In or about 1786, an ‘acting committee’ of keelmen, led by John Day and Henry Straughan, assisted by William Tinwell, a schoolmaster who had succeeded Alexander Murray as secretary of the Hospital Society in 1785, began to consider a new plan. It was calculated that a halfpenny per chaldron from the crews of 355 keels each carrying eight chaldrons of coal and working on average 160 tides per year would yield £946 13s 4d, and an additional sum from keels loaded with materials such as ballast, stones and lead would bring the total to approximately £1,000 per annum. Judging by the average outgoings of the Hospital Society with two hundred members over the past ten years, it was estimated that the annual disbursements from a fund with a membership of 1,000 would amount to £400 for the sick, a like sum for the aged, and £200 for widows. The number of aged in the first few years was likely to be small, and, if the £400 earmarked for their relief was invested, the proceeds could be applied to the building of a hospital with eighty rooms to house the widows and the permanently disabled. The committee drew up a number of articles for government of the proposed association. The fund would remain closed for the first three years; benefits to the sick and disabled would thereafter be 5 shillings per week for a maximum of twenty weeks in a year; the permanently disabled would receive 4 shillings per week, widows £5 per annum, and both would have free accommodation in the proposed hospital. Thus a keelman overtaken by age or infirmity could look forward to ‘a comfortable maintenance for life’, instead of being ‘forsaken by his former friends and left destitute’. As the keelmen would be under self-imposed rules, it was optimistically asserted that ‘every irregularity amongst them will be cured, disturbances avoided, and peace and good order established’.