The Style Counsel: How high-end tailor built an international team of pandemic heroes
IN DEMAND: Gill Long at the original premises of Cock of the Walk in Grimston Street
Chewing the Fat, out to lunch with Phil Ascough
This month’s guest: Gill Long
If you were telling the story as a film you might open with the sheer brutality of people dying, as doctors and nurses are overwhelmed by the failings of their PPE as they try to cope with the rising numbers of patients being wheeled through the doors.
Or you might start with the care home workers clad in bin bags as they’re forced to welcome yet more residents just released untested from Covid-ravaged hospitals.
For a more placid introduction you could show some nice footage of Gill Long at her workshop in Hull, the Master Tailor running her fingers across fine Savile Row fabric, measuring, cutting, pinning and sewing as she turned out wonderful garments for race days, weddings, fancy days out, even funerals.
All the things we couldn’t do as the pandemic swept across the world five years ago.
With customers of Cock of the Walk tailors unable to attend for fittings at Gill’s tiny premises in Grimston Street, normal work stopped as well, so she pivoted to making PPE. Eventually.
Her story is staggering but also stuttering, because even after all this time she is unable to open up fully on the obstacles placed in her way and, as the Covid inquiry meanders along, she declines to speculate on what might have triggered the blockages.
‘WE’RE A TIGHT-KNIT BUNCH’: From left, Tarquin, Darren Whitcombe, Gill Long, Calvin Dreher, Amirali Mohammadi, Saeed Rajab and Zohre Taheri
“When the Prime Minister said people had to work from home our customers had already stopped coming in,” Gill recalled.
“We had no idea how long it would last and I didn’t know what to do, because I had an extremely highly skilled workforce and we are a tight-knit bunch who all work closely together.
“We could not bear to watch people on the news wearing bin bags when we knew we were able to help. I set about seeing what we could do. I wasn’t trying to get any paid work. We were just trying to help and all of my team were happy with that. We set ourselves two goals: don’t lose any staff and keep our reputation high.”
Repeated attempts to find a way through the mechanisms of the Department of Health and Social Care came to nothing until a discussion between local business leaders and MPs Emma Hardy and Diana Johnson provided a breakthrough.
Gill had told me of her plight and I dropped it into the conversation, back in the days when most of us were new to Zoom and Teams, as the Hull and Humber Chamber of Commerce brought together HullBID and prominent chamber members.
When the two MPs asked about the impact of the pandemic on local businesses, I put them in touch with Cock of the Walk.
Gill recalled: “I’d almost given up by then and it was a last-ditch plea. I wrote to the MPs to get everything off my chest. I told them what had happened and how frustrated we were.
“I just laid out who we are and what we could do, with a shop that was isolated, easy to run in a safe manner and staff with extremely valuable skills. Diana replied within about half an hour and asked if it would be OK to pass my message to her contact at Hull Royal Infirmary.”
A contact at the hospitals told Gill they needed surgical gowns. He took one to show her, he asked if she could make them, and in a game-changing moment he handed over some sterilised material.
But that still wasn’t enough. Incredibly, when Gill went on a government website to check the spec for the gowns she found it had been taken down, but again she came up with a solution.
“Luckily we were able to work backwards from the gown brought to us,” said Gill,
“We created a pattern, made some samples and they went to the hospital for testing. Were they sterile? Functional? Would they fit the people using them? After about four days of testing we heard from one of our customers who works there that it was going well.”
VITAL CONTRIBUTION: The Cock of the Walk team made almost 4,000 PPE gowns
Gill’s team also set to work adapting the design. She said: “The view was that the disease came at you from the front, so we changed them to fasten at the back.”
As more people were forced to stop working, Gill was able to build her team: “We drafted in other people. People who knew what we needed and wanted to help. There were some we didn’t know so we sent them test samples to work on and they did fine.
“Hull College helped by getting their fashion tutors to do the cutting because they had big tables not being used. We also had people from East Riding College. Everything had to be hand-cut because there was a risk using machines would have melted the material.”
Local businesses NAtelier in Hessle Road and E K Stitch in Cottingham Road also stepped up and in total the Cock of the Walk team turned out nearly 2,000 gowns for the hospital and another 1,000 for dentists who contacted Gill as their surgeries started to open up again.
But that was just the tip of the iceberg. When it became clear that major population centres were likely to have first call on any supplies of PPE coming into the country, the NHS hatched a plan to take over four factories in the North that had gone out of business, and step up manufacturing.
Gill said: “They were producing to our specification which we provided free because we didn’t think anybody should be cashing in on it. We weren’t thinking of money or anything like that. We were just providing an essential service.”
So no multi-million-pound yacht for Gill, just letters of thanks from the hospital, MPs, care homes, doctors and dentists for making PPE that worked. The project finished just as Gill was given permission to open Cock of the Walk again, with restrictions in place.
She said: “We struggled to get ready because the shop was full of PPE but we opened just about on time.”
Over the years, Cock of the Walk has gone back to business as usual, making garments for Kings Counsels, MPs, Trinity House Brethren, High Sheriffs and regular men and women from all walks of life.
She said: “It’s’ so varied. We have clients all over the place and we go to London once a month stealing customers from Savile Row and promoting Hull.”
A move to new premises in Parliament Street, fitted out by Gill’s joiner partner Darren Whitcombe, enabled the business to close the workshop in Posterngate taken on to provide more space for her team, which increased at a rate of about one a year and now stands at ten plus Tarquin the terrier.
They come from Poland, Latvia, Spain, Korea, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Germany and they bring the specialist skills that are hard to find in the UK.
‘WE TESTED OURSELVES AND PASSED’: Gill Long at Cock of the Walk in Parliament Street
“We don’t really have any difficulties finding staff because we know where to look,” said Gill.
“If we need someone we normally ask our existing staff who they know. There’s not an abundance of tailors in Hull sitting around waiting for someone to give them a job. It’s not a skill that is taught to the level we need.
“We have good contacts with the Refugee Council and they tell us they have a lot of qualified tailors coming into the country. The Hazara people are from Iran and Afghanistan and there are only certain jobs they are allowed to do in their home countries. Usually the dirty, hard-working horrible jobs.
“Tailoring is hard work. What we turn out is high-end but where they come from they were working regular 16 or 17-hour days. One of ours started at the age of eight and when he was learning he had his fingers broken for making a mistake. The garment industry is not a great one to work in. It can be a sweat shop, but not here.”
It’s not lost on Gill that the superhuman effort came from a team of people who had little command of English but who communicated expertly using the language of tailoring.
She said: “None of our team were British and they had no understanding of what this meant to us but they piled in and helped us get through it. We all understood what needed to be done because we are a very close team.
“I think I had a different pandemic to a lot of people. I thrived in it. I enjoyed the challenge of having daily regulations and trying to interpret them and communicate them to the team. The birds were singing. It was lovely weather. We tested ourselves and passed.”