I was referring to Alfred Williams who collected in that area, I quote
"Williams, in keeping with other contemporary folk song collectors, did indeed try to avoid bawdy songs, as this comment shows:

I have more than once, on being told an indelicate song, had great difficulty in persuading the rustic, my informant, that I could not show the piece, and therefore I should not write it.

But, unlike some members of the Folk Song Society, who were extremely puritanical when it came to songs of a sexual nature, Williams clearly sympathized with the singers who were confused by his reluctance to note down such songs.

Besides the legitimate pieces there were many "rough" songs in circulation. I make no apology for them. I do not know, indeed, that any is needed. They were rude, but not altogether bad. Many of them were satirical. In fact, the most of that kind of which I have heard were so. They dealt chiefly with immorality; not to encourage or suggest it, but to satirise (sic) it. No doubt they served the purpose for which they were intended, in some cases, at any rate, though we of our time should call them indelicate. And such, to us, they certainly are. Yet the simple, unspoiled rustic folks did not consider them out of place. They saw no harm in them. But they knew not shame, as we do. They were really very innocent compared with ourselves.

Just occasionally, though, it seems that the 'simple, unspoiled rustic folks' get the better of Williams, when they slipped in the odd erotic metaphor that Williams seems to have missed. Take his note to the song T Stands for Thomas, for example:

A quaint old song, composed by one who, whatever other qualifications he might have possessed, was never a naturalist, or he would not have wished to climb to the highest tree-top to rob the cuckoo's nest."
    The story of Just AS The Tide was Flowing is explicit,MacColl like Williams was literally barking up the wrong Tree, or even up Barking Creek without a paddle