I was amused to read this.

MGMLion and Derek Schofield are correct on this: I won the Male Solo Section of the competition and Derek Brimstone was second. The prize was £5, quite a bit of money then and two of the judges were Jack Taylor, editor of the magazine Ballads and Songs and Dave Moran the editor of another folk magazine whose name escapes me and also a member of the Halliard with Nic Jones.

I was also in one of only three or four tents camping in Cherry Hinton Park.

By the time I left the festival I had been invited to join Jack Taylor's band back in Manchester. Quite good going for a seventeen year old schoolboy, I thought! In retrospect I'm not so sure that this precocity and early success did me a lot of favours :)

A further irony is that I now live in a flat overlooking Cherry Hinton Park.