Pearly Kings and Queens are London charity fundraisers who appear at events across the capital in dark suits and dresses covered — sometimes entirely — with mother-of-pearl buttons sewn into elaborate patterns. A full suit can carry 30,000 buttons and weigh over 30kg.
Henry Croft
The tradition begins with one man. Henry Croft was an orphan raised in a Somers Town workhouse who worked as a road sweeper and rat catcher in the 1870s. He collected money for the orphanage and hospitals that had helped him, and he needed to be noticed.
He took the idea from the costermongers — London’s street market traders — who had a habit of sewing rows of pearl buttons along the seams of their trousers and caps as a flash of style, and who elected “kings” among themselves to defend traders’ interests against bullying and against the police.
Croft went considerably further and covered an entire suit. It worked: he was impossible to ignore, and he raised substantial sums. When he asked the costermongers to help him, families across London took up the costume, and the pearly tradition was established.
Croft died in 1930, and around 400 pearlies attended his funeral. His memorial statue now stands in St Martin-in-the-Fields.
How it works
Titles are attached to London boroughs and districts — the Pearly King of Hackney, the Pearly Queen of Peckham, the Pearly King of Highgate — and are usually hereditary, passing down within families through generations.
Each family sews its own suits, and the designs carry meaning: hearts for charity, anchors for hope, crosses for faith, wheels for the circle of life, playing card symbols for the chances of life, and a horseshoe for luck. Some suits are “smother” suits, covered completely; others have the buttons arranged in symbolic patterns on the cloth.
What they actually do
They raise money. Pearlies appear at fêtes, festivals, charity days, church services and civic events, collecting for hospitals, hospices, children’s charities and local causes. It is unpaid, and the costume is made and maintained at the family’s own expense.
The annual Costermongers’ Harvest Festival at St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square each autumn is the big fixture, with pearlies processing with a donkey cart, maypole dancers and morris sides. It is free, well attended, and one of the more charming things in the London calendar.
Cockney
Pearlies are inseparably associated with Cockney London — the traditional working-class culture of the East End, its accent, and its rhyming slang. That world has largely dispersed, as the East End gentrified and its populations moved out to Essex and Kent, and the pearlies are one of the few visible survivals of it.
Now
There are two organisations, following a split some decades ago, and perhaps a few dozen active pearly families. Numbers are lower than they were, and continuity depends entirely on families passing the title on. They are, in the meantime, unfailingly happy to be photographed and to explain what every button means.