Ralph Vaughan Williams after Boult, Sargent and Barbirolli are Vernon Handley, Richard Hickox, Sir Mark Elder and Sir Andrew Davis. Record companies with extensive lists of Vaughan Williams recordings include EMI, Decca, Chandos, Hyperion and Naxos. Vaughan Williams refused a knighthood at least once, and declined the post of Master of the King's Music after Elgar's death. The one state honour he accepted was the Order of Merit in 1935, which confers no prenominal title: he preferred to remain "Dr Vaughan Williams". His academic and musical honours included an honorary doctorate of music from the University of Oxford (1919); the Cobbett medal for
Vaughan Williams and English Folk Music song, "The Long Whip", seems to have been lost completely as a result. Vaughan Williams knew that the texts of many of the songs he was preserving had been printed as broadsides and he sometimes used broadside texts to fill out his songs for publication. He did not bowdlerise the material he collected for publication, as some other collectors did, but was as much as they were forced to recognise the constraints of the time when it came to publishing "unsuitable" material. Sometimes too he failed to note singers' names or occupations. Vaughan Williams and English Folk Music The composer