The Pearly Society was created in 1911 by Henry Croft who was born on the 24th May 1861 in a Victorian workhouse orphanage (now St Pancras hospital).

When Henry was fifteen, he worked as a road-sweeper and became acquainted with several costermongers (coster, or costard is a street seller of fruit and vegetables from a cart in London and other British towns).

He was fascinated by their ‘flash boy’ outfits. They had 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.

Well suited Henry decided to go one better and made a suit totally covered in pearl buttons, and he used to wear this to collect pennies and halfpennies to help out the children in the orphanage where he had been raised.

Henry and his suit became a great attraction, and he was approached by hospitals, churches and other organizations to collect for the poor, deaf, dumb or blind. Eventually he had more requests for help than he could cope with single-handed.
The costermongers had a tradition of organizing a whip-round for any of their number who had fallen on hard times, and Henry now asked them 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.

Today there are many pearly kings, queens, princesses, princes’ organisations with one aim of keeping the traditions alive and that is charity.