Sorry folks. The smoking gun just fired my missive before I'd had chance to finish it. To continue, here's the entire posting.

Right. I've found the smoking gun and that is not Edwin Thomas singing in the film.

1.Edwin Thomas sings with a distinct west country accent, not Essex or Home Counties, and with a noticeable traditional style.

2.He is in my opinion a far better singer than the one on the film soundtrack.

3.Edwin Thomas does not sing Searching For Lambs, Roud 576, on the tape I've got. What he sings is Searching For YOUNG Lambs. Roud 1437. Laws O9. As I pointed out above, this is a different song altogether.

To confuse matters, Roud lists a song under the title Midsummer's Morning, allegedly sung by Edwin Thomas and collected by Kennedy and Karpeles, and gives it the Roud 576 number.

It could be of course that he sang both songs, but I don't think so, and I think just for once Steve Roud has got this one wrong. (Sorry Steve, but the Folksong and Broadside Indexes have a total of around 300,000 records. Nobody can input that amount of data without making just a few slip ups.)

Anyway, my reason for not thinking that ET sang both songs is that he sang seven songs to Peter Kennedy and Maud Karpeles. I have 6 of them, namely:

Searching for young lambs
Reynard the fox
Barbara Allen
Miller's last will, The
Henry, the poacher
Three gypsies

The one I am missing, and it could well be on another tape, is Thorneymoor Woods. Logically therefore, if I've got 6 of his songs, including Searching For Young Lambs, he could not have sung Searching For Lambs as well, if the seventh song was Thorneymoor Woods. That doesn't mean he didn't know the song or sing it to Kennedy on another occasion of course. However, Roud is pretty exhaustive, and I can find no mention of any other songs recorded from Edwin Thomas mid 20th century.

Curiously enough, there is what I presume to be another Edwin Thomas listed for Dulverton (about 20 miles from Allerford where Kennedy's Edwin Thomas was from), whom Sharp collected 4 songs from in 1914. I'm left wondering whether the older Thomas might have been the younger Thomas's father, especially as they had two songs in common - Thorneymoor Woods and Reynard The Fox. In fact that would be 3 if young Edwin did in fact sing Searching For Lambs as well as Searching For Young Lambs.

BTW., Robert Hamer, who directed the film was also the director of at least one Ealing classic; the wonderful Kind Hearts and Coronets. Unfortunately, his career went down from there, possibly catapulted by alcoholism and by the fact that he was a homosexual at a time when homosexuality was taboo, and he died aged 52. A sad loss to English cinema. But given the not very common surname, I can't help wondering if he might have been related to Fred Hamer, and if that's where the Searching For Lambs connection comes in. Well, it's a thought.