Walking, talking, liv

Long before Derek Trotter strode Sarf London in a flashy whistle and a cloud of Brut, another geezer had a cushty number scamming punters down Peckham market.

George Major had a Reliant Regal too and, just like Del Boy, dreamed big.

Not that he’d be a millionaire this time next year, but that he would one day build a cathedral to East End culture.

And, would you Adam & Eve it, he’s finally achieved his Custard cream.

“It’s taken 63 years and all me bees ’n’ honey, but I got there in the end,” beams George, showing me round his newly opened Cockney Museum.

“It felt like my destiny to keep our language and culture alive and to remember all the great characters.”

George Major, 82, the Pearly King of Peckham, is one of those characters.

Since his coronation at 20 he has raised a small fortune for charity, dedicated his life to passing on Pearly philosophy and amassed a huge collection of historic memorabilia.

And since lockdown George has been all on his Tod putting the finishing touches to his museum.

But, when I get on the dog and bone to arrange having a butcher’s, I’m surprised to hear it isn’t in Bow or dahn the Old

Kent Road.

It’s in a storage unit in... Epsom, Surrey.

“Well, I couldn’t afford the Duke of Kent for any venues in London and I’ve owned this place for years,” George explains. “But all the visitors so far have been delighted. Soon this will be all that’s left. Cockney land is already dead and rhyming slang is being replaced by estuary English and multicultural London lingo.”

George has created street scenes and tableaux of domestic life from the povertystricken East End of his youth.

There’s a market square with a fruit-laden bow and arrow, like the one on which George learned the costermonger trade.

A glass case displays buttoned suits worn by famous Pearlies of the past. The tradition began in the 19th century when London’s unlicensed fruit and veg sellers, or costermongers, took to 27

GETTING FRUITY Mirror’s Rachael tries her hand on fruit stall with George as customer

sewing pearl button “flashies” on their tatty clothes and caps as a mocking “up yours” to wealthy West Enders. They also developed their own slang to outwit the Old Bill, which developed into Cockney rhyming slang. Then, in 1870 an orphaned street sweeper called Henry Croft began collecting money for charity,

drawing attention by covering his suit and top hat with shiny buttons.

Others soon followed suit and before long the elected coster “kings” and “queens” of London’s 28 boroughs all wore the outfits for charity events.

George says: “They symbolise our whole philosophy. No matter how poor you are, there’s always someone worse off and you help them out.”

George learned that as

WIDE BOY David Jason as Cockney icon Del Boy Trotter a nipper,

enduring an almost Dickensian upbringing of poverty and violence.

His mum ran off to escape her violent husband, so George got battered instead.

“I had a younger sister,

Joyce, who got some affection,” he recalls. “I just got thrown downstairs and punched in the head.”

Those ear-bashings left George deaf, but couldn’t break his spirit.

Often starving hungry, he would tear down fences to chop into firewood then sell the bundles to unsuspecting neighbours.

George eventually got some nurturing from a female neighbour.

She knew his mother had come from Pearly stock and sewed him his first ever pearly suit.

But when another friend took him to work on the marke t s , George found a surrogate family who taught him to read, write and charm the birds from the trees.

Th e re was “Grandad” Fred and young Barry Evans, a lanky lookout who kept his mince pies

GEORGE MAJOR ON HIS WHEELER-DEALER PAST

SUITS YOU Some of the museum’s 27 pearly suits

MAKE YOUR MARKET Museum recreation of East End scene

peeled for Rozzers.

S o u familiar? Mai s oui . George’s career was interrupted by a spell in the Army. Though the crafty Cockney disguised his deafness to trick his way in to the Royal Signals and says: “I loved every minute – and lasted 20 months before they booted me out.” Back on hooky street, George’s scams became legendary in Peckham.

He was regularly hauled before magistrates for illegal trading but got away the n d

with nicking hundreds of half-pint milk bottles off doorsteps, sticking them over exhaust pipes to collect fumes.

He laughs: “We set up in Oxford Street with a sign... ‘Pure London Smog, a dollar a bottle’ and cleared the bloody lot. Some people do call me Del Boy the First.”

Twice-widowed George gets teary as he shows me photos of his first queen, Anne, and their five kids. His second trouble and strife, Cathy, with whom he had two more, died in 2018.

Rabbiting with George has been an absolute joy. Before I go, he puts on his best whistle and hands me a jacket and feathered titfer, and we do the Lambeth Walk around the museum.

George has done a blinding job re-creating the memories of the East End, so it’s well worth a visit.

Any time you’re Epsom way... originalcockneymuseum.com