The Codbanging Song Collected in Harwich, Essex by Ralph Vaughan Williams, as sung by Charles Benham, April 1904

Charles Edwin Benham JP 15 April 1860 in Colchester, Essex, England – 1 April 1929, also in Colchester. Born into a family of newspaper proprietors. Living in Colchester for all but a handful of years of his life, writing about it in many of his books. He helped edit the family-controlled paper the Essex County Standard jointly with his brother Sir William Gurney Benham.

Essex ballads and other poems by Charles E. Benham ; with a prefatory note by the Right Honourable, the Countess of Warwick (1919). The Flash Girl; Lorna Tarran learned this intriguing piece from her grandmother. The opening four lines are very similar to those which start Never Been to Colchester which is included in Charles Benham's Essex Ballads (1897).

Could this newspaper proprietor with an interest in Essex dialect and folk-song be the singer of the song? I can't find the original record of RVW collecting the song, although it may well have had a different title.