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Roy Judge was a meticulous scholar of Mary Neal and the Esperance Girls' history.

Malcolm Taylor, Director of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, commissioned Roy Judge to give a talk about Mary Neal in 1988. The talk was developed in to this full length article, the first to piece together a myriad of detail about Mary and her role in the Folk Revival. Roy's footnotes trace a very remarkable period of detective work and research across the country. During the course of researching the article Roy made a number of trips to visit Nita Needham, the then holder of Mary's papers. Roy participated in a talk during LIFT '93 called Folklore v Fakelore and was responsible for putting Lucy Neal in touch with Nita.