The three tailors of Tooley Street

Canning says that three tailors of Tooley Street, Southwark, addressed a petition of grievances to the House of Commons, beginning Nine tailors make a man. The present scope of this expression is that a tailor is so much more feeble than another man that it would take nine of them to make a man of average stature and strength. There is a tradition that an orphan lad, in 1742, applied to a fashionable London tailor for alms. There were nine journeymen in the establishment, each of whom contributed something to set the little orphan up with a fruit barrow. The little merchant in time became rich, and adopted for his motto,