"O, weel may the keel row,
The keel row, the keel row,
O weel may the keel row
That my laddie's in."
The chorus of the 'Keel Row' an 18th Century Geordie Folksong.
There is a narrow pathway near Blaydon, which I walked recently, hemmed in between the Carlisle to Newcastle railway line and the River Tyne. I took this photograph from that path looking east towards Blaydon as the river sweeps around to the left on its way to Newcastle. If you expand the shot, you can see the spire of Blaydon's St Cuthbert's Church.
Where now trees cluster along the right bank, one hundred and fifty years ago, would have been wharves and staithes. An industrial landscape. Because long before the coming of the famous Races, Blaydon played a vital role in the regional lead and coal industry.
Between the 1600s and 1800s, a network of routes fanned out west and south from Blaydon to the lead smelting mills in Northumberland and Durham and beyond them to the lead mines of the high North Pennines. In addition, from the 1720s, a refinery was in operation at Blaydon, just left of where you can see the church in the photograph, converting lead into silver and litharge – used in the paint and stained-glass industries.
Because of its position as the most westerly navigable part of the River Tyne, Blaydon became a prominent place where smelted lead could be trans-shipped from pony trains to keels and taken down the river to Newcastle for onward shipment. Staithes built from wooden piles shored up the river's muddy banks as it sweeps around at Blaydon. Those staithes needed to be strong enough to hold stacks of lead bars and secure enough for the mooring of Keels to take on their cargo.
Keels were once in abundance on the Tyne. An extremely basic boat. Some historians say it is of the same design as those in which the Vikings first navigated the river. The boats are tubby and shallow in the draft—rounded fore and aft, with a single square sail and a large oar at the rear. The 'row' in the song 'Keel Row' above refers to that large oar used by Keelmen when faced with poor wind or an adverse tide. It was traditional to paint both the boat and sail black.
As well as the 'Keel Row', several Geordie folksongs mention Keels and Keelmen. Another very well-known such song is ‘Cushy Butterfield’, which I included in a piece written some fifteen months ago. That song of a ‘big lass and bonny lass who liked her beer’ and who broke the heart of a Keelman.
Keelmen had a reputation as tough workers. Their nickname was 'bullies' but not because of their attitude. Instead, it's a corruption of the obsolete word 'boolie', meaning beloved, a brotherly term extensively used among north-eastern coalminers up through the 1800s. Today in the northeast, you are more likely to hear 'Marra' as the Geordie equivalent of 'mate' or possibly 'Kidda'.
In the lead industry's early years, thousands of ponies carried the metal over the hills from the smelting mills. They eventually came down Blaydon and Shibdon Banks (just off which my house now stands) to the river at Blaydon. However, with the arrival of the railways (whose first use, one might need to remember, was to transport industrial goods rather than people), it became much cheaper to move lead that way rather than by pony train. Indeed, the first section of the Newcastle to Carlisle Railway that opened between Hexham and Blaydon in 1835 was for that very purpose. The line today still follows the same course, hugging the River Tyne, along which it once brought lead right to the refinery on the riverbank at Blaydon.
That refinery closed in the mid-1850s, and the Pennine lead industry had collapsed by the 1870s. All evidence of that industry's heavy sights and sounds are now gone, leaving a peaceful path squeezed between railway and river, offering scenic views from between trees that now echo only to birdsong.