I've answered this already guest and asked for a response
MacColl, my father and many others educated themselves during the great depression, mainly by going into Libraries to shelter from the rain, off the streets
I have no doubt whatever that Urban working people were as capable of making songs as were rural ones, but there's no evidence that they wrote rural songs beyond the limitations of their experience at the time these songs were made
I ask again, why is it so impossible to to accept that rural people wrote rural songs about rural subjects - likewise seamen, or soldiers....?
If they did, why didn't those documenting the songs at the time spot that these songs were really Urban products?
Who is more likely to have made these songs - city dwellers working under conveyor belt conditions or country dwellers responding to what was happening all around them?
Why is is so important to you that these songs were produced for money rather than made to reflect working lives
What makes 19th century rural England so different from Rural Scotland or Ireland, where folk song making is a proven fact?
I've asked these questions over and over again and nobody appears to want to answer them!

For the interest of those who appear to be expressing doubt over the suggestion that the Vaughan Williams Memorial has held a copy of the Carpenter collection since the 1070s
I've just checked our section of the collection shelved in the loft and have established that we have 15 spring-back folders of photocopies from the contents of (I think) 5 or 6 microfilms
We paid to get as many of them copied as we could but didn't manage to get all of them
As far as I am aware, the set is still available at the Library
Each of our folders contains at least 150 songs (at a guess)
This is the first song from the first folder, though I can't guarantee we got them in order
Jim Carroll

Buchan Observer,
Turlundie Side
Bell Robertson, New Pitslogo, June 9, 1908

Now Nature decks Pitligo's groves
In all their summer pride.
And temps the wandering feet to rove
Upon Turlundie's side.
To gaze upon the prospect fair,
So varied and so wide,        
And breathe the sweet and balmy air
Upon. Turlundie's side.
To hear the little feathered throng
With music fill the woods
And the lav'rock chant his joyous song,
Hid in the fleecy clouds.
Sweet wild flowers deck the meadows green
Like to a bonny bride,
And wimplin burnies row unseen
A' down Turlundie's side.
From Brucklemore to Mormondhill        
And to the ocean wide,
The wanderer's eye can rove at will
From off Turlundie's side.
I care not for wealth's gaudy toys        .
It's pageantry and pride,
Just give me Nature's simple joys
Upon Turlundie'a side.        
Does any wish in quiet retreat
A few weeks to abide?
Just come and try this village sweet
Upon Turlundiefs side.