Bryn - I think it is just you; Skewball and Master McGrath are both about a four-legged animal unexpectedly winning a race, but I can't see many other similarities.

Brian - I don't want to join any kind of witch hunt of a man that I admire in many ways, but I do think there are questions to be asked and tangled threads to be teased out.

Hear, hear.

I'm puzzled by the Tom Keating analogy, for a number of reasons - I think it's actually too harsh in some ways, as well as being too kind in others. First, Keating was an artist who couldn't make a living from his own work, and turned to producing fake rareties instead. I don't think Bert Lloyd's harshest critics would accuse him of rewriting traditional songs because he couldn't find an audience for original material - so it's a bit odd to see this argument apparently advanced in his defence!

Second, Keating turned out new paintings by Samuel Palmer et al, and put them into circulation as the real thing. Again, I don't think anyone's accused Bert Lloyd of writing songs from scratch - he may have put a lot of time and energy into some of his rewrites, but rewriting is what it was.

Third, and most important, Keating was an artist rather than an art expert. As Brian said, Bert Lloyd wrote the book (literally!) on English folk song; he was in a particularly strong position to certify songs as being the product of folk creativity preserved through oral transmission. (It's as if Tom Keating had been an authority in the field of authenticating Samuel Palmers.) He seems to have abused that position repeatedly.

I like Les's argument, but I don't think it's the whole story - perhaps turning a poem called "Jenny's lament" into a traditional song called The recruited collier makes a point about folk culture in mining communities, but what's the political point of the expanded Skewball, the explicit Long a-growing or Reynardine with the added shining teeth? I think a lot of it was down to giving the people what they want - a good story, well-written, with a point that's not too obscure and mysteries that aren't too baffling, and a good tune to carry it. And that is something he was very good at - it's just a shame Bert Lloyd the perhaps-a-bit-on-the-creative-side folk singer was the same person as Bert Lloyd the collector.