George Major, the celebrated Pearly King of Peckham, died on Aug. 1 at the age of 88, leaving behind a legacy that stretched across generations of East London charity work, Cockney culture and one of the city's most distinctive sartorial traditions. He was laid to rest on Sept. 14 in a cemetery close to the Cockney Museum, an institution he himself founded to preserve the heritage he embodied.
For those unfamiliar with the tradition, Pearly Kings and Queens are London figures who dress in elaborate suits and dresses covered in mother-of-pearl buttons and sequins, and who have historically canvassed East London neighborhoods to raise money for charity. The practice grew out of working-class Cockney communities, and Major became perhaps its most famous modern representative, earning the title Pearly King of Peckham.
I first met Major in 2016, on one of my earliest reporting assignments in London for NPR. He was 78 at the time and already a local celebrity in the East End, where the factories and docklands of his World War II-era childhood had been replaced by gleaming glass towers. As we walked together through the neighborhood, a street vendor rushed out to give him a high-five, and tourists stopped to take photographs.
Major had dressed for the occasion in striking fashion: a black suit and flat cap, both heavily decorated with sequins, sparkles and mother-of-pearl buttons. Across the back of his jacket, his title — Pearly King of Peckham — was spelled out in shimmering buttons, a walking billboard for a tradition he spent decades promoting.
What made the interview genuinely unforgettable, however, was not the outfit but the language. Major spoke a dense mixture of what he called "backspeak" and Cockney rhyming slang, a dialect so impenetrable to an outside ear that I found myself struggling to transcribe even basic sentences. One phrase he uttered — about costermongers who used to "fly-pitch" on a "frog and toad" — remained a mystery to me even after replaying the tape multiple times.
At one point during our video interview, I turned to the camera and admitted, half-joking, that we might need a translator. It was a moment that captured both the charm of Cockney culture and the genuine difficulty it poses to outsiders — a difficulty that, in many ways, is the whole point of a dialect designed to be opaque to those not in the know.
Cockney rhyming slang substitutes a common word with a rhyming phrase, often dropping the rhyming part entirely, so that "frog and toad" becomes "road" and "apples and pears" becomes "stairs." Combined with Major's "backspeak" — a form of wordplay in which syllables or words are reversed — the result was a code that even a fluent English speaker could not crack.
Yet Major's importance went well beyond linguistic curiosity. Pearly Kings and Queens have long served as ambassadors for London's working-class East End, raising money for hospitals, shelters and community causes while keeping alive a culture that has been steadily displaced by gentrification and redevelopment. Major carried that mission into an era when the docklands and factories of his youth had largely vanished.
His death prompted an outpouring from family and community members. Four generations of the Major family, all dressed in matching pearly suits, gathered for his funeral, where a horse-drawn cart carried his casket into a small chapel. The walls of the chapel shook with mourners singing raucous pub songs, a send-off that felt true to the spirit of a man known as a charming wheeler-dealer.
Even those present for the burial only as bystanders seemed moved. One gardener working outside the chapel looked on in bewilderment at the spectacle, a scene that neatly captured how Major could turn an ordinary day in London into something theatrical and memorable.
At the gravesite, I approached the Major family to offer condolences and hesitantly recounted the story of my brief, confusing 2016 encounter with their loved one. A crowd of pearly kings, queens, princes and princesses turned to look at me, some through tears, before throwing back their heads and laughing — a reaction that seemed to honor both the absurdity and the affection of that long-ago interview.
Ten years after that conversation, I still chuckle every time I land at Heathrow Airport, where a portrait of Major covers an entire wall. It is a fitting tribute to a man who became a symbol of East London for visitors and locals alike, and whose image now greets travelers from around the world before they ever reach the city center.
Major's legacy is preserved not only in photographs and museum exhibits but also in the Cockney Museum he founded, a project dedicated to keeping the traditions of the East End alive for future generations. His death marks the end of an era for the Pearly King tradition, even as his family and successors continue to wear the suits and carry on the charitable work.
For a journalist, the lesson of George Major is that language is never just language. It carries history, class, geography and identity. The fact that I could not understand a word he said was not a failure of the interview but the story itself — proof that Cockney culture remains a living, defiant and gloriously complicated thing.
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