Chris,
Thanks for reminding me of Bert as a storyteller; I heard him telling stories on numerous occasions at The Singers Club.
He tended towards Australian 'Tall Tales' like those of The Spiwah, (never sure of the spelling) a place in the Outback where everything was ten times the size of anywhere else. One such was how he once travelled on a mule for three days though a tunnel which turned out to be a hollow tree-trunk.
The only traditional tale I can remember was called 'fill bowl, fill', about an itinerant labourer who seduced all the occupants of a settlement with the aid of a magic whistle. I think there is an American version of this in Richard Chase's 'Jack Tales'.
Then there was the one of a farmer who suspected one of his employees of seducing his daughter, so he hung a carrot over a bowl of milk under her bed; when he looked the following morning, the milk had turned into whipped cream.
I suspect that the stories he told were of his own creation, but they were a pleasure to listen to.
It was common at The Singers Club for the residents to tell stories. MacColl was a great storyteller, his favourites, like Bert's, being Tall Tales, usually about the adventures of the Scots adventurer Chairlie Plenderleith, though he did occasionally tell stories he had recorded from The Stewarts, and a couple he got in the forties when he was collecting for the BBC (The Wellington Boot).
I may have some of of these among the evenings we recorded at The Singers Club.
Jim Carroll