The foregoing account of the many instances of collective action by this body of proletarians from the mid-seventeenth century onwards raises the question whether they have a place in the history of trade unionism. Information about combinations of such labourers for increased wages or redress of grievances in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is not plentiful, but the activities of the keelmen are unusually well documented. In their classic History of Trade Unionism (1894) Sidney and Beatrice Webb defined a trade union as ‘a continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment’, but by insisting on continuity they excluded manifestations of united action that lacked evidence of permanence. The earliest trade unions they found among skilled craft-workers such as tailors and woolcombers who possessed sufficient independence of character to resist, when necessary, the will of their employers and form enduring, as opposed to ephemeral, associations. Modern historians, however, have abandoned insistence on continuous association, and, as John Rule puts it, have ‘re-incorporated into trade union history’ the innumerable instances of collective action that the Webbs dismissed as ‘episodic and spontaneous labour reactions’:

The keelmen, congregated in Sandgate and linked by ties of family through intermarriage as well as, in many cases, by Scottish origin, and employed on the one waterway in work often involving danger and demanding mutual assistance, acquired from these constant patterns of association a habit of solidarity, ‘the foundation of effective trade unionism’. This appeared earlier than among other labourers such as the miners, also noted for their solidarity, but who in the seventeenth century worked in independent groups in dispersed locations which lessened their opportunity to take effective united action. Professor E.R. Turner was the first to suggest that the keelmen might provide an example of trade union activity earlier and different from those cited by the Webbs.