An ancient building, once a hospital, overlooking Newcastle Quay, and a few folk songs such as ‘The Keel Row’, are now the only mementoes of the keelmen, a group of workers who for hundreds of years played an essential role in the coal industry of Tyneside. Although historians have often shown interest in this colourful, cohesive and often turbulent workforce, this is the first full-scale study of these workers. The saga of their struggles against poverty and grievances connected with their employment adds a new dimension to the history of the north-east coal trade, and provides a particularly good example of embryonic trade unionism.

Rich coal seams lay close to the River Tyne and by the late fourteenth century the export of coal via the river, although as yet small in quantity, had become of major importance to the prosperity of Newcastle. In the course of succeeding centuries coal exports greatly increased and long remained the principal source of the region's wealth. For much of this period the coal destined for London and east-coast ports, or for markets overseas, was brought from the pit-head along waggonways to staithes (elevated timber platforms with adjacent storage facilities), situated at various points on the river banks, the furthest upstream being fourteen miles from the estuary. At the staithes the coal was loaded, by hand or down spouts or chutes, into keels (small barge-like craft with a crew of three men and a boy), and transported to the colliers lying in the lower reaches of the river.

Until systematic dredging was carried out in the 1860s, only small sea-going vessels could proceed up the narrow and dangerous waterway as far as Newcastle, and none of them could pass under the low arches of the bridge that spanned the river there. The Corporation of Newcastle exercised absolute control over the whole of the navigable river but, although that body gained rich revenues from shipping tolls, it invested little in conserving this valuable asset.