Rats, I missed the preview button. Backtracking and carrying on...

That sleeve note makes it fairly clear that Harvey Kershaw wrote it.

I find some Lancashire dialect writing quite hard to read, so I'm not going to try to write it. The above just has what I think may be needed for it to scan reasonably and rhyme for non-Lancastrians (west Pennine Yorkshire folk should do OK as well).

I get more convinced each time I hear it but am still not entirely happy about that first line of Verse 3, but the weekend starts here.

Getting back to geography "lived in't mill brew" suggests something hillier than most of what was Rochdale before the local government reorganisation. The older dialect poets were writing when the mills where on the slopes closer to water for processing the cotton.

The second of the two youtube links above has much better sound quality than the first. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es1EBRNT43U I don't think it had an advert yesterday.