@ Jag. I think it goes further than this. For in my opinion, Jim gets thread after thread closed. If he feels he isn't 'winning the battle' he ups the emotional ante until it all kicks off and the thread gets closed. I think that's what he is doing now. It isn't the opinions of collectors that must have primacy I don't think, for me it is the opinions of Jim, and I share your previous thoughts on how people encountering his work on Mudcat may regard his reliability as a source of information.

@ Jim. Assuming you have passed on the whole of what Mike Yates said to you, then I suggest that Mike Yates refreshes his memory by looking at what he and Ron Stradling wrote on the MUSTRAD site. It's there for the whole world to see. And the song is mentioned in the work by Dave Hillery which, I think, you mentioned yourself on another thread. Thanks: it was a fascinating piece of work. The best thing I have read on Pardon, and I think I have read everything there is.

@ Brian. I am happy with my use of inverted commas. It is the case that a lot of 'stuff' written about songs and their origins looks like history but isn't really. And a person looking into where particular songs came from will no doubt encounter this material. By the way, I think you were a science teacher of some sort? I didn't catch in your 'bailliwick' what you did for a living, but I have it in mind that it was physics? I might be wrong, sorry if so.