The evidence to support the belief that the man in the song and the photograph was called Seth Davy has always been weak. The information came from Liverpool Echo readers corresponding with William Ashcroft Braley in 1957. The absence of a Seth Davy in the Liverpool records has led me to search for an alternative name for the man. I think the man was a West African man called George Smart who lived near Bevington Bush and died in 1902:-