True -- he spent much time in Australia after being unemployed round Wandsworth, his birthplace, & then came back to haunt the British Museum Library. When I interviewed him for Folk Review in 1974 he was living in Greenwich. The Suffolk connection -- he sang a lot of Suffolk songs like The Farm Servant &c -- was probably more cultural than residential: I think there was some Suffolk connection in his family a generation or two back. And his spoken accent always sounded more E Anglian to me, than cockney or Oz.

When I wrote his obit for the Guardian, the Arts Editor, to my fury, inserted the non-fact that both his parents were traditional singers, & when I protested, said he had found the fact in Grove's Dictionary. I replied that whoever was the ignorant idiot who wrote the Grove entry had obviously confused Bert with Ewan MacColl, and Bert's father had been a regular soldier & then an AA patrol man, & his mother a cockney former housemaid who had died young; but alas no correction ever appeared, so that solecism remains perpetuated on file over my byline, sod·it!. Even so, when I met his widow & daughter at the memorial concert, they were kind enough to say that they liked my obit best of all that had appeared, as I obviously had known him & his work better than the other obituarists.

≈M≈