Next installment in the saga of "English Bill" ... still no pointers to any older source, but here's some info about Bill Barker and the play-by-play for the song. The following is verbatim from, of all things, a genealogy site:

http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/read/CORNISH/1997-11/0879622085

There was a real historical character called Billy Barker from the St Austell area who emigrated to Canada, ended up in the gold rush in the Yukon, struck it rich, and the town of Barkerville up there is named after him today.

I enclose a passage about him from John Rowe's Book "The Hard Rock Men" the story of the Cornish emigrants on the North American Mining frontier.

Towards the end of his letter, Raby added
(24. Mining Journal (London), 21 May 1864: letter of Martin Raby to Captain Mitchell, 17 February 1864.)
that no-one should come to Cariboo without at least five hundred dollars in his pocket when he arrived, and that the winters were long and cold, the thermometer standing at thirty below when he wrote on I7 February I864.

It was, however, another Cornishman who discovered the greatest bonanza at Williams Creek. Billy Barker, a seaman, had been among the first adventurers who sought gold on the Lower Fraser in I858. Not particularly lucky but still hopeful, he ventured further and further up the river. With seven others, including the Hankin brothers who may have been fellow Cousin Jacks, Barker found a rich gold lode in August I862, and after spending a week celebrating their discovery, the party went to work; the claim is reputed to have been worth at least half a million dollars, but Billy's share looked pretty wan after a winter spent in Victoria honeymooning with a shipwrecked London widow. He brought her back to the diggings with him in the spring, but there she found the company of younger men more congenial than that of her stocky, grizzle-bearded, bow-legged husband who, now most of the money was spent, liked to pass his evenings when the day's work was done sitting like other Cousin Jack miners before a blazing fire in his stockinged feet, perhaps even reading the Pickwick Papers and regretting that he had not heeded Tony Weller's admonitory advice about 'vidders'.

When he had the gold, Billy Barker 'whooped it up' in the saloons with the best of them, but with his not uncommon weaknesses for wine, women and song, Billy and gold were apt quickly to part company. Up in the Cariboo country it almost became a legend how he would come into a saloon, put down a few drinks, and then start hopping and jigging about proclaiming

I'm English Bill, Never worked and never will
Get away girls Or I'll tousle your curls!

He lived to be seventy-four, old indeed for a Cornish miner who lived rough most of his days, dying in a Victoria poorhouse for aged men. The town named after him, Barkerville, through a disastrous fire in September I868 and the exhaustion of rich 'pay dirt', can hardly be said to have survived him, though it did not become completely a ghost town. Billy Barker was probably the only Cousin Jack miner to have a town named after him, a town whose life was as turbulent, chequered, and marked by such varying fortunes as his own. But all along the Pacific Coast region, from Bering Straits down to the Sonora Desert, in those days were adventurous and luckless men like Billy who could truly carol

Let their chorus loudly ring,
The Broken Miner's lot they sing,
Most bitter is the lot indeed
Of him who cannot find the lead.
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Search continues. -- Bob