I'm not sure whether it is a good idea or not to revive this old thread; as Malcolm observed earlier it may only encourage people to repeat what has been written already. However this is just a footnote prompted by the discovery of a copy of A L Lloyd's Come All Ye Bold Miners in a Carnforth bookshop. The copy formerly belonged to David [?] and it contains a letter dated 26 November 1965 from Stephen [probably Stephen Sedley] which reads "...Re The Recruited Collier, I have a letter from Bert Lloyd somewhere, and I can't find it, which says he got the words from Jim Huxtable but Huxtable had a throat infection and couldn't sing; however he named the tune as (I think) Dolly Gray or summat and Bert got that off a workmate. Bert, interestingly, reshapes and edits a lot of his stuff without publicizing the fact, and what the eye hasn't read about the ear doesn't hear it, seems."
It is worth re-reading Lloyd's preface to the booklet as this establishes the context in which the songs in the book were collected:- "In the spring of 1951, as part of the mining industry's contribution to the Festival of Britain, it was decided to try to collect coalfield songs before they disappeared. I was asked to arrange a competition; and by means of the Mining Review, a cinema newsreel of colliery affairs, and the National Coal Board's magazine, Coal, miners were invited to submit any songs they knew..."

The implication therefore is that The Recruited Collier was one of many songs submitted by miners in 1951, but the missing letter from Lloyd to Sedley suggests that Lloyd claimed to have met Jim Huxtable to get the words but only the name of the tune from him. It is noticeable that even back in 1965 there were queries about the origins of the song, and about Lloyd's role in "reshaping" songs.

The letter also refers to the Birketts of Elterwater; it was from Franklin Birkett that Ann & Stephen Sedley collected two songs in 1967 - The charcoal black and the bonny grey and The noble fox-hunting. These were sung by Martin Wyndham-Reed, accompanied by Nic Jones, on the Broadside LP English Sporting Ballads.