From JC:

"In the twenty years I knew Ewan, I never once heard him attack a colleague, certainly not publicly, and very occasionally when he reciprocated to the stories
He regarded such behaviour beneath contempt, as I do now - people who behave like this need to crawl back into the sewers they crawled out of".

I and a number of other people once witnessed Ewan MacColl attempting to physically attack Dominic Behan. Dominic had suggested that Alan Lomax rewarded his Irish informants with only a bottle of guinness to which MacColl took exception. This was at a meeting of the Ballads and Blues at the Horsehoes in Tottenham Court Road. Fortunately Malcolm Nixon was able to pull them apart.

Re Shirley Collin's description above, I couldn't agree more. It is an opiniom which I have held for years well before he became grave stomping material.