Obituary of a formidable woman.

Anne Harper, who has died aged 83, was, for 40 years of her life, better known as Anne Scargill, wife of the firebrand miners’ leader Arthur Scargill.
For the first two decades of their marriage, she was a conventional miner’s wife, working as a clerk at the Co-op in Barnsley, bringing up her daughter, Margaret, and, although she was a member of the Labour Party, staying in the background politically.
It was not until the miners’ strike of 1984-85 that her activities in support of the strikers and their families brought her out of her husband’s shadow.
The dispute began in March 1984, when the National Coal Board announced plans to close 20 mines, with the loss of tens of thousands of jobs. Arthur Scargill, president of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), called for nationwide strike action and around 165,000 miners heeded the call, despite the fact that there had been no national ballot by NUM members.
Women formed support groups as soon as the strike began on March 9. One of the largest and most influential of these groups was Barnsley Women Against Pit Closures, of which Anne Scargill was credited as a co-founder. They organised a rally and march through Barnsley on May 12, and invited women’s support groups from all over the country to join them.
The response was huge, and at least 10,000 women attended the rally. Subsequently a national women’s rally was organised in London on August 11 1984. 15,000 people attended, including a wide selection of the metropolitan Left. Shortly before the rally, a unified national women’s support group was founded: Women Against Pit Closures (WAPC).
During the course of the year-long strike, Anne Scargill drove busloads of picketing women into the Nottinghamshire coalfields, where a ballot had been held and the majority of miners had chosen to carry on working. She spoke at rallies, helped to organise soup kitchens and set up courses to advise miners’ families on how to get benefits. In November she launched a Christmas appeal which was highly successful in raising funds to cover welfare and legal costs for striking miners and their families.
To begin with, many miners disapproved of their wives becoming involved. “They had to have their dinner on the table when they came in and they were really male chauvinists,” Anne recalled in a 2018 interview.
But the NUM leadership became increasingly convinced that the women’s movement was an asset, a perception bolstered in July 1984 when Anne Scargill and three others were arrested on the picket lines at Silverhill colliery in Nottinghamshire.
Rather than being attacked in the press Anne was praised for her pluck, down-to-earth manner – and her good looks. “With her blonde-streaked brown hair, her well-tailored trousers, her neat black sweater with its shining white shirt peeping over the collar, she hardly looked like an arch-criminal,” observed the Daily Mirror. “Mrs Scargill, in fact, is a nice-looking woman. The sort you’d notice – and Arthur is lucky to have a gutsy wife like this.”
The experience of her 14-hour incarceration in a police cell, during which she claimed she was strip-searched, seems to have been a turning point in Anne Scargill’s political trajectory.
“I was never as aggressive as I am now,” she told an interviewer in 1993. “I never thought I could hate anyone as much as I hated those police. The feeling has subsided, but I still have that sadness for what they did to me.”
This anger added to her zeal “to do our bit,” she recalled in 2014. “Margaret Thatcher had just smashed the steelworkers but she didn’t know what she was taking on once we got going.” But the reality was that Margaret Thatcher knew exactly what she was taking on, her government having strategically built up coal stocks in anticipation of the strike.
The dispute ended in defeat for the miners, who returned to work without a settlement in March 1985, after NUM delegates voted to call off the industrial action. The National Coal Board closed 25 pits. “If there had been a return-to-work vote among the women,” Anne Scargill insisted, “the answer would have been no.”
Women Against Pit Closures went on to campaign on wider Leftist issues including asylum seekers and refugees, equality and employment rights, medical aid for Cuba and the issues of nuclear power and nuclear weapons. In a tribute after Anne’s death, the Left-wing Labour MP Rebecca Long-Bailey said of her: “She consistently fought for political representation for working-class women, workers’ rights and anti-fascism.”
Anne Scargill returned to the front pages in 1992 when Michael Heseltine, the then Conservative president of the Board of Trade, announced plans to close up to 31 out of 50 remaining deep coal mines with the loss of 31,000 jobs. Inspired by the protesters at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, Anne Scargill became a key figure in setting up similar camps at threatened pits, led marches and was arrested for chaining herself to the railings at the Department of Trade and Industry. In April 1993 she made headlines by staging a five-day sit-in with other WAPC protestors down the Parkside coal mine near Newton-le-Willows in Merseyside, remaining 2,000 feet below ground for four nights.
Anne Scargill was fond of homely analogies, likening the policy of importing coal to “growing turnips in the back garden and then going out to buy them at the shops”. She was fighting, she claimed, “for our families, our future, our children’s future,” yet she conceded that women’s activism had contributed to the disruption of this traditional way of life of mining communities. “One man did say to me: ‘I want my wife back – her who used to do the ironing,’” she told an interviewer in 1993. “Miners, you know, tend to be a bit male chauvinistic.”
Anne continued to support her husband, founding the Socialist Labour Party with him in 1996. Standing unsuccessfully as a candidate for the party in local elections in Barnsley, she gave a rare insight into their relationship, commenting: “The only thing we have in common is a love of dogs and, I suppose, our politics. I like to rock and roll, he doesn’t. I like holidays, he doesn’t. I’m outgoing whereas Arthur, when he’s not performing, is very shy and reserved.”
The couple separated in 1998 and after their divorce in 2001 she reverted to her maiden name.
Anne Harper was born in Barnsley, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, on October 12 1941. Her father was a miner and member of the trade union branch committee at Woolley Colliery.
She first set eyes on Arthur Scargill, a fellow committee member, when he came to discuss union matters with her father. Her main interest at the time was going to discos, and he introduced her to the music of Big Bill Broonzy, but as she admitted later: “I suppose I should have known what I was letting myself in for. On our first date he took me to a Young Communist League debate with the Tories.”
They married in 1961, their daughter Margaret was born in 1962, and for many years from the mid-1960s she worked as a clerk at the local Co-op. After her husband was elected president of the NUM in 1981, she often accompanied him to rallies, but in a later book published by Barnsley WAPC, she recalled that she had led “a very, very boring life” and “was really at a bit of a loose end” before the 1984-85 strike.
The late Yorkshire miners’ MP Mick Welsh once recalled meeting Anne Scargill on a train in the early 1980s. En route, she said to him, “Arthur really needs to loosen up. Can’t you and the lads take him out one night and get him drunk?”
In 1996 she was made redundant from her £7,000 clerk’s job at the Co-op, but, finding that the business had advertised for 50 more workers, she took it to a tribunal, won back her job and stayed until retirement.
After the breakdown of her marriage she declined requests to talk about her ex-husband: “I’ve never, ever said owt. I’ve had hundreds and hundreds of pounds offered for my story, and I’m not washing my dirty linen in public.”

Her daughter survives her.

The majority of miners did not want to go out on strike in 1984, Arthur knew that, and that was why they would not hold a strike ballot, because he knew there would be a 'No' to going on strike, so he called them out on strike anyway, Donald Trump style, because he could do ......

Anne was one of the many miners wifes who stood by their husbands lduring the strike and helped in the only way they could during what was one the darkest periods in the history of both the National Union of Mineworkers and the Trade Union Movement.

RIP Anne, you should never be forgotten!

"Anne was one of the many miners wifes who stood by their husbands during the strike"

If you mean the 1984/85 'strike', there was a big difference between Anne Scargill and the striking miners' wives.

Then there are those irrespective of what others did when alive have no respect for them when they pass!

APLS
Utter rubbish

Handsomeminer

So it's utter poppycock is it ?

Are you on about that 'Show of Hands' ?

Very democratic.

Those miners just wanted to go to work and look after their families, they did not want to be foot soldiers in a class war, led by a commie.

"The majority of miners did not want to go out on strike in 1984" - TRUE.

"Arthur knew that, and that was why they would not hold a strike ballot, because he knew there would be a 'No' to going on strike" - TRUE.

"so he called them out on strike anyway, Donald Trump style, because he could do ......" - FALSE.

It follows that APLS's is not rubbish at all. In fact, it's 66.6% true.

And the big difference between Anne Scargill and the striking miners' wives was that Anne Scargill's husband wasn't on strike and was still getting his salary from his employers. That made it easy for her to 'support' him.

Anne, supporting Arthur ..........

"Aaarrrrthur"! ..... clap/clap/clap .... "Aaarrrrthur"! ..... clap/clap/clap .... "Aaarrrrthur"! ..... clap/clap/clap ....

and

"Aaaa-rthur Scargill"! ....... clap/clap - clap/clap/clap
"Aaaa-rthur Scargill"! ....... clap/clap - clap/clap/clap

followed by

"Aaaarthur Scaaar-gill"!
"Aaaarthur Scaaar-gill"!
"weeeee'll support you evermoooore, evermoooore,
"weeeee'll suppo-ort you-ou e-ver-more"!

Then they wonder why less people are posting!

A dignified obituary of a formidable woman despoiled. Disgrace.