I've come to this thread a hell of a long time after it was in its prime, but for those of its contributors who catch up with it occasionally, or for late-comers such as myself, here's my pennyworth. I was a member of the London Critics Group, the 'Dick Snell' mentioned above in relation to my time at the Cecil Sharp House Cellar Club. I knew many of the Critics Group's original members from my schooldays - indeed, it was they who encouraged me when in my mid-teens to take up singing seriously - and I knew McColl for several years before I joined the Group. Because of this I feel my opinion has some value here. My time with the Group was extremely instructive in a variety of ways, not all of them agreeable, and I left the Group under very bitter circumstances - Jim Carrol may recall the circumstances as presented to him by McColl and Seeger. Accordingly, my feelings about the work done by the Group - described with clinical accuracy by Jim - are profoundly mixed. Inevitably personalities played a large part in the way it operated, and it was not always healthy, as I'm sure Jim will be honest enough to agree. My personal view of McColl's and Seeger's own contribution to the final demise of the Group is fairly unequivocal. But I have to say that the kind of abuse heaped on the Group by certain people whose understanding of its aims and its work is coloured by political and personal prejudices that only they can account for is not only unpleasantly discourteous, but profoundly unwarranted. A huge number of highly-talented performers owe their ability to use their talents fully to the work they did with the Group, even those of us who finally fell out with Ewan and Peggy, and daring to call singers like Frankie Armstrong, John Faulkner, Sandra Kerr, Terry Yarnell amongst many others 'no-hopers' can only indicate in the writer of that phrase a powerful streak of ignorance and, quite possibly, envy. McColl, for all his failings, and there were in my opinion many, was the most thoughtful and most influential contributor to the creation of a cultural movement which has survived every kind of attack on it for over six decades: I refer to the so-called 'Folk Revival', of which everybody who contributes to this forum is a beneficiary. Added to which, the wide range of themes he chose for his song-writing provided inspiration and opened up possibilities for many great song-writers such as 'popular' music was and is incapable of providing. And on top of that, the revolutionary influence his work with Charles Parker had on broadcasting is still very much felt today: and you don't have to understand his methods or agree with his politics - which at least were rooted in the concepts of compassion and fairness - to appreciate any of that. We are all entitled to express our opinions, but if we cannot do that without using petty abuse or on the basis of firm knowledge, we should not expect those opinions to be respected.