G'day Ewan,Since you are using the information on Aunty Mary's peripatetic canary in an academic context, I should caution against putting too much trust in the regional origins of my grandfather's songs. Although he was born in Lancashire, at Haslingden, in 1897, he went away to Grammar School in 1908 and would have had two or three years of Grammar Schooling before his father died and his mother migrated to Australia with the two boys.
In Australia, he served an appenticeship as a carpenter, in a country district and, as soon as his apprenticeship was complete (and his mother allowed him) he enlisted in the Australian Army to fight in World War I. He fought in Europe with the Artillery and was demobbed under the description of "driver" - presumably of horse-drawn artillery. He met my grandmother in the south (Titchfield) in this period.
He returned to Australia and worked as a carpenter until the great depression, when he spent a period on the 'Susso' - sustenance employment on government projects around the countryside - before he got a job as a carpenter on the Sydney Harbour Bridge construction and then work in building, as the economy picked up.
When the Second World War broke out, he re-enlisted and spent the early part of the war in training, then the latter part, as a Warrant Officer One (Regimental Sergeant Major), in charge of guards at Hay Prison Camp.
The point to all this is; Grandfather had a reasonably good start to his education and then was widely-travelled ... and spent a good decade, in two slices, in the army. He was a good singer and my memory is of a taste for 'parlour' songs and the repertoire of singers like Peter Dawson. It is possible that he could have learnt songs from many places and people (or printed sources) and it is not safe to assign a definite regional provenance to any of his songs ... but he did have a fondness for the Lancashire he was torn from as a lad.
Regards,
Bob Bolton