A look back at the life of London’s Pearly King of Peckham: NPR

LONDON – He was one of my most memorable interviews. Even though we both spoke English, I could barely understand a word he was saying.

“The costermongers, wheeze used to fly, on this frog and fashion,” he said – at least I think, after listening to my tape a few times again, none the wiser.

Our interview was back in 2016, on one of my first NPR reporting trips to London. George Major, then 78, was a local celebrity. We walked together through the East End, where the factories and docklands that Major grew up around during World War II gave way to glass skyscrapers. A salesman ran into the street to high-five him. Tourists took pictures.

Major showed up in bling: A black suit and flat cap, both decorated with sequins, sparkles and mother-of-pearl buttons. His title – Pearly King of Peckham – was written in shiny buttons across the back of his jacket.

He was a charming wheeler dealer. But his language – a mixture of what he called “backspeak” and Cockney rhyming slang – was impossible for this unfortunate American visitor to understand.

At one point in our video interview, I looked at the camera and exclaimed, “We might need a translator here!”

Ten years later, I smile when I land at Heathrow Airport, where a portrait of the Major covers an entire wall. But this summer a former colleague alerted me to an article in the local press that hit me harder than I expected: The Pearly King of Peckham died on August 1, aged 88.

He was buried on September 14 in a cemetery not far from the Cockney Museum he founded A horse-drawn carriage carried his coffin to a small chapel, whose walls shook with mourners singing raucous folk songs. One of the gardeners outside looked bewildered.

At the cemetery, I approached Major’s family, offered my condolences, and hesitantly shared the story of my brief, confusing 2016 encounter with their loved one.

A horde of pearl kings, queens, princes and princesses—four generations of the Major family, all in matching pearl costumes—turned and watched, some through tears, then threw back their heads and smiled.

“A real cockney cheeky chappy!” his daughter Janet Major said, hugging me.

Who are the Pearly Royals?

In the 1870s, an orphaned street worker named Henry Croft began decorating his suit with mother-of-pearl buttons scavenged from the streets outside textile factories that once dotted London’s East End.

His pearl dressing infused menial work with dignity—a royal air, even—and launched what would become a working-class East London institution: pearly kings and queens.

“These pearl costumes are now cultural artifacts with fantastic designs that tell a deep story about London and Cockneys, what we call non-posh Londoners,” says Andy Green, co-founder of the Modern Cockney Festival, an annual celebration of various working-class communities in London.

Some of the so-called pearls were street vendors, market vendors or fly-pitchers – unlicensed traders. Others rode for charity. Many were immigrants, their slang peppered with words from Yiddish or Bengali. They became neighborhood fixtures, and mother of pearl.

“You had what are called costermongers, which is a fancy word for street vendors, street vendors,” Green says. “Imagine you’re a new immigrant in the country. One of the first jobs you can do is to hustle, selling goods on the street.”

That’s what George Major did. Born in 1938 in a military barracks in Peckham, south-east London, he was abandoned as a child, grew up in a workhouse, and found odd jobs in the local market as a teenager, explains his daughter Janet.

“Dad eventually became one of the Kostermonger kings who used to run market stalls,” she says. “It wasn’t an easy childhood, but he followed the ideals of Henry Croft. That was before the welfare state, where you had to help your friends, your neighbors, your community.”

Janet Major describes the weekends of her childhood, with her father leading all seven of his children walking door to door in matching beaded costumes to ask for money for charity.

Nowadays there are still fewer and fewer pearls Canvass for charity such as children’s hospitals, women’s shelters and veterans’ groups. They appear at summer street festivals and march in parades.

George Major later trained as a plumber and ran a plumbing supply business, she says.

The gems in pop culture

On screen, the pearls inspired the streetwise, heart-of-gold fireplace character of Bert in Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins Film – played by Dick Van Dyke, an American who later up to what he called “the most atrocious Cockney accent in the history of cinema.”

The Major family and others believe that George Major himself inspired another fictional character: Part Boythe happy-go-lucky East London huckster in the long-running British sitcom Only fools and horses. He is a cheeky salesman, always scheming to get rich quick, with the statement, “This time next year we’ll be millionaires!”

At his funeral, the Major’s eulogy was punctuated with Del Boy quotes.

But like the TV protagonist, Major also broke the law. In 2012, he was sentenced to six months in prison, after pleaded guilty to benefit fraud. He was released early.

“If he could avoid the tax man, he would!” his daughter laughs. “He said, ‘Discount for cash!’ He would like a bargain.”

His fame overshadowed his legal troubles. Major was one of Dozens of Pearly Royals who marched in the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games.

What does the nickname Cockney mean?

Years later, I finally found out what the Major meant in 2016 when he told me he was a “costermonger” (street hawker) who used to “fly-pitch” (sell things without a license) at the “Frog and Toad” where we did our interview.

In Cockney rhyming slang, “frog and toad” means road. “Porky Pies” means lies. “Apples and pears” means stairs. “Flute and Flute” means costume. “Ruby Murray” means Curry. The vocabulary is extensive, and confusing for foreigners – that’s exactly the point. Green, the Cockney expert, says this type of slang probably originated as code to confuse the police, or to secretly rig prices among street vendors.

To complicate matters, the major also spoke in what he called “backspeak”, sometimes called backslang, which is even more confusing. An example that has crossed into mainstream British slang is the word “yob” for boy. Take any word at all, and just write it backwards.

Offer “lleweraf” to a pearly legend

One of the only parts of that 2016 interview I could understand at the time was how Major waxed poetic about his family’s unique pearl costume pattern. He pointed to a row of buttons on his sleeve, calling them “the line of life.”

Ten years later, at his funeral, I found myself examining the same pattern on a beaded outfit worn by his granddaughter.

“There’s a straight line, which is your lifeline,” said Aleisha Gordon, 19, pointing to a row of shiny buttons. “The triangles are the ups and downs in life, and the flowers are the friends and family who help you along the way.”

After the funeral, children threw handfuls of earth as George Major’s coffin was lowered into the ground. The Undertaker brought out four caged pigeons to free the Major’s descendants for heaven. The birds circled overhead twice, then disappeared.

People shared anecdotes about a “real rascal” and “the funniest person” but who was “very particular” about who made his tea. Someone turned on a boom box, and mourners began to beat their legs like the can-can, singing along to 1950s songs.

She parades out of the graveyard towards a nearby nuclear sub – what Cockneys call the pub – for a cool pint of Pig’s Ear, or King Lear.

At least that’s what the Pearly King of Peckham would have called it. Now I finally understand.