Dave,
Thanks for that - funny - the minute I started to read your posting I though 'Thatcher'. Wouldn't William Hulton have made a great Home Secretary in her government?
When I lived in Manchester I did a great deal of work in The Central Library on The Chartists. For anybody interested, they had a reasonable collection of broadsides and hundreds of newspapers (on microfiche) from the period, many of them containing songs and poems.
Never got round to The John Ryland library, but I believe they have similar.
Jim Carroll