The Keel Row

A keel was a real boat, not a poetic invention. It was roughly forty feet long, close to twenty feet across the middle, flat-bottomed so it could work shallow water, and crewed by four men who shifted about twenty tons of coal at a time down the River Tyne to the seagoing collier ships. The singer is a young woman in Sandgate, the Newcastle riverside district where the keelmen and their families lived, and her chorus is a wish for her sweetheart's boat to have a good run. Read that way, the repeated line stops sounding like filler. "Weel may the keel row" means may the boat travel well, which in Sandgate meant a safe tide and a full day's pay.

The song reached nurseries and school songbooks by a roundabout route, arriving as a bright, easily learned tune with an insistent chorus. It also became a military quick step. The melody is used as a trot march by the Life Guards, the Royal Horse Artillery, the Royal Gurkha Rifles and The Rifles, and Rudyard Kipling wrote about hearing it rising above the noise of a regiment on the move.

Origins

The earliest known printing is from the 1770s, in a collection called A Collection of Favourite Scots Tunes, edited by Charles Maclean and published in Edinburgh. The tune also turns up in several late eighteenth century English manuscript collections, and the collector Frank Kidson connected the melody to a 1748 dance tune called "The Yorkshire Lad", which would put the music earlier than any printed lyric. Words and tune were probably in circulation for some time before anyone bothered to write them down.

The keelmen themselves are far older than the song. Coal-carrying keels on the Tyne appear in written records from 1266, and the trade ran for another five centuries. Around 1700 there were roughly 1,600 keelmen working the river. In 1701 they funded the Keelmen's Hospital in Sandgate out of their own wages, a charitable almshouse for sick and aged keelmen and their families, and the building still overlooks that stretch of the quayside. Their decline began with the coal staiths of the 1750s, which let waggonways tip coal straight into ships, and was finished by steam tugs, dredging and new docks. By the late nineteenth century the keels were gone.

Nineteenth century versions of the words were printed in Joseph Ritson's Northumberland Garland and Cuthbert Sharp's Bishoprick Garland, and in 1827 the Newcastle writer Thomas Thompson produced a separate song, "The New Keel Row", built on the same tune.

Meaning & Interpretation

This is a love song in a woman's voice, set inside a working port. She does not describe the river or the coal. She describes one man: his blue bonnet, the dimple in his chin, the fact that she rates him first among all the keel lads on the Tyne. The industrial detail sits underneath rather than on top, which is why the song survives outside Newcastle at all.

The chorus carries the anxiety. Keel work was tidal, often done in the dark, and involved moving heavy loads between a low boat and a high ship's side. Wishing the keel a good row is a wish for wages and a wish that he comes home. Children singing it in a classroom get a nonsense-sounding refrain with a good bounce. Grown-ups in Sandgate would have heard something closer to a prayer.

What was a keel, and what did keelmen do?

A keel was a large, shallow-draught wooden boat used on the Tyne and Wear to carry coal from riverside loading points out to the collier ships that could not sail far upriver. It measured about forty feet long and at least nineteen feet across amidships, drew only around four and a half feet when fully laden, and carried roughly twenty tons of coal. It had a single mast with a square sail on a yardarm, two large oars, and poles for punting through shallows. The crew of four was a skipper, two crewmen and a boy called a "pee dee". Keelmen loaded, navigated on the tide, transferred the coal by hand, and went back for another load if the tide allowed.

Is The Keel Row Scottish or English?

Both countries claim it, and the evidence points in two directions at once. The oldest printed source is Scottish, an Edinburgh collection of the 1770s, but the tune also appears in English manuscripts of the same period and possibly earlier, and the words are full of Tyneside references. Scottish versions relocate the song to the Canongate in Edinburgh instead of Sandgate in Newcastle. The safest thing to say is that the song belongs to the shared border repertoire of northern England and lowland Scotland, and that the Sandgate version is the one about actual keelmen.

What do the Geordie words mean?

keel - a flat-bottomed, shallow-draught boat used to carry coal down the Tyne to waiting ships
row - to row or travel along, said of the boat, not of the crew
weel - well, so "weel may the keel row" means may the boat have a good run
Sandgate - the riverside street and district just east of Newcastle city centre where the keelmen lived
lassie - a girl or young woman
laddie - a boy or young man, here her sweetheart
thro' - through
blue bonnet - a soft flat woollen cap, common working headgear in Scotland and the far north of England
wha's - who is
sae - so
leish - lithe, nimble, active
blythe - blithe, cheerful, good-humoured
bonny - handsome, fine-looking
mony - many
coaly Tyne - the River Tyne, named for the coal trade that dominated it
pee dee - the boy who made up the fourth member of a keel's crew