"The hand weaver and the factory maid is not about lancashire specifically but about social divisions.... that line, 'nowt lies there but a fact'ry maid'. Didn't you ever take a girlfriend home that your parents didn't approve of?"

I don't have all the paperwork to hand, but a publication by Roy Palmer gave several quite distinct songs (not all of which are about factory work at all) that seem to have formed the basis of Lloyd's version. These contain lines like:

"At weaver lads she looked in scorn
I wish that a weaver I'd ne'er been born"

and:

"The factory maid is like a queen
With handloom weavers she'll not be seen."

... which never made the final cut.

So it seems that Lloyd inverted the snobbery in the old versions of the song, in order to suggest that the factory worker was at the bottom of the heap. A feeling of empathy with the fellow whose parents didn't approve of a girlfriend is one reason I learned the song in the first place, but if we're going to use old songs to say to people, "There you are, THAT'S what it was like back then" (which is precisely what just about every modern singer of an industrial folksong IS saying), then surely we need to know what is old and what is made up?