Towards the end of 1767 the north-east coal trade was in depression. Prices were very low, most of the staithes were full as contrary winds had interrupted sailings for much of October, and in several places the workmen were ‘uneasy’. The new year did not bring improvement. A correspondent in the Newcastle Journal declared that the trade was in a ‘most languishing condition’ through ‘clogs and abuses’ at Billingsgate, ‘where those Harpies, the coal buyers, crimps, &c … are making immense fortunes on the wreck of every branch of trade in these parts’. They exacted an illegal premium of sixpence or a shilling per chaldron from the coal owners, a further douceur from the ship-masters, and by custom had one free chaldron in the score. It is not surprising that this period of depressed trade led the coal owners to resort to grants of overmeasure, as the most flexible means of price reduction. Towards the end of March, the keelmen, ‘being for some time very heavily oprest with Over Measure which we are not able to subsist with’, enforced a strike. ‘We all with one voice desire no other terms then King's Measure which is eight chaldron [to the keel]’, they declared in a petition to the Mayor, and ‘with one consent’ would serve on those terms ‘so never to be oprest no more’.

The magistrates, most of whom were directly involved in the coal trade, immediately summoned the fitters and a skipper from each employment. The fitters agreed that for the future no keelman was to take in more than 8 chaldrons, and the magistrates passed a resolution to the same effect, but it was the intervention of Thomas Harvey, an attorney, rather than these assurances that ended the strike. Harvey promised the keelmen that he would endeavour

Whether he offered his services to the keelmen, or whether he had already been engaged by them, is not clear. He claimed to have been ‘an utter stranger’ to the contents of their petition to the magistrates, and solemnly denied that he had encouraged them to strike.