merchant seaman with Running Fitter as occupation

[delphinium44]

I have been researching one of my forebears who was a merchants seaman from his apprenticeship in 1830. I have found information about him for the period 1835 to 1846 in the Merchant Seamen Registers but in both the 1851 and 1861 census he gives his occupation as a Running Fitter. As he was elsewhere described as a Seaman, Mate and Master Mariner during the same period I presume a Running Fitter was a role aboard a sailing ship within the Merchant Navy. Can anyone shed any light of what a Running Fitter did please? He seems to have spent most of his working life on Colliers between Hartlepool and London.

[ShaunJ]

"The running fitter has now [1881] nearly passed away but sixty years ago we had [a long list of names], whose business it was to manage the keels belonging to the coalfitters. They also placed the vessels in their loading berths, and piloted them to sea."

http://blunderingblindlybackwards.blogspot.com/2011/02/

They could decide which boats got loaded with coal first and so were in a powerful position. There seems to have been a lot of friction between them and the professional pilots.

[delphinium44]

Thank you that is fascinating particularly as a parallel line of my family were professional pilots in Hartlepool at the same time!! Pilots were self employed; who employed the Running Fitter?

[ShaunJ]

I believe the running fitters worked for the coal agents.

[hanes teulu]

Google search "Water Trades on the Lower Tyne in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries" by Peter D Wright and download as PDF file. Explains how "fitters" or "agents" developed.

There are some interesting 1843 newspaper articles about the clash between running fitters/watermen and licensed Trinity pilots in the Northeast.