Songfacts®:

• This song appeared in the 1935 George Formby vehicle No Limit, in which as usual he played a character named George, George Shuttleworth.
  
  Formby performed it in blackface, which like the lyrics of a couple of his other songs, including "Mr. Wu's An Air Raid Warden Now," have not held up well with time. Formby and his wife were thrown out of South Africa in 1946, literally, in a dispute over playing to black audiences.
• "In A Little Wigan Garden" was written by Fred E. Cliffe and Harry Gifford, two of his regular songwriters.
• It sounds fairly innocuous, but in a documentary first screened by the BBC in October 2011, presenter and Formby fan Frank Skinner wondered if it might contain some far from obvious innuendo, such as:
  
  There's my girl and me
  She sits on me knee
  And watches the rhubarb grow
  
  Is it George or is it me, asked Skinner? The tittering from the crowd in No Limit answers that question. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Alexander Baron - London, England, for above 3