Not children but bairns
Interested parties, including at least one blogmeister, have been in touch with helpful insight.The first piece of advice is to be shorter. The second comment is that in the Scots language, my mother tongue, the phrase is expressed as ‘cobbler’s bairns’. Bairns being children. The third useful insight is to have lots of interesting links. So here is one to the online Scots dictionary which needs a serious visual redesign but seems to work – http://www.dsl.ac.uk/dsl/index.html