A01=Joseph Fewster
Author_Joseph Fewster
Category=KNG
Category=NHD
Category=NHTK
Coal industry
Coal trade
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Industrial disputes
Keelmen
Labour organization
Parliament
Poverty
Tyneside
Product details
- ISBN 9781843836322
- Weight: 516g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 16 Jun 2011
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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A comprehensive account of the everyday lives of the keelmen of Tyneside, and their struggles and industrial disputes.
For hundreds of years the keelmen, the "keel lads o' coaly Tyne" celebrated in the north-east folk song "The Keel Row", ferried coal down-river to the estuary and cast it aboard ships bound for London or overseas. They were "the very sinews of the coal trade" on which the prosperity of the region depended.
This book charts the history of the keelmen from the early seventeenth century to the point where technological advances made them redundant in thecourse of the nineteenth century. It describes how the importance of their work placed them in a strong position in industrial disputes, especially since they could shut off the coal supply to London. It examines their numerous turbulent battles with rapacious employers and unsympathetic magistrates (often themselves involved in the coal trade), their struggles against poverty and eventually against redundancy, and their attempts to gain redress in Parliament and in the law courts. The book also describes the squalid conditions in Sandgate where, as recounted in the folk song, many keelmen and their families lived with a reputation for independence and savage roughness but exhibited impressive solidarity both as an early industrial labour organisation and as a tightly-knit, mutually supportive, and highly self-reliant community.
The book will be of interest to social and economic historians, labour historians, maritime historians and all interested in the history of the North East.
JOSEPH M. FEWSTER was, until his retirement in 1997, Senior Assistant Keeper in Durham University Library.
The late JOSEPH M. FEWSTER had an almost life-long interest in the keelmen of Tyneside, culminating in his definitive monograph The Keelmen of Tyneside; Labour Organisation in the North-East Coal Industry, 1600-1830 (2011), to which the present volume provides a valuable supplement.
