A Pearly Harvest Festival Knees-Up!

On Saturday 29th September I travelled into London to watch the Costermonger's Harvest Festival event - better known to most as the 'Pearlies Harvest Festival'. It took place at he Guildhall in the City of London and was attended by mayors, mayoresses, sheriffs and other important people - including Pearly royalty.

The story of the Pearlies goes back to one Henry Croft (1861-1930). Crodt was born into poverty and became a road-sweeper at the age of 15. He got to know several costermongers (people who sold goods from barrows) and became fascinated by their ‘flash boy’ outfits - a row of pearl buttons, each the size of a penny, sewn to their outside trouser seams from the ankle to the knee, with more pearl buttons on the flaps of their waistcoat and coat pockets, and the front of their caps. Henry decided to go one better and made a suit totally covered in pearl buttons, and he wore it while collecting pennies and halfpennies to help out the children in the orphanage where he had been raised. He and his suit became a great attraction, and he was approached by hospitals, churches and other organisations to collect for the poor. Eventually he had more requests for help than he could cope with so he approached his coster friends to help him with his charity work. They adopted the same style of costume, and so the Pearly monarchy and its tradition of raising money for charity began. When Henry died, in 1930, 400 Pearly Kings and Queens attended his funeral. You can read more about the Pearlies here: https://pearlysociety.org.uk/

More on the Chelsea Pensioners here: https://chelsea-pensioners.co.uk/
And on the Rock Choir: https://rockchoir.com/
And on the Hammersmith Morris: https://www.hammersmithmorris.org.uk/

Huge thanks to the Saturday Morning Folklore Club for organising my visit to the event. You can find them here: https://www.meetup.com/saturday-morni...

That's it for this time. Toodle pip!