Frank’s grandson, Kevin, grew up hearing stories of the heroic acts from his father, Joe, but thought of them as merely exaggerated family lore. The truth of what he had heard only dawned on him while playing for Newcastle United in the Eighties, when he was first shown photographs of his grandfather and his fellow rescuers. And when he returned to Newcastle as the club’s manager in the Nineties, he proudly unveiled a memorial to the disaster.

Born in 1951, Keegan started his career at Scunthorpe United before playing for Liverpool and then Hamburg, where he was affectionately known as “Mighty Mouse”; he, certainly had the muscular physique of a miner, but perhaps courage and tenacity were inheritable too. As one Stanley native explained to me: “Frank Keegan went back into the mine to rescue people. He was a local hero. It ran in the family.” Those qualities defined Kevin’s football as much as his character. He was never the tallest, strongest or most naturally gifted player on the pitch, yet he played every game as though it might be his last: harrying defenders, chasing lost causes, refusing to accept that any contest was beyond saving. “In Keegan we saw a man who had the one thing we wanted, apart from his ability: his natural enthusiasm,” observed his great mentor, the Liverpool manager Bill Shankly.

That enthusiasm proved infectious wherever he went. At a time when few English footballers dared leave home, Keegan embraced the adventure of moving to Hamburg in 1977, immersing himself in a new language and culture with the same wholehearted commitment he brought to everything else. The gamble transformed him into one of Europe’s finest players, winning consecutive Ballon d’Or awards, but just as important, it revealed an openness to new experiences that never left him. Whether racing cyclists on the TV show Superstars, throwing himself into charity work, or embracing new challenges as player, manager and broadcaster, Keegan possessed a rare lust for life that inspired affection as much as admiration.

Nowhere was that more evident than on Tyneside, where he played between 1982 and 1984, helping them achieve promotion to the First Division. But thanks to his father, a pitman who had headed south from Durham to the South Yorkshire coalfield, Keegan was always conscious of his Geordie roots. Joe brought him up on tales of Hughie Gallacher and entered into correspondence with Jackie Milburn (Newcastle’s famous center forward from the Fifties) about his son’s burgeoning football career. When Kev returned to Newcastle United as manager in 1992, the club was in a dire state — on the verge of relegation to the old Third Division for the first time in its history — and the city itself was reeling from the collapse of its traditional industries. He leaned into all this: he set new standards at the club — even paying for Newcastle’s squalid and dilapidated training ground to be cleaned up over the weekend with his own money — and spoke with knowledge and affection about the great cup-winning Newcastle teams of the Fifties, assembling a team that played with the same attacking elan as Milburn, and his dazzling fellow forwards George Robledo and Bobby Mitchell.

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But he did far more than build an exciting football team. He instilled confidence and a sense of possibility and gave an entire region permission to dream again. Keegan’s swashbuckling and high-scoring team — known to many as “The Entertainers” — became one of the most beloved sides in the club’s history. But football was only part of the story. He persuaded supporters that hope was not naïve and convinced players they could achieve more than they imagined. Les Ferdinand thought the gaffer was as charismatic as Muhammad Ali, while players as varied as the diligent fullback John Beresford and the dynamic Andy Cole, and countless others, have spoken of how Keegan’s greatest gift was making people believe in themselves.

So magnetic was his personality that on his return, the local press reached instinctively for biblical language. Keegan was “the Messiah” and promotion to the Premier League was the “Promised Land”. This was affectionate hyperbole, but it reflected real devotion. The North East had once been notably devout in its Christian practice, especially in the coalfields, so maybe there was a Methodist folk memory here of the Israelites’ bondage in Egypt. But Keegan was brought up a Catholic (indeed his first football coach at school in Doncaster was a nun called Sister Mary Oliver) and he seemed to believe in good works and not just faith alone.

The stories that have emerged since his death are telling because so few of them concern famous goals or managerial triumphs. Instead, fans always recalled his small acts of kindness and generosity. There is the much-loved tale of Newcastle’s visit to Swan Hunter’s shipyard at Wallsend, when workers facing redundancy were astonished to see Keegan arrive unannounced at the gates declaring, “My name is Kevin Keegan. I’ve brought the team down to cheer the lads up if that’s OK.” There is the Manchester City tea lady who was mugged of her pension, only for Keegan to organize a whip-round among the players and personally deliver far more than had been stolen. Others remember him pushing a disabled child around a charity fun run so the youngster could finish alongside everyone else, or simply taking time with supporters until the last autograph had been signed.

It’s hard to express just how much he was loved in the North East. Maybe because, with the decline of organized religion, football clubs became the last institutions that could gather a congregation, and this invested certain footballers and managers with a sort of moral authority. Especially figures like Keegan, who always played the game in the Corinthian spirit and who could be moved to righteous indignation by the dark arts of opponents like Alex Ferguson. His famous tirade against Ferguson’s Manchester United who pipped Newcastle to the title — “I will love it, just love it if we beat them” — distilled the spirit of defiance in the face of adversity, and a refusal to surrender hope or emotion, that Newcastle fans recognized in themselves and their city.

Yesterday evening, I drove over to Barrack Road where supporters were laying flowers, scarves and bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale on the steps of St James’ Park. There was grief, certainly, but also gratitude. People weren’t simply mourning a footballer. They were remembering the man who took their dreams seriously, who had carried their hopes with him as though they mattered as much as his own.

In the end, perhaps it was always his courage that defined him. Frank Keegan’s courage was physical, descending into a poisoned mine in search of survivors. Kevin’s was quieter but no less real. Even after learning he had stage-4 cancer, he chose not to retreat from public life. Instead, he appeared at Newcastle’s Tyne Theatre, speaking to a packed house with characteristic warmth, humor and honesty about his illness. He joked about his treatment, reminisced about his extraordinary life and admitted that he hoped to return to St James’ Park one last time to thank the supporters who had given him so much.

Asked once more about the long-standing campaign for a statue in his honor, he gently brushed it aside. “You will have to wait until I die, I’m afraid,” he smiled. “My statue is the way you receive me.”

Few public figures have left behind a finer epitaph. The affection that greeted Kevin Keegan wherever he went was only partly about football. It was earned in the countless moments when he made other people feel that they mattered. Frank Keegan emerged from the darkness beneath West Stanley carrying men back into the light. More than a century later, his grandson spent a lifetime doing much the same.

The Delavals are no longer in residence, though. When the male line died out in 1814, the estate passed through marriage to the Astleys of Melton Constable in Norfolk — holders of the ancient barony of Hastings — and that’s why, as well as working for Edward Delaval Henry Astley, 22nd Baron Hastings, in the gift shop of his stately home, I spent my youth hanging out in Astley Park, collecting glasses in the Astley Arms or waiting for the bus on Astley Road to attend Astley High. (Our school’s local rivals at Ridley High were named for the viscounts who’d turned their Blyth fiefdom into a Victorian boomtown, and whose scion has just stood down from the House of Lords.)

“The feudal tradition is strong in Northumberland,” wrote the sociologist Henry Mess in 1928, and well into the 20th century, half of the county was held in great estates of over 10,000 acres. This was in part a legacy of the way the Far North of England had been governed in the Middle Ages. Being far from the royal centres of power in the South, and on the frontier with the usually hostile Kingdom of Scotland, a caste of Northumbrian warlords (and, uniquely in Durham, a Prince Bishop) were given quasi-royal authority to muster armies, hold courts, and punish disobedience. As Parliament treated the defence of the border as a purely local affair, and never raised any taxes for this purpose, they relied on the few northern magnates and their retainers, whom they compensated by adding barony to barony and office to office — until, by the 14th century, the greater part of England north of the Trent was held by the three great Houses of Neville, Lancaster and Percy.

The greatest of the blue-blooded Northumbrian magnates were the Earls, and later the Dukes, of Northumberland. One history of the House of Percy has noted that in the tumultuous North, the “Southern king’s writ hardly ran. In Percy country, there was Percy law backed by a Percy army paid for by Percy money”. The dynasty began with a Norman knight from Calvados who was granted lands in northern England. In the following centuries the family’s fortunes rose and fell with the vagaries of court politics, but they always had their Northumbrian stronghold at Alnwick Castle, from which they dominated the lands from the Tweed to the Tyne — with the assistance of lower-ranking armigerous families like the Delavals of Seaton.

By the 18th century the male line had died out, and, in an aristocratic sleight of hand, Sir Hugh Smithson — an obscure but wealthy Yorkshire baronet who had married a descendent of the last Percy Earl of Northumberland — assumed the famous surname and was elevated to ducal status. (Marcel Proust was fascinated by the sonority and evocation of high lineage of certain ancient titles and was always delighted when he came upon the name of the Duke of Northumberland, which he thought had a “sort of thunderous quality”.)

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Not all of England’s landed gentry had the good luck to find that their estates contained colossal mineral wealth, and as David Cannadine showed in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, the 20th century saw them lose a generation of sons in the First World War — as well as much of their prosperity, prestige and power, as they were assailed by death duties and democratic politics. It wasn’t long after Lloyd George’s famous speech in Newcastle in 1909 — where he quipped that “a fully-equipped duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts; and dukes are just as great a terror” — that the House of Lords lost its powers of veto over the commons, a key watershed in British history.

But while other great houses struggled to repel these assaults on their privileges, this was not the fate of the Kings of the North. As Henry Mess pointed out, “there is not the sharp divorce between feudalism and the new industrialism which is found in most other areas”. For the vast landholdings of the Percy dukes included some of the richest coalfields in Britain. This made their fortune and saw them take their place in the North East among a new industrial aristocracy of sharp-elbowed “Lords of Coal” — a group so wealthy that at her wedding to the Scots nobleman John Lyon in 1767, Mary Eleanor, the daughter of the Durham coal baron Sir George Bowes, was probably the richest heiress in Europe. The dynasty they founded led directly to the marriage of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon to the Duke of York in 1923: Queen Elizabeth II carries the DNA of hard-nosed Tyneside coal-owners.

The Percy family has survived setbacks. When George Orwell wrote in The Lion and the Unicorn that the “English ruling class are morally fairly sound” because “in time of war they are ready enough to get themselves killed”, he probably had in mind Lieutenant Alan Percy, the 9th Duke of Northumberland, who, in an odd echo of Harry Hotspur, fell leading a bayonet charge by the Grenadier Guards on the retreat to Dunkirk. The death of the playboy 11th Duke in 1995 after an amphetamine overdose was another blow. But the Percys endured by diversifying their coal wealth into a vast property portfolio, which has secured their place in the Sunday Times Rich List ever since.

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Certainly in comparison to, say, the Australian-born 13th Duke of Manchester, who was jailed for burglary in Las Vegas in 2016, the Percy family maintains a certain Edwardian grandeur, with their great castle in the country and Syon House, opposite Kew Gardens: a luxurious seat in the capital. Indeed, few places could match the Ruritanian splendour of Lady Melissa Percy’s marriage in 2013 when she travelled with her father Ralph (“Rafe”), the 12th Duke, through Alnwick with a retinue of liveried footmen in the yellow state coach that had carried the 3rd Duke of Northumberland to the coronation of the Bourbon King Charles X in Reims in 1825.

The Percy family still maintains a visible presence in the public life of the region. Among other patronages, the Duke of Northumberland is the President of the Charitable Community Foundation, and his wife is the Lord Lieutenant of the county of which she is the Duchess. There was even a charity football match at St James’ Park in 2007 between the North and South of the region, where star players such as Alan Shearer and Niall Quinn turned out under the respective colours of the Duke of Northumberland and the Earl of Durham to raise money for the Prince’s Trust. But the longevity of Northumbrian aristocrats like the Percys of Alnwick has been a story of adaptability — and alliance.

On Hood Street in Newcastle, just near the Theatre Royal, stands the graceful premises of one of the oldest private members clubs in the world. “The Northern Counties” was founded in 1829 by the nobility and gentry of Northumberland and Durham, and a painting on the Club’s main staircase shows a gathering of red-tailcoated Northumbrian grandees in the Fifties, including the Duke himself, with Viscounts Ridley and Allendale, and Field Marshal Sir Francis Festing (whose son Matthew became, in 2008, the Prince and Grand Master of the Order of Malta) — alongside representatives of the local monied classes who’d gentrified themselves through the coal trade.

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It’s somehow apt, therefore, that the family with the greatest fossil fuel-based wealth of all now has a major presence in the birthplace of carboniferous capitalism. When the Duke of Northumberland’s niece Lucy Cuthbert married the Saudi Prince Khalid bin Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud in 2011, few could’ve predicted that this would foreshadow the purchase of Newcastle United by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia ten years later. And it was striking, too, to observe that at the first match at St James’ Park after the Saudi takeover in October 2021, there in the director’s box next to the club’s new chairman, His Excellency Yasir Al-Rumayyan, were representatives of the old and new Geordie aristocracy, as the 5th Viscount Ridley took his place alongside the famous presenting duo (and Ambassadors of the Princes Trust): Anthony McPartland and Declan Donnelly.

As they entered the 21st century, the Percys could justifiably look out from the ramparts of Alnwick Castle with some confidence, knowing that if they face a cashflow problem they can always look down the back of the sofa for a spare Raphael. And yet the deference that they once enjoyed — and expected — is harder to sustain. When the 5th Duke’s tenants gathered for their annual dinner in 1859 they could still state their loyalty to the Percys with unfeigned enthusiasm:

Those relics of the feudal yoke
Still in the north remain unbroke:
That social yoke, with one accord
That binds the peasant to his Lord…

And yet just this year The Times reported a “second peasants revolt” as the citizens of Amble mustered in defiance of the Duke’s plans to build new homes on an area of common land. The relics of feudalism may live on in Northumberland, but the ties of lord and peasant, it seems, have started to fray.