Thinking about Belle Stewart after what I wrote in the posting above, it made me think of the times in the 1960s and 1970s that I used to organise folk club tours for the Stewarts and a number of other traditional Scots and Irish performers who had found acceptance in the one sort of folk club. I always used to contact the Singers' Club when I was organising these tours and invariably they would either book the people that I suggested or give me a very good reason (already booked etc.) why they would not. As our club met on the night after the Singers Club, it meant that the Stewarts would come to Lewes after staying with Ewan & Peggy in Beckenham. Belle was never neutral about that pair. She would either arrive telling us that they were the most kind loving couple that she had ever met or she was "bliddy glad tae get oot o' that awfa' hoose." though it was usually Peggy rather than the pair of them that raised her ire. Belle was always contrary in her opinion of the folklorists she worked with; Hamish Henderson was alternately a saint or a devil according to Belle.
Writing this has made me remember the extensive coverage that Ewan gets in that marvellous book The Elliotts of Birtley by Pete Wood (Herron Publishing ISBN 978-0954068233). Here are two of the more relevant quotations; once again we get a mixed view of Ewan MacColl:-


When MacColl met the Elliotts, it must have been like all his birthdays coming at once. I think that in Ewan's mind, the working man had been endowed with dignity, fierce pride, great honesty and openness, a keen sense of the unfairness of the capitalist system, and a political drive to replace it with a fair, humane, and sensitive brave new world in which the workers would be at the same level as the bosses. In doing this, it would be the community culture that would make it possible, and songs, particularly those of protest, would put the fairy on the top of this idealised Christmas tree. The Elliotts, although far from typical of their community, had quite simply fulfilled all his dreams.
Accordingly, Ewan, Charles (Parker) and Peggy (Seeger) became the first of several teams to set up their cumbersome recording gear in Brown's Buildings. During the course of a week in March 1961, they recorded their 'actuality', mainly from Jack and Reece Elliott, pitmen all their lives. As we saw earlier, there is wonderful material here about the traditional games the miners played, the terrible conditions, wriggling through a 16-inch seam, the dangers of roof fall and water in the pit, Jack's two accidents, and living conditions at home.
A great deal of this was used unedited in the ensuing radio ballad, The Big Hewer. The programme had as its theme the pit's superman, the one who outshone all his mates, could fill two tubs to the others' one, and hold up the dodgy roof with his back. MacColl had come across this in several of the coalfields, and thought it a myth, a John Henry figure. However, there were real men who were like this, and most pits had one. As with every job, there was always somebody who could do it better or faster than the rest.
Pages 53/54

Some time in the early '60s there was a Club trip to the Singers' Club in London at the request of Ewan and Peggy. A 40-seater coach was duly filled and down they all went. Some have mixed feelings about the trip, saying MacColl was arrogant and didn't let them sing. They had thought they were taking over the Club for the night. In fact, however, it was just the Elliott family that had been asked to go. Imagine the effect of these boisterous Geordies, all het up and raring to go, on the staid Singers' Club audience of that time!
However, as Bob Davenport, the Gateshead singer long exiled in London, comments, Jack was told what to sing at the Singers' Club. It seemed he was there as a performer, obliged to pop up from time to time in order to illustrate a point from MacColl's 'lecture'. He was delighted to find that when invited to sing at the Fox Club in Islington, he could sing anything he liked when he liked! (Different approach, different people, the Folk Revival had it all.)
Jim Bainbridge, long-exiled singer and musician, and member of the legendary Marsden Rattlers of the 60s and 70s, has this to say:
"Tolerant folk clubs taught many of us that, given the opportunity, most singers improve with time and experience, and that this serves the tradition much better than the quality control exercised at Ewan MacColl's Singers Club. MacColl was a wonderful songwriter and promoter of the tradition as he saw it, but as a man of the theatre -with little time for imperfection - his ideas for improving the quality of singing were applied via technical advice and analysis rather than absorption by exposure to the perceived inadequacies of unbelievers. No less a singer than old Jack Elliott of Birtley was once castigated by this crowd - after a return visit to the Singer's Club, disappointment was expressed that his singing hadn't "improved" since his last visit -What a damn cheek!"
There was also apparently a comment by either Ewan or Peggy that Jack "hadn't moved on", implying that they expected him to develop a stage act, much as they had done. It's sad that they didn't see the true value of such a natural singer who had such a wide appeal without artificial devices.
Pages 81/82