Of Keelmen...

Some drawings, a photograph, a painting and a song....

A Keelman dressed to impress

The keelmen who are employed on the river Tyne are a remarkably hardy, robust, and laborious class of men and are distinguished for their great muscular strength... Their employment requires uncommon exertions. They have to contend, in their strong, clumsy vessels, with the perils of violent gales, dark nights, freshes in the river, and a crowded harbour.

Eneas Mackenzie - ‘An Historical, Topographical, and Descriptive View of the County of Northumberland’

From the mid-14th Century until the latter part of the 19th Century, the keelmen of the River Tyne and the River Wear were a significant and distinctive group of workers responsible for transporting coal, mined in northeast England, from the riversides to larger ships anchored at the river mouths. These men have occasionally appeared in passing in some of my Meanders, so it's time to dedicate one to them. Although this piece is of the keelmen who worked the River Tyne, the first recorded coal shipment by keelmen was from the River Wear that runs through the nearby City of Sunderland. That was in 1396.

The keelmen take their name from the boats they worked with, 'keelboats' or as most people called them, ‘keels,’ a type of flat-bottomed boat that was particularly suited for navigating the shallow, narrow and often silt-laden waters of the Tyne. Keels were robust, shallow-draught wooden vessels with a pointed stern, so the bow and stern looked almost the same. They were typically forty to fifty feet long (circa thirteen to sixteen metres), fifteen feet wide (circa 5 metres), and could carry up to twenty tons of coal. Sadly, none has survived despite the many keels that worked the Tyne.

The keelmen were not just workers but the vital middle link in a three-stage coal transportation chain. As I've described in other Meanders, horse-drawn waggons brought coal from northeast England's coal mines to loading staithes (wharves) on the banks of the River Tyne. It was here that the keelmen loaded the coal onto their keels. Until the late 18th Century, keels had open holds, and the coal carried in those. However, the coal was laborious to unload, and gradually, a wooden cargo structure appeared on their decks to hold it. The tides provided the primary method of propulsion of a keel – hence, each round trip was known as a 'tide'. However, keels also had a small single mast for rigging a square sail and a pair of substantial thirty-six-foot (thirteen metres) oars to achieve quick changes of course or hazards such as the old Tyne Bridge. In certain circumstances, keelmen might also 'pole' the boat (a kind of punting). Where these propulsion methods were impossible, the crew had to go ashore and drag or 'track' the keel using a rope. Once at the mouth of the Tyne, the keelmen would load the coal onto waiting 'Colliers', who were lying moored in deeper water. 

Colliers carried much of the coal mined in northeast England to London and elsewhere. These ships were typically broad of beam with large holds to carry the coal. Built to be durable, they regularly travelled along the rough seas of the North Sea and the English Channel. They were typically slow, laborious ships, primarily concerned with the safe and efficient transport of coal rather than speed. The large square sails on most or all their masts provided the power to sail, but manoeuvring such ships required skill, especially near coastal waters. The size of a collier could vary, but they generally had a cargo capacity ranging from a few hundred to over a thousand tons. One famous ex-collier was HMS Endeavour, Captain James Cook's ship, originally named the Earl of Pembroke. A demonstration that because of their durability and ability to manage rough seas, colliers were suitable for exploration and coal transport.

However, until the 20th Century the Tyne was not easily navigable for ships of significant draught, such as a collier. Obstructing the mouth of the Tyne were Herd Sands, Bellehues Rock and a bar that ran across the mouth of the river. Further upriver, a ship might run aground in various shallows, and Newcastle's medieval stone bridge that I wrote of in the blink of an eye prevented colliers from reaching coal deposits, necessitating the shallow-draught keels to transport the coal downriver to the waiting colliers.

The keel crew were often family members and typically consisted of a skipper, two 'bullies' (at the time, a bully was the northeast England word for a comrade or brother), and a boy known as a Peedee, an apprentice, carried to learn the trade, ensuring the continuity of the profession across generations. The crew's work was incredibly demanding, requiring immense strength and endurance to handle the boats. A round trip took around fifteen to seventeen hours. This meant that a keel Skipper needed an intimate knowledge of the river and its various depths and currents at each stage of the tidal cycle. A keel's crew typically took about an hour and a half to unload the cargo. By 1700, one thousand six hundred keelmen on the Tyne were working in four hundred keels; this rose to six hundred keels as the century progressed. The keelmen's role as the vital middle link in this chain was crucial to the success of the coal trade and the economic growth of the Northeast of England.

Keelmen had a keen sense of identity and community. They lived together in neighbourhoods east of Newcastle, like the Sandgate area, which is close to the river. They developed their traditions, songs, and customs, fostering a powerful sense of belonging and unity. Despite the harsh life, keelmen knew how to dress to impress, and their 'Sunday Best' was a distinctive costume of a blue jacket, yellow waistcoat, grey bell-bottom trousers, and a blue bonnet topping it all off. They were also very fond of playing cards and hard-drinking during their time off. And not all keelmen were from Tyneside, as many seasonal Scottish keelmen were also employed. Returning home when trade was slack.

The work was so physically demanding that few men remained fit enough to continue working beyond their forties. Due to their short and perilous working life, the keelmen were pioneers in labour organisation. They established the Keelmen's Hospital in 1701 in the Sandgate area, a testament to their collective action and welfare provision within their community. The hospital provided keelmen care during sickness, injury, or old age. It took the keelmen two years to raise the four thousand pounds (around one and a quarter million pounds today) it cost to build the hospital by contributing one penny (around a pound today), a 'tide' from the wages of each keel's crew. Using these funds, the keelmen secured the land for the hospital's building, one of the earliest examples of a worker-funded charitable institution. The original hospital was a modest structure with extensions added over the years as the number of keelmen requiring care increased.

Recently, the Grade II-listed building housed students from Newcastle University. Moves are now afoot between Newcastle City Council, the Tyne and Wear Building Preservation Trust, and Historic England to reuse the building for affordable housing, in a way taking it back to its original purpose. 

The Keelmen’s Hospital

People began to move to the area of Sandgate in the medieval period. The name is taken from a gate on the eastern side of Newcastle’s old town wall that stood near a bank of sand by the river's quayside. The area soon became a prime location for trade and industry connected with the river, and with that, the area became crowded with housing. By the 18th century, the keelmen were a defining feature of Sandgate's history. But as the keelmen's dominance started to wane, this, in turn, led to the decline of the community in Sandgate into what became a slum area. The start of the 20th century saw the removal of the slums and, as you can see from the photograph below, the redevelopment of Sandgate as part of Newcastle's urban expansion. I leave what the keelmen would have thought of the circa three hundred pounds a night Malmaison hotel to your imagination. The Keelmen's Hospital is somewhat buried amongst the other buildings but can be seen with the white clock tower just to the left of the Malmaison sign.

Keelmen were employed by the 'Hostmen' of Newcastle. A company of men that developed from the 16th Century 'Company of Merchant Adventurers' who we might see as the precursors to modern entrepreneurs, finding or creating opportunities for trade and investing heavily in such ventures. The Hostmen functioned as intermediaries between the coal mine owners and those who shipped the coal to London. Without the agreement of the Hostmen, coal went nowhere. Over time, the Hostmen largely controlled the coal trade and, by extension, Newcastle, especially during the 17th and 18th centuries. Keelmen were known to be brutal, skilled, aggressive, and militant, and they took a no-nonsense approach to labour relations, arguing for better wages and safer working conditions, particularly during the 18th century. 

On paper, keelmen were not poorly paid, earning significantly more than the average daily wage for tradespeople when they could work. However, the weather and economic fluctuations heavily affected a keelman's income, making it irregular. They were also traditionally bound to the Hostmen for a year, effectively employed on what we'd today call a 'zero hours contract'. This led, at times, to severe poverty among keelmen and their families during times such as summer when the coal trade slowed and, in the winter, when the weather was inclement.

Due to their small-boat expertise, keelmen were 'targets' for the notorious Royal Naval 'Impress', especially during the wars with France of the late 18th century. Because coal exports were vital to the British economy, keelmen received official protection from the impress. However, there were still regular attempts to impress them despite their exemption. In the early 19th century, the Hostmen agreed with the Royal Navy to provide one substitute for every ten exempt keelmen. There is an amusing tale about some keelmen who impersonated a Royal Navy Press Gang while on a pleasure trip upriver to my hometown of Blaydon. They walked from Blaydon to the nearby town of Winlaton and tried to 'press' some local men, demanding ransom money for their release. The problem for the keelmen was that many of the men of Winlaton were burly blacksmiths who were a match in strength and aggression. The blacksmiths overpowered the keelmen and took them back to Newcastle, where the authorities detained them in the castle Keep for a night before putting them aboard a Sloop-of-war as part of the King's Royal Navy the next day. The exemption didn't cover all instances!

As industrialisation progressed and changes in shipping technology reduced the need for their labour, the keelmen resisted the loss of their traditional livelihoods despite the hardship of the work. They hoped to prevent the introduction of steam-powered tugs, which threatened to make their roles obsolete and called for a significant strike in 1819 after the introduction of the tugs. However, by 1822, the keelmen numbers began to decline, given tugs were in use, along with the introduction of better docks and deeper dredging of the River Tyne. Further accelerating the demise of the keelmen's role was the advent of railways, steamships, and the mechanisation of coal transport in the mid-19th century. By the end of the 19th century, the keelmen had disappeared as these technological advancements took over their tasks. However, their adaptability was clear as some keelmen crewed wherry boats as river transport for people and goods. Over time, as the use of wherries diminished, their crews transitioned into other Tyneside industries such as mining and shipbuilding.

While the keelmen's work was crucial to the coal trade, a cornerstone of Newcastle's economy during the Industrial Revolution, their industry and significant contribution to the economic growth of northeast England seem sadly forgotten. Yet, for close to a century before the song 'Blaydon Races' became the 'anthem' of Tyneside, ‘The Keel Row' held that position. Only after the keelmen began fading from people's memories did 'Blaydon Races' take its place. 

'The Keel Row' remains part of the folk music tradition in northeast England. The song's 'narrator' overhears a lassie singing for the safe return of her laddie and her love of him. Unsurprisingly, the song's lively tune and affectionate lyrics have made it one of the most popular songs associated with the keelmen and the River Tyne. Several British Army regiments also adopted the tune as a march because of its jauntiness. ‘The Keel Row' is the trot march of the Lifeguards of the Household Cavalry and the Royal Horse Artillery. The Royal Gurkha Rifles, known for their rapid marching pace, also use it, as does the Light Infantry as their double pace. Given the Gurkha's fearsome, no-nonsense reputation, it seems apt they've adopted the keelmen's song. The writer Rudyard Kipling mentioned the tune in one of his accounts of army life in India under the British Raj: "The man who has never heard the 'Keel Row' rising high and shrill above the sound of the regiment...has something yet to hear and understand".

Another song well-known across northeast England is 'Cushie Butterfield' in which a "broken heated keelman" laments his love for Cushie, a "big lass and a bonny lass" who has given her affection to another. That song is strongly associated with the North East's working-class culture, including the keelmen, and its humorous lyrics and catchy melody have made it a staple of Geordie folk music. Its writer, Geordie Ridley, based it on an actual person and did not change the person's name. By all accounts, Cushie and her family were initially not pleased with Geordie's rendition. Today, they would probably sue, but in the mid-1800s, people dealt with such matters more 'personally'. So personally, Geordie had to go into hiding for a while for fear of the repercussions if Cushie's family found him. Fortunately, the popularity of the song and the 'fame' it brought Cushie caused tempers to calm.

There are also many paintings and drawings of the keelmen and their work. The most famous is J.M.W. Turner's painting 'Keelman Heaving in Coals by Moonlight'—a somewhat romanticised but atmospheric depiction of the keelmen loading coal onto a collier. A composition that creates a sense of quiet industry, with the keelmen silhouetted against the moonlit sky. Turner's depiction emphasises the keelmen's toil, yet the soft lighting lends a certain dignity to their work. The light reflecting off the water's surface illuminates the keelmen and their boats, creating an ethereal and almost dreamlike quality, while the moonlight and the misty atmosphere add a layer of melancholy to the painting. For me, a striking feature of the painting is Turner’s use of light and shadow, which offers an evocative blend of realism and romanticism that is characteristic of Turner's later work. The contrast between the work's industrial nature and the natural world's beauty reflects Turner's fascination with, and broader contemplation of, human interaction with the natural world, industry, and the passage of time. As in many of Turner's works, his expressive brushwork in painting the swirling clouds and the shimmering reflection on the water with broad, sweeping strokes contributes to the painting's overall sense of movement and fluidity.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington now houses the painting—not Washington, in the northeast of England, from where George Washington's family originated, but in Washington D.C. in the USA. As an aside, Washington Old Hall, in the centre of northeast England's Washington, the ancestral home of the family of George Washington still stands. Yes, if you go far enough back, George, despite his first name, was not a Geordie but a Mackem!!

I'll leave you with a rendition of 'The Keel Row', and to help you understand the Geordie dialect, the chorus means 'well may the keel row,' offering hope that the lassie’s loved one’s keel journey is smooth and safe. Leish means lithe, blithe means merry and 'foremost mang the mony' means 'first among many.'