I remember from some years ago another northern English song in which a boy gets the buckle end of a belt from his dad for running off & listening to a Salvation Army band! Once again, it is merely incidental -- certainly not propaganda in favor of corporal punishment.

I have come on such advice (tho not in song) in what seems to me an odd place: a review (of a book on police brutality) by the US journalist & critic H. L Mencken, in 1931: "Let [our lawmakers] restore the bastinado, as has been done in England.... The English, when they take a tough boy in an assault with firearms, give him what, in America, would be regarded as a very short term of imprisonment, but they keep him jumping while he is behind the bars by cowhiding him at regular intervals.... In consequence there are very few gunmen in England.... [T]here is really no reason why whipping should be inhumane. In England its aim is not to butcher the culprit but simply to hurt him -- above all, to invade and make a mock of his dignity. It is hard for him, when he gets out, to posture as a hero, for all of his associates know that he has been flogged like a schoolboy, and they can imagine his piteous and unmanly yells."