a bespoke tailor, the customer is his best advertisement, so on that level alone the tailor’s skill is defined by how well a man looks in his suit. Then again, nobody could call Winston Churchill a fashion plate and yet the fact that he was a Henry Poole & Co customer reflects more glory on the firm than all the five other British Prime Ministers we dressed put together. To my knowledge, no other bespoke tailor in the world was awarded over 40 royal warrants, and now that the era of kings and emperors is in twilight I don’t imagine they ever will. This kind of history is gold dust for bespoke tailors.

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Would Savile Row exist as it does today without Henry Poole & Co?

Henry Poole & Co was the first tailor on Savile Row and I suspect it will be the last to leave, though I hope this does not happen in my lifetime. As I say in the book, our chairman Angus Cundey’s grandfather Howard Cundey was the first father of bespoke tailoring in the 19th and early 20th centuries and I think Poole’s still has that reputation in the trade today. Poole’s is a bellwether of British bespoke and also the oldest – if not the only – bespoke tailor on the Row still owned by descendants of the founding family. That said, the company survived off the Row between 1961 and 1982. But I do think the Savile Row without Henry Poole & Co would be like The Mall with no Buckingham Palace at the top of it.

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Henry Poole & Co: The First Tailor Of Savile Row, published by Thames & Hudson, is out now