Regarding the origins, Tommy may have re-created it but my mum, a former Cleckheaton mill girl, used to sing a version of it to me in the late 50s, when I was very small, and all my aunts remembered singing it as girls in Popplewell Mill in the early 1930s.

To Austin P: The Lancashire cotton looms may have gone "Thrumedumedum", but Yorkshire woollen looms definitely went "clickety clack". And I learned very early that my mum, all her sisters and other female relatives could lip-read perfectly well over large distances!

The Yarn wetting verse is, I assume, due to them having to wash the excess dye out of the woollen yarn by rinsing it in the mill dam ("tarn"...not a word used locally for the mill dam...but I guess it makes the rhyme work). They'd started to use chemical dyes and some of them weren't very pleasant....the fumes from them could make the weavers feel bad.