They also have their kings and queens, princes and princesses; the titles are hereditary or accessed through marriage; they proudly wear their crowns, though not of rubies; they contribute enthusiastically to charitable causes, and are divided into families (the equivalent of the Windsors, the Bourbons, the Oranges, etc.) not always well-off. But that’s where the similarity between real monarchies and pearls ends, an old tradition of cockney folk culture in London’s East End dating back to the Victorian era.
They are called so (in English pearlies ) because of the mother-of-pearl buttons with which they cover the black fabric of their historic and shiny dresses, hats and jackets, originally a mockery of the jewels worn by aristocrats, completely out of their reach. They still are somewhat today, as they are worn at horse races, christenings, weddings and funerals (they were also paraded at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics). But especially when they appear once a month in Covent Garden and other strategic points in London with their feathers and their characteristic blue plastic buckets to raise money for various charitable causes.
The origin of the Pearls, East End royalty, dates back to 1875. Henry Croft, a scavenger abandoned by his parents who grew up in an orphanage, was fascinated by the custom of 19th-century London street vendors (greengrocers, butchers , fishmongers…) of sewing buttons on shirt lapels, trouser pockets and caps. And also because of the way they helped each other, when someone got sick and couldn’t go to the market, or their fruit was damaged, or the donkey that was pulling their cart died.
One day, or so the urban legend explains, a boat ran aground in the waters of the Thames with no less than sixty thousand mother-of-pearl buttons the size of a penny coin that you know of where they came from or what their destination was, and either they were abandoned, or the good people of the East End made them their own. Croft grabbed as many as she could and with them decorated her hat, completely covered her best suit and proclaimed herself the Pearly King. So he went door to door and asked for money for hospitals and the orphanage where he had grown up.
The original dynasty of this alternative royalty, the Descendants of Croft, came to be comprised of four hundred Pearls, of whom only around fifty now remain. But there are others of less pure lineage, with branches in many neighborhoods of the city, which celebrate births, baptisms and marriages with magnificence; they bury their kings, and crown the heirs in ceremonies that are not like Charles’s the day before but which, in a much more popular way, also have their pomp. When someone dies, the mother-of-pearl buttons on their clothing are distributed among relatives and dear friends, who incorporate them into their clothing and thus always wear something of the deceased.
Cockneys speak English in their own slang and with a characteristic accent, and is a term that has historically been applied to the slum dwellers of London’s East End, the neighborhoods of Aldgate, Shoreditch, Hackney, Bow, Bethnal Green, Mile End, Limehouse, Old Ford, Stepney, Poplar, Whitechapel and Whapping. In football, his team would be West Ham, which before moving to the Olympic Stadium had the Upton Park field in the strategic heart of this district, where many Asian immigrants have recently settled and Poles Coexistence is not always harmonious. The natives complain that foreigners are taking over the officially protected apartments, taking away their children’s places in schools and saturating public services, an attitude that is a breeding ground for the advancement of the ultra-right.
The original concept was that to be truly Cockney you had to live and be born where you could hear the bells of Saint Mary le Bow Church, consumed by the Great Fire of London in 1666 and rebuilt by Christopher Wren, the architect of the cathedral of Sant Pau. But that theory has become more flexible with demographic changes and the enormous growth of the capital. If anything, they are the custodians of the Victorian tradition of the pearls, the royalty of the working classes, who also crown themselves.