SteveG wrote: 'Or Ladies Treasury simply looked up the title and got the wrong one!'

Of course it is possible that the 'Ladies Treasury' confused the attributed Geoghegan 'Cockles' starring Jim the Mussel Man with the Dublin version starring Molly Malone. But is it not equally possible that they were well informed? The Molly version was attributed to James Yorkston in an 1884 edition as is well known, but Yorkston is credited with no similar songs and his name appears usually as an arranger for Messrs Kohler of Edinburgh. As I noted above, in view of the discovery of an earlier edition of the Molly 'Cockles' published in Boston, Mass, in 1876, with no composer's name, 'the Yorkston version no longer appears as original as before'. So Geoghegan remains in the frame as possible composer, and in retrospect I was wrong not to have emphasised him more when I first went into print with the story in 1992.