If the keelmen attempted to carry on the charity without the Hostmen or magistrates, it soon became clear that they had no hope of success. By about 1717, some skippers and keelmen, fearing that the hospital was ‘in all probability agoeing to decay without some immediate repair’, petitioned the magistrates to request that a society, supported by a subscription from those keelmen who wished to benefit, be established under the governorship of the Mayor and settled by Act of Parliament. The petitioners clearly did not expect all the keelmen to participate. The magistrates took no action and the matter dropped for the time being. Soon the keelmen had to endure the ‘hard and tedious winter’ of 1717–18 during which many of their families were ‘almost starved for want of necessarys’. Moreover they had many grievances against their employers and were on the verge of mutiny. It is not surprising that these circumstances revived their desire for independence. Early in March 1718/19, the Hostmen were alarmed by a report that endeavours were on foot to procure an Act of Parliament to incorporate the keelmen or establish their former charity, and hastened to appoint a committee to investigate, since ‘such an incorporacon or establishment, without being under a due regulacon or the government thereof in proper hands with sufficient power rightly to manage and apply the same, would be an entire ruin not only to this Company but the Corporation and trade in generall’. Unfortunately the committee's report has not been preserved, but the Hostmen's alarm illustrates the connexion they perceived between the charity and industrial action.

A few years later the Hostmen were informed that the keelmen had petitioned the magistrates and Governor of the Company to manage the charity. Some of the wording of what appears to be a draft of this petition (the original has not been found) is identical with one presented to the Mayor, William Ellison, in 1710, which suggests that Ellison, who again held that office, may have orchestrated this new initiative.