For a beano it's a fair old treat

Above: during the recent bank holiday I dropped into a concert given for charity by a Pearly King and Queen. The audience was elderly. The format was a sing-song including Maybe It's Because I'm A Londoner, the Lambeth Walk and London Pride Has Been Handed Down To Us.

Not being an extrovert I had been dreading the singsong aspect of this concert, but actually it went well. The audience really enjoyed themselves in a knees-up-mother-brown sort of way. I meant to just stay long enough to take some photographs, but was so interested I stayed until the end.

There is a Pearly King and Queen for every London borough. The tradition started in the mid-nineteenth century when a dirt poor teenage crossing sweeper began collecting the mother-of-pearl buttons he found in the gutter and sewing them on his clothes. This developed a youth fashion of the time, and young people wearing this fashion were known as "flash" (giving rise to the term Flash Harry).

Because these pearly outfits attracted attention they were adopted by costermongers (possibly as a marketing device?). In turn, the costermongers became involved in raising money for charity, and set up the network of Pearly Kings and Queens in each borough. Permission to use the royal titles was given by Queen Victoria in recognition of their charitable work.



Above: I was interested in this ad for the White Stripes as it gives an indication of how the original flash fashion would have looked.

The White Strips did this ad for Coke: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9zgT3WzTVA&feature=related



Above: unlike most youth fashions the pearly style has persisted. It is now seen as an aspect of London culture and heritage. This illustration of the Mayor of London portrays him as a Pearly King, and appeared in the Daily Mirror.

The survival of the Pearly Kings and Queens is a living link to working class culture of a hundred and fifty years ago, and reminds me of the early Underground posters portraying this vanished world - see For a beano it's a fair old treat: ://www.ltmcollection.org/posters/poster/poster.html?_IXMAXHITS_=1&IXinv=1983/4/319&IXsummary=results/results&IXsearch=hampstead&_IXFIRST_=15&IXenlarge=0157-54