I think at least one of Les's original questions has been answered:

There is clearly a growing number of songs that owe much more to Bert Lloyd than to the people he claimed to collect them from.
...

Two questions:

1. How long is the Bertsong list
2. How much does it matter?

If nothing else, over the last week we've established that:

a) there are some people for whom it matters a lot;
b) there are some people for whom it doesn't matter at all;
and
c) there are some people in each group who hold uncomplimentary opinions about people in the other group.

Perhaps - in the interests of not exposing people to arguments they don't like - this discussion could be continued on a thread called, say, Bertsongs (For Those Who Think It Matters)?

Something I was looking at today, for reasons unconnected with Bert Lloyd, reminded me of this thread (and why I do think it matters). On the Copper family Web site you can find the family's own version of "Spencer the Rover"; you can also find the version Bob Copper collected from a man called Jim Barrett in a pub in 1954. A look at the Bodleian's Web site will find you several broadside copies of "Spencer the [young] rover", printed around a hundred years earlier. They're not identical - there are differences in wording and word order; the Coppers' version is all in the third person, Barrett's is all first-person, and the broadsides are inconsistent. They're not identical, but they're very, very close; they're obviously variants on a common source, and variants that haven't diverged very far.

So: here's a song preserved by the Copper family and collected by Bob Copper in 1954 - and if you look at these mid-Victorian broadsides, you see the same song. For me there's something wonderful about that. If you can write a song you're a songwriter - it's a good thing to be, but there's no shortage of them. If you can collect a song, pass a song along and keep it alive - that's a much rarer honour, and the two shouldn't be confused.