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Keelmen’s Hospital

Keelmen’s Hospital was built in 1701, not as a hospital in the modern sense but as an almshouse. Almshouses provided food and shelter for the town’s poor. Keelmen’s Hospital was set up specifically for retired and sick keelmen and their families. Keelmen worked on flat-bottomed boats called keels to carry coal from the banks of the Tyne out to ships that were too large to sail up the river. In later centuries, the building was used as tenement, social, and student housing but as, of 2024, has been vacant for 15 years.

At a glance

  • Built in 1701, Keelmen’s Hospital is a Grade II* listed almshouse. Throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, the building provided food, shelter, and medical care for sick or retired keelmen and their families.
  • Into the nineteenth century, as the coal trade declined on the Tyne, the Hospital began to take in residents with other occupations, such as sailors, mariners and watermen.
  • From the late nineteenth century onwards, the building was converted into tenement housing for the city’s poor. This continued into the mid-twentieth century until the living conditions there were deemed inadequate. In the 1970s, there were plans to convert the building into sheltered accommodation for the elderly, but these plans did not materialise.
  • Then, from 1989 – 2009, the building was converted into student accommodation for what was then Newcastle Polytechnic, now Northumbria University.

1701 – 2024

History

  • The Keelmen petitioned Newcastle’s common-council for some land to build themselves a hospital in July of 1700. However, the lease was then seized by the Hostmen, Newcastle’s  elite who held a monopoly over coal exports from the region, likely in an effort to prevent the keelmen becoming a threat to their profits. The keelmen also accused the hostmen of misappropriating the funds that were supposed to go towards the building’s construction. The true ownership of the building remained contested for the duration of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the keelmen were able to wrestle back more control over the funds raised to build and maintain the hospital.
  • The design of the building was inspired by colleges and monasteries, with the corridors resembling cloisters. ‘Dr Moor, bishop of Ely, remarked of this hospital “that he had heard of and seen many hospitals, the works of rich men; but that it was the first he ever saw of heard of which had been built by the poor”. The document ‘Articles of the Keelmen’s Hospital Society; with Rules and Regulations for the Hospital’ published in 1829 provides insight into not only what it was like to be a member of the society, but also to live at the hospital.
  • Fines for members of the society included a half-crown fine for ‘threatening or provoking a brother to fight, or saying or doing that which tends to take away his livelihood or good name’, one shilling for ‘being disguised with drink at a funeral’,  and  a sixpenny fine for any ‘great rudeness of their wives’ or ‘speaking disrespectfully of his Majest, or any of the royal family’.Members could also be excluded for bring guilty of any ‘immoral, vicious, or disloyal practises’.People living at the hospital were remined that they were not allowed to let chickens or dogs roam free in the building, and that ‘for the peace and good order of the inhabitants, no young person above fourteen years of age, either male or female […] shall be allowed to lodge by night or work by day in the hospital’.
  • Whilst most almshouses in England only provided short term medical care, Keelmen’s provided long term treatment for its elderly residents.1829 was also the year that one of Keelmen’s most infamous residents met her end. Jane Jamieson sold fish on Newcastle’s Quayside whilst her mother, Margaret, was a keelmen’s widow who lived in the Hospital. On the 2nd of January 1829, Jane and her mother were heard loudly arguing in her mother’s apartment. The arguing quickly stopped and Jane began crying for her mother. Other Keelmen’s residents rushed in to find Margaret with a wound in her chest that looked like it had been caused by a poker near the fire. By the 12th of January, Margaret had died.Jane was ultimately executed and dissected, as was the punishment for murderers at the time.  Her ghost and the Keelmen appear together in a ballad known as the Sandgate Pant: ‘she waits for her love, each night at this station. And calls her ripe fruit with a voice loud and clear; the keelbullies listen in great consternation. Tho’snug in their huddocks they tremble with fear.’
    • A huddock was the name for a cabin on a collier ship, while ‘keelbullies; was an insulting term for keelmen, describing how they were often seen as rough around the edges.
  • The Keelmen’s lease of the building expired in 1899 when it was then converted into tenement housing.  It remained as council housing until 1962, and was student accommodation from 1989-2009. It has since been vacant and a target for abuse.
Keelmen making their procession from the hospital c.1800.
A resident of Keelmen’s walking in the courtyard in 1961.
Dunston Staiths

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