The Pearly King of Peckham Left Behind a Living Legacy

George Major was a walking contradiction. He was a charming rascal who spoke in a nearly impenetrable mix of Cockney rhyming slang and backspeak. He was a plumber and small business owner who got caught up in benefits fraud. Yet he was also a cultural ambassador for a vanishing tradition, someone whose sequin-covered suits and irreverent wit made him one of London’s most recognizable figures.

When I first interviewed Major in 2016, I could barely understand a word he said. “The costermongers, wheeze used to fly-pitch, on this frog and toad,” he explained at one point, gesturing down the street. It took me a decade to figure out he was talking about street hawkers who sold unlicensed goods on the road. At the time, I just smiled and nodded, glancing helplessly at the camera.

From Orphan to Icon

Major’s journey shaped his character long before he became the Pearly King of Peckham. Born in 1938 inside a military barracks in southeast London, he was abandoned as a child and grew up in a workhouse. His early life offered few advantages, but it planted seeds of resilience and ingenuity that would define him.

He started as a teenager doing odd jobs in local markets, eventually becoming a costermonger himself, running market stalls like the street hawkers who inspired the tradition he’d later embody. The pearly kings and queens tradition itself traces back to 1870, when an orphaned street sweeper named Henry Croft decorated his suit with mother-of-pearl buttons scavenged from outside textile factories. That act of defiance, transforming menial work into dignity through shimmering finery, became a working-class institution.

Major followed Croft’s ideals. His daughter Janet recalls childhood weekends when all seven children would walk door-to-door in matching pearly suits, asking for charity donations. “It was not an easy childhood, but he followed the ideals of Henry Croft,” Janet says. “That was before the welfare state, when you had to help your friends, your neighbors, your community.”

A Culture in Decline

Today, pearly kings and queens are increasingly rare. These dedicated charity fundraisers still march in news parades and appear at summer street festivals, but their numbers dwindle each year. Major’s passing on August 1 at age 88 marks the end of an era, though his legacy lives on through his sprawling family and the Cockney Museum he founded.

The pearlies inspired fictional characters, most famously Bert the chimney sweep in Walt Disney’s “Mary Poppins.” Some believe Major himself inspired Del Boy from the British sitcom “Only Fools and Horses,” the lovable huckster always scheming to get rich quick. That comparison feels apt. Major did plead guilty to benefits fraud in 2012 and served six months in prison, released early. His daughter laughs about it now: “If he could avoid the tax man, he would! He used to say, ‘Discount for cash!’”

Yet his notoriety never overshadowed his genuine cultural significance. Major was one of dozens of pearly royals who marched in the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony, a moment that cemented his place in contemporary London’s identity.

Understanding the Code

Cockney rhyming slang likely originated as a code to confuse police or rig prices among street vendors. Words like “frog and toad” (road), “porky pies” (lies), and “apples and pears” (stairs) formed a linguistic barrier between insiders and outsiders. Major added another layer with backspeak, spelling words backwards, making his speech nearly impenetrable to outsiders.

At his funeral in September, I finally understood what Major had been telling me. His pearly suit designs conveyed profound symbolism: straight lines represented life itself, triangles showed life’s ups and downs, and flowers symbolized the friends and family who help along the way. His great-granddaughter Aleisha pointed out these patterns on her own suit, keeping the tradition alive.

The funeral itself was quintessentially Major: horse-drawn carts, pub songs, can-can dancing, and mourners celebrating a “real rascal” and “the most hilarious person” they’d known. They toasted with pints of pig’s ear, as Cockneys call beer. In the end, Major’s ability to make people laugh while preserving something sacred made him unforgettable.

Source: NPR

When an entire culture can be contained in one person’s sequined jacket, what happens when that person is gone?