London's East End lost one of its most recognizable characters this summer. George Major, who held the title of Pearly King of Peckham, died on Aug. 1 at the age of 88, leaving behind a legacy that stretched from the rubble-strewn docklands of his wartime childhood to the polished floors of Heathrow Airport, where his portrait now greets arriving travelers.
Major was laid to rest on Sept. 14 in a cemetery close to the Cockney Museum he founded. The funeral procession featured a horse-drawn cart carrying his coffin to a small chapel, where the walls reportedly shook with the sound of mourners belting out raucous pub songs. Even a gardener working outside the service paused, visibly puzzled by the joyful noise emanating from within.
For those unfamiliar with the tradition, the Pearly Kings and Queens occupy a peculiar and beloved place in London's civic life. Dressed in black suits and flat caps encrusted with thousands of mother-of-pearl buttons — arranged in intricate patterns, slogans and royal crests — they once canvassed working-class neighborhoods collecting money for charity. The custom traces back to the 19th-century street traders known as costermongers, who decorated their clothing with pearl buttons so they could be spotted in a crowd.
Major embodied that history. His jacket bore the words "Pearly King of Peckham" spelled out in shimmering buttons across the back, a declaration of both identity and territory. When NPR's Lauren Frayer first met him in 2016, during one of her earliest reporting assignments in London, he was 78 and already a local celebrity. Their walk through the East End drew spontaneous attention: a street vendor dashed out of his shop to slap Major a high-five, while tourists stopped to snap photographs.
The neighborhood itself told a story of transformation. The factories and docklands where Major spent his childhood during World War II have largely vanished, replaced by glass skyscrapers and the sleek architecture of a global financial capital. Major, in his sequined suit and cap, seemed to carry an older East London with him — a place of markets, street pitches and tight-knit working communities that now exists mostly in memory.
That sense of a disappearing world extended to Major's speech. He spoke a dense blend of what he called "backspeak" and Cockney rhyming slang, a linguistic tradition in which ordinary words are replaced by rhymes — "frog and toad" for road, "apples and pears" for stairs — and then often shortened further until the connection to the original word is nearly invisible. For an American reporter, the effect was bewildering. Frayer later recalled listening to her tape of the interview multiple times and still struggling to decipher his sentences.
At one point during their filmed conversation, she glanced at the camera and joked that a translator might be needed. It was the kind of moment that could have embarrassed a less confident subject, but Major seemed delighted by the confusion. He was, by all accounts, a charming wheeler-dealer who understood that his language was part performance and part inheritance — a verbal costume as distinctive as his suit.
The encounter stayed with Frayer for a decade. She thought of Major whenever she landed at Heathrow, where a portrait of him covers an entire wall, offering visitors an unmistakable introduction to a certain strain of London character. So when a former colleague sent her a local news item this summer, the news of his death landed harder than she expected.
At the graveside, Frayer approached the Major family to offer condolences and, somewhat hesitantly, told them about her brief and confusing 2016 interview with their patriarch. The response was not awkward silence but laughter. According to her account, a crowd of pearly kings, queens, princes and princesses — four generations of Major's relatives, all dressed in matching button-covered suits — turned to look at her, some through tears, and then threw back their heads and laughed.
That moment captures something essential about the Pearly tradition. It is at once solemn and irreverent, a charitable institution and a family inheritance, a piece of living history that refuses to be mourned quietly. The title of Pearly King is not merely ceremonial; it is passed down through families and carries obligations of community service, fundraising and public visibility.
Major's decision to establish a Cockney Museum reflected his awareness that the culture he represented was under pressure. As gentrification reshapes the East End and traditional Cockney speech fades from daily use, institutions like his museum serve as archives of a way of life. His funeral, with its horse-drawn cart and singing mourners, functioned as one final act of preservation — a public ritual that introduced a new generation to customs that might otherwise slip away unnoticed.
For journalists and historians, Major was an invaluable guide. He could explain not only what rhyming slang meant but why it developed: as a coded language among market traders, a way of speaking that bonded insiders and baffled outsiders. His own love of "backspeak" added another layer, turning conversation into a puzzle that required patience and good humor to solve.
His death at 88 closes a chapter in that story. Yet the images endure — the sequined suit, the flat cap, the portrait at Heathrow, the four generations of family in matching pearly regalia. In a city that constantly rebuilds itself, George Major served as a reminder that some traditions are held together not by buildings or institutions but by the people willing to wear them in public.
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