Ewan MacColl - as he is better known - would have been 17 at the time. Mike Harding says that he was a Press Officer. Do we know exactly when he wrote The Manchester Rambler?

"I once loved a maid, a spot-welder by trade" always amuses me but it doesn't sound like a 17 year old to me. (MacColl may, of course, have been a more sophisticated 17 year old than me - strangely, a girl neighbour was indeed a blacksmith and welder.) Perhaps verses were accumulated over time.

In 1932 in the days of the Mass Trespass he wrote a song with that title to the traditional Scots tune 'Road to the Isles, and 'Manchester Rambler' to a tune thought to be his own. (Until, that is, someone spotted that it came from Haydn's 94th symphony.) (Set into Song - Peter Cox)

Only 'Dirty Old Town' which had been dashed off about his boyhood Salford to an instictively laconic tune of his own to cover a scene change in 'Landscape with Chimneys' could be regarded as a song in its own right. Ewan says they sang the songs for that and other shows with no accompaniment (or just a harmonica) not out of conviction but because they had no instruments. That had been in 1949. (Set into Song - Peter Cox)