Songfacts®:

• This is a slightly risqué song about an old letcher who lures a young maiden to his apartment and plies her with Madeira in order to get her into bed. It was half-sung, half-recited by Michael Flanders solo, accompanied by Donald Swann on piano. Flanders would wear a top hat during the number to emphasize the fact that the would-be seducer belonged to a certain class.
  In the song, before she is rendered incapably drunk, the victim remembers something her dying mother told her; she drops her glass and flees the apartment, waking up in her own bed the next morning with a headache and his words still ringing in her ear "Have some Madeira, M'Dear."
• In his memoirs, Swann's Way, Donald Swann said that at one point the duo received a letter from a wine merchant who wrote "Please don't go on with that line about Port, it's affecting our trade." >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Alexander Baron - London, England, for above 2