OrnaVerum
v 7.00.00
23 Jan 2024
updated 23 Jan 2024

The first of these is but the first verse of a well-known Rugby song, of which there are many variants (note that in the days before fully-plumbed household lavatories, the night-soil men who emptied domestic middens via rear-wall outlets in the small hours of the morning were often known as 'midnight mechanics'):

My father's a midnight mechanic
He works in a midden at night
And when he comes home in the morning
He's covered in Turkish Delight!

My brother makes counterfeit money
My mother makes synthetic gin
My sister sells love to the sailors
My God, how the money rolls in!

My grandpa makes cheap prophylactics
He punctures the ends with a pin
My grandma does quickie abortions
My God, how the money rolls in!

I am but a street-corner preacher
I save fallen women from sin
I'll save you a blonde for a guinea
My God, how the money rolls in!

(Rolls in, Rolls in, My God how the money rolls in!)

And the second is in pretty much the same category, except there aren't any plausible second or subsequent verses:

The working class can kiss my arse
I've got the foreman's job at last.
You can tell old Joe I'm off the dole
He can stick his Red Flag up his 'ole!

The 'dole' was a pitifully small unemployment benefit reluctantly paid to working men in the Depression years of the 1930's, and 'old Joe' refers to Joseph 'Stalin', the diminutive figurehead of the Soviet Union, mass-murderer and darling of the intellectual Left (except George Orwell and Bertrand Russell) and much of the Trade Union leaderships of the time.

William, like his father Robert, was deeply sympathetic on an emotional level with the dreadful hardships endured by the unemployed, or casually employed, working class people of that era, as he himself worked alongside their more fortunate counterparts who did actually have regular jobs. And even they were paid the most derisory wages.

But he wasn't convinced by Socialism or Marxism, let alone Bolshevism, as alternatives to a much more humane and decent capitalist economic model of society. Which sadly today (2018) is as distant and receding a vision as ever, as corporate greed and social divisions are increasingly reminiscent of the 1930's.