Profile | Tailor went from sewing pants at 13 to dressing Princess Diana, Hollywood stars on Savile Row – ‘I’m living my dream,’ says Andrew Ramroop
- When Andrew Ramroop was nine, he cut up a pillowcase and sewed it into pyjamas. At 17 the Trinidadian sailed to the UK to study at the London College of Fashion
- Today, he is a master tailor on London’s Savile Row and teaches around the world. He speaks to Kate Whitehead about how he came to be in Hong Kong
I was born in Trinidad in 1952. I come from the foothills of the northern range mountains, near Tunapuna, where my father had dug into the side of the hill to build a one-room house using slabs of tree trunk. It was squatting land, it was all my parents could afford.
It was a very humble life, but it was idyllic – on one side was a stream and the other side was a river. There were six houses on the hill, but you couldn’t see our nearest neighbour for all the trees.
I have three brothers and a sister, I’m the second to last. We had a great time growing up on the hills and learned to swim in the river at a young age.
My mum washed clothes in the nearby stream, beat them on the rocks and hung them to dry. Daddy cycled a 26-mile (42 kilometres) return trip every day to a guest house where he worked as a gardener, barman and cleaner and had a stall selling fruits, vegetables and confectionery.
Pyjamas from pillowcases
To get educated, you had to be baptised because the school was run by Christian missionaries from Canada. I was the first person in my family to be baptised into the Presbyterian Church.