Maaaaaybe it was this bit I missed Bryan

Appendix III The Critics Group And The British Folk Song Revival
In 1968, Ewan wrote:
If any single event can be said to have been instrumental in launching the British folk music revival it was the BBC?s broadcasts in 1952 of the series of radio programmes known as Ballads and Blues. Prior to these programmes, the emphasis had been on North American folk songs. The knowledge that there existed in Britain a huge corpus of exciting traditional songs and ballads was confined to ; mere handful of individuals. By presenting English, Scots and Irish songs in an historical and social context, these programmes transformed the situation overnight and triggered what was to become known as the folk song revival, the most extraordinary bout of public music-making Britain had ever known. It was the nineteenth-century industrial folk songs that made the first impact. These songs evoked an immediate response from working-class audiences throughout Britain, particularly among young people. Soon scores of new, young singers appeared on the scene and the audience began to reflect other class orientations
Since those early days the revival repertoire has been extended to include pastoral songs and ballads, urban broadsides, forebitters (recreational songs of the seamen), shanties (work songs of the seamen), regional songs, contemporary songs in the folk idiom and political and educational songs.
The bedrock on which the revival stands is the folk song club movement. At the present time, the number of these clubs is variously estimated at figures ranging from 800?1000, with a minimum membership of about 750,000. Almost from the very beginning of the revival there has raged a debate on the definition of folk music, a debate which (in its simplest form) has been reduced to a struggle
11, Peggy adds:
In actual fact, Ewan was the instigator, the facilitator and the person who held the group together. He poured all his training from Theatre Workshop into the group and worked like a demon when The Festival was on each year. He had no Joan Littlewood to take his script and bring it alive?he did that himself, training the singers into actors and sitting each night taking notes to bombard us all with at the end of the performance. The members of the group proved themselves worthy of the task and of the scripts. They all had 9-to-5 jobs (which in reality are 7-to-7 jobs), and everyone poured their All into the common cause. Ewan was _ a brilliant if tyrannical teacher and he and I learned and developed along with everyone else. I took over the teaching of accompaniment techniques, sightreading, script typing and duplicating, stage managing and general organisation. We carried many of these techniques into our songwriting and concert work after the group broke up.
By the time it dispersed in 1971, the Group had said hello and goodbye to three or four dozen members. Among them were: Frankie Armstrong, Bob Blair, Brian Byrne, Bobby Campbell, Jim Carroll, Alistair Clare, Aldwyn Cooper, Ted Culver, Jenny and Tony Dunbar, John Faulkner, Richard Hammerschlag,Richard Humm, Allan and Maggie Ives, Luke Kelly, Donneil Kennedy, Enoch Kent, Sandra Kerr, Hamish MacColl, Gordon McCulloch, Pat MacKenzie, Jim and Sally O?Connor, Charles Parker, Brian Pearson, Mike Rosen, Buff Rosenthal, Dave Smith, Suzannah Steel, Dennis Turner, Jack Warshaw . . . and many others.

Jim Carroll