On Shrove Tuesday 1633, ‘an armed and unruly multitude of young men’, numbering ‘forty at the least’, assembled at Ballast Hills in Ouseburn.
List of events
On Saturday 17 March 1660, about five hundred Newcastle keelmen ‘assembled together in a tumultuous manner’, parking their keelboats across the arches of the old Tyne Bridge ‘to stopp the passage o
On 26 June 1740, a crowd of 3,000 angry townspeople, keelmen, iron workers and miners from the nearby collieries attacked and wrecked the Guild Hall in Newcastle.
Thomas Spence (1750-1814) made a major contribution to revolutionary and reform movements, both in Newcastle and across Britain.
High Bridge Street was the site of an independent chapel, established in 1765-6 by the friends and admirers of James Murray (1732-82), a Scottish-born Presbyterian minister who used his pulpit to a
When John Mitchell arrived in Newcastle in the final year of the eighteenth century there were already three newspapers produced in the town.
In October 1809 keelmen below the Newcastle bridges went on strike to demand improvements in pay. Keelmen were the workers who transferred coal in keels or barges to waiting colliers.
The keelmen strike of 1819 was given an extra edge as it occurred shortly after the massacre at 'Peterloo' in Manchester.
On the afternoon of Thursday 15 May 1828 Newcastle’s Guildhall played host to a gathering of professionals and clergymen who advocated the gradual, rather than the immediate, abolition of West Indi
Crowley’s iron works were once the largest in Britain and its workers from the various works were collectively known as Crowley’s Crew.