Mike, I had to do a double take there. "Ewan is going from strength to strength"? Now they were the days!

I recall an edition of Spin, the magazine of the Spinners, which printed that song and which said that IC wrote it after the Ian Campbell folk group had done an evening for some old age pensioners and he'd got talking to one of them in the interval. Given the era whn Campbell wrote the song (late 60s?), would Bob have reached retirement age.

CTOI. The opening line says "At the turning of the century I was a boy of five". That would mean the song's subject would have been born in 1895 and about forty when the Spanish civil war broke out. That would not have been impossibly old of course, but does anybody know the year Bob was born?