No 1 Savile Row, London
The New Yorker magazine reported many years ago that when Charles Laughton set about playing the role of William Bligh in The Mutiny on the Bounty, he first made his way to Gieves and Hawkes, the great London military outfitters. "Do you have a record of a uniform you made for a certain Lieutenant William Bligh?" he asked. "No doubt, sir," a veteran of the firm replied, "about when would that have been?" "In the first half of the 1780s," Laughton said. Unperturbed, the employee disappeared into the recesses of the store, soon to emerge with a large and dusty order book. Opened to the appropriate page, it showed the order and gave the specifications in detail. Laughton had the uniform reproduced to his capacious corpus.