One more response before I go back to my tax return:

”Hillery comments how carefully Pardon breaths at the ends of lines and at suitable pauses in his songs, and I too noticed this and thought somebody has taught him when singing to take a breath at the pauses. I think one of the online interviews with Pardon he mentions doing folk singing at school so this theory holds up... Indeed, nobody seems to have realised that he went to a Methodist Sunday School.”

What Dave Hillery says is that WP deliberately broke up the rhythms of his songs, sometimes by inserting a pause / breath in the middle of a line. Nowhere does he suggest that this technique might have been taught him at school. I was taught folk songs at school too, but this consisted of the class singing them in unison without any advice on such esoteric matters as breathing, and I’d be highly surprised if any such specialist tuition was going on in folk song classes at WP’s school. Taking a breath at a pause point is simply the natural thing to do. FWIW, I also attended a Methodist Sunday School, and the hymns we sang there were almost martial in their metre, so it’s counter-intuitive to suppose that a singing style characterised by broken rhythms would have been greatly influenced by hymn-singing. The most likely influences on WP’s style in singing traditional songs are the people he heard singing those same songs, but it’s possible – as Dave Hillery suggests – that he developed certain aspects of his style, such as the arhythmicity, deliberately to interpret the songs as he felt appropriate.