On the Miners’ Welfare membership in Worsbrough Dale, Tuesday afternoons are nonetheless a sacred affair. After I go to, 60 or so ladies, many of their late 80s, have gathered beneath the crimson banner of the Nationwide Union of Mineworkers. “Pay attention lad, you’re welcome to return in,” says one. “However you’ve solely bought ten minutes.” Why the frenzy? “Belief me,” she replies, “you don’t wish to get in the best way of those women and their bingo.”
Luckily, after I point out the identify of Worsbrough’s most well-known resident, the bingo is momentarily forgotten. The room erupts: everybody has one thing to say about Arthur Scargill and the legacy of the miners’ strike, which led to defeat 40 years in the past this month. “As soon as it was over, he offered us down the river,” says one girl. “I went to highschool with him and he was a big-headed bone even then,” provides one other. A 3rd begins to tut: “He by no means actually cared about us right here.”
For a person as soon as hailed as “King Arthur” in these elements, it’s a outstanding fall from grace. In spite of everything, if Scargill had a Camelot, it was right here in Worsbrough, the sandstone pit village within the West Driving of Yorkshire the place he was born and raised. However simply as Britain’s mining communities have dissolved within the many years since, so too has Scargill’s repute. King Arthur was as soon as one of the well-known males within the nation: a fearsome orator, raised on coal and chilly winters, whose articulate militancy was toasted within the New Left Review and despised within the Day by day Mail. As we speak, aged 87, he lives a mile outdoors of Worsbrough. For these within the village who bear in mind the strike, he may as effectively be in exile.
If Thatcher believed “there isn’t a such factor as society”, the Worsbrough of Scargill’s childhood was proof on the contrary. Sure, it was a spot of one-up, one-down homes with out gasoline and electrical energy, and solely storm lamps for lighting. But it surely was additionally a world of brass bands, bare-knuckle boxing and pigeon racing; a world the place coal hung within the air and the clatter of trade echoed via the valley. It was, Scargill mentioned in 1978, a “full neighborhood”. Why would anybody depart?
The younger Scargill by no means noticed the necessity. As a baby, he turned down the prospect to take the eleven-plus as a result of it might’ve meant going to highschool in close by Barnsley. As a younger man, too, he stayed in Worsbrough regardless of working in one other city’s colliery. Over the following 20 years, as Scargill’s charismatic commerce unionism noticed him ascend the ranks of the Nationwide Union of Mineworkers (NUM), Worsbrough remained central to his identification. In 1960, because the 22-year-old consultant of the native Communist Celebration, he promised to make “make Worsbrough a mannequin mining village”. That conviction by no means wavered. It was from right here that Scargill – by then the hero of the Battle of Saltley Gate, the defining victory of the profitable miners’ strike in 1972, in addition to of the strike that introduced down Ted Heath in 1974 – launched his marketing campaign to develop into NUM president in 1982. And it was from right here, two years later, that Scargill triggered the most important industrial dispute in post-war Britain.
“Historical past will vindicate our motion,” Scargill would later say of the miners’ brave response to the federal government’s resolution to shut 20 mines in Britain. The fact was typically much less glamourous. What adopted was a yr of picket strains, paramilitary police brutality and widespread poverty, because the miners, described by Thatcher as “the enemy inside”, fought to guard their livelihoods. A yr later, on 3 March 1985, they have been pressured to concede. “SURRENDER,” gloated the entrance web page of the Mail.
Numerous autopsies have been carried out within the many years since. Did Scargill cut up the strikers by refusing to poll the NUM’s members beforehand, resulting in accusations of anti-democratic management? (In all probability.) Did, as Scargill insisted on the time, Thatcher lie about her intention to shut 50 extra pits? (Positively.) Forgotten, in the meantime, have been the strikers themselves and the communities they’d fought to guard. Forty years after being crushed, what has occurred to “the enemy inside”?
Go to Worsbrough at the moment and, aside from a weathered monument and the weekly bingo on the Miners’ Welfare, there may be little signal of the world’s industrial heritage. Woolley Colliery, the place Scargill labored, has been became an anaemic housing property. Close by Cortonwood Colliery, the primary to go on strike in 1984, is now a retail park – a plaque on the wall of a Morrisons grocery store the one clue to its historical past. Worsbrough’s brass band didn’t even get that: its closure final yr was introduced with a Fb submit.
Quickly, all we be joined essentially the most symbolic scalp of all. The NUM, which boasted 250,000 members when Scargill was elected president, now represents fewer than 90. And Chris Kitchen, its present normal secretary, believes it will likely be pressured to shut earlier than it may possibly commemorate the strike’s fiftieth anniversary. “Simply wanting on the age of membership and the price of being a commerce union, it’s not sustainable,” he tells me. Now, he explains, with each main coal mine shut and new mining licences banned, the NUM’s membership is essentially made up of administrative workers, well being and security officers and legacy members. It nonetheless campaigns for improved pensions and compensation for its former members, however that gained’t maintain it. “We might flip into some type of affiliation or charity to protect the NUM’s legacy,” Kitchen explains. In actual fact, he tells me that plans for that transition are already underway, the ultimate dissolution of a union that, in 1922, numbered over one million robust.
A former miner at Kellingley, the final deep pit to close in 2015, Kitchen delivers the information of the NUM’s looming demise – and with it the symbolic finish of Britain’s industrial period – with pragmatic resignation. As Kitchen observes, with the crises within the Center East and Ukraine, the UK’s power independence has by no means appeared so necessary. “But the federal government insists on pushing nuclear, which is dearer than coal, or issues like Drax [a power station largely powered by imported wood pellets], which is worse for the setting.” He’s fast to level out that the UK continues to import thousands and thousands of tonnes of coal from overseas – a lot of it from the US and Australia – when Britain has round 80 million tons of it in shallow deposits. “However I can’t see Labour listening to us on this.”
Throughout the previous coalfields of South Yorkshire, the fall-out from all this may be measured in two methods. First, on paper: in experiences about its excessive charges of deprivation, poor psychological well being attributable to “post-mining woes”, and low life expectancy. But it surely can be witnessed within the cities and villages themselves – within the cracks showing on their surfaces.
In Worsbrough, what now passes for a excessive road is the antithesis to Scargill’s “full neighborhood”: there’s a tanning salon, a vape store, a nail bar and an Asda – however not a single café or communal house. On one aspect, a neighborhood discover board advertises a scheme that gives discounted groceries for residents. Simply up the street, the doorway to a derelict nursing dwelling, closed since 2022 for well being and security breaches, nonetheless guarantees “a house away from dwelling”.
“This place is horrible,” says Ann, who lives subsequent door to the home owned by Scargill in the course of the strike. It appears an ungenerous characterisation, given Worsbrough’s sweeping Pennine views and occasional chocolate-box allure. “It’s the crime,” she explains. “I can’t even depart potted vegetation within the backyard – a couple of weeks in the past, some children stole my gnome!”
Together with a 3rd of the Barnsley South constituency that accommodates Worsbrough, Ann voted for Reform in final yr’s normal election – and blames the Labour authorities, together with the Labour MP who gained, for the world’s decline. Most locals I converse to share her concern about crime, however not her prognosis. Roy Bowser, a Labour councillor within the ward, agrees there may be “an actual downside with medication and crime” within the space, however blames the Conservative authorities that, after the strike, “ripped out the center of this neighborhood and put nothing again”.
“It’s all Thatcher’s fault,” nods one girl who lives on Pantry Hill, subsequent to the place Scargill’s childhood dwelling as soon as stood (it has since been knocked down and rebuilt). She needs to remain nameless as a result of “there’s nonetheless pressure within the space in regards to the strike”. She describes how one neighbour, an area ex-miner, continues to be known as a “scab” for crossing a picket line 40 years in the past. “The adults right here nonetheless must dwell with it,” she says. “It’s their kids who’re capable of transfer on.” However on to what?
Jamie, 23, is meant to be a kind of kids. I meet him on his manner dwelling from a job centre in Barnsley. “I’m on the lookout for one thing in retail,” he explains, “however there isn’t a lot round. Most individuals my age simply wish to depart.” He goes on to explain how his father used to assist with the equipment on the close by mines, however after I ask about Scargill, he replies: “Who’s that?”
It’s a stunning however forgivable response. In spite of everything, Scargill had stood down because the chief of the NUM by the point Jamie was born. And even amongst ex-miners in Worsbrough, there’s a way of unease about how Scargill must be remembered: because the native hero who went to battle with Thatcher, or because the traitor who turned them and their neighborhood into collateral.
In September 1985, six months after the strike ended, Scargill determined to money out. As Worsbrough’s unemployed miners reckoned with a yr of poverty and mounting debt, King Arthur bought essentially the most glamorous property within the space, Treelands – a four-bedroom indifferent home described on the time by property brokers as a “monument to class”. The optics weren’t misplaced on Worsbrough’s locals: Scargill, the grumble started, had “began the strike with a giant union and a small home, and ended it with a giant home and a small union”.
The fact was much more unedifying. In addition to shopping for Treelands, reportedly with a mortgage from a separate miners’ organisation, Scargill additionally held on to an residence in London’s Barbican property that he had rented – utilizing NUM funds – since turning into chief. Unaware or uncaring of the irony, in 1993 he tried and didn’t buy it beneath Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme. Kitchen, who has since fought numerous authorized battles with Scargill over his bills and the flat (which he ultimately succeeded in shopping for), refused to be drawn on the topic. But he has beforehand mentioned that he doesn’t “see a lot distinction between the best way Arthur has lived his life and the capitalist system he constructed a repute for preventing”.
In the meantime, together with his property portfolio secured, Scargill turned his consideration to extra urgent issues. In 1996, with New Labour in ascendance, he based the rival Socialist Labour Celebration, and stood towards Peter Mandelson in Hartlepool within the 2001 normal election. On that balmy June evening, Scargill, then 63, walked away with a measly 2.4 per cent of the vote, in addition to considered one of his campaigners who, she says, he later seduced and persuaded to have a threesome. Regardless of the fact, across the similar time, Scargill and his spouse Anne, the Barnsley-born co-founder of the Nationwide Girls In opposition to Pit Closures motion, divorced after 4 many years of marriage, having separated in 1998. The next yr, he stepped down as chief of the NUM.
And what of Scargill at the moment? In 2024, he stepped down from the management of the Socialist Labour Celebration, and now makes solely very uncommon public appearances. He attended only a handful of the occasions commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the beginning of the strike this time final yr; at one in Doncaster, he was photographed alongside George Galloway, sporting a purple tie and Free Palestine badge. “To be trustworthy, he’s fairly reclusive,” says a long-time ally. “I noticed him the opposite week in Asda,” provides one of many bingo women.
After I fail to seek out him in Asda, I drive to Treelands. You possibly can’t miss it: a secluded grey-stone manor guarded by CCTV, conifers on two sides and the M1 on the opposite. Throughout the street, an indication factors to a cattery down the lane.
Virtually as quickly as I knock, the door is opened by Nell Myers, the previous NUM press officer and Morning Star journalist who’s now Scargill’s companion. Now 82 however sharp as ever, she smiles and elegantly dances across the dialog. It gained’t be attainable to talk to Scargill, she says. However she’s comfortable to play the press officer. After I ask about Worsbrough’s decline, she talks of the energy that comes from a “steady battle” and the way Scargill nonetheless holds the “similar values and rules”; she insists the strike’s finish “was clouded in misinformation”.
After which one thing peculiar occurs. After I point out the NUM’s impending closure, a 3rd particular person, hidden from view, begins to slowly shut the door. It will possibly’t be Myers, who’s standing to at least one aspect of it, and there is just one automobile within the driveway. After Myers flashes a look at our hidden companion, I ask if it’s Scargill, and if he may take into account popping out for a chat. “No, no, no,” Myers stutters unconvincingly. “It’s any person else.” She checks to see if I consider her. (I don’t.)
It rapidly turns into clear that our dialog is over. As Myers shuffles to at least one aspect, the particular person behind the door begins to close it once more. Even in his citadel, it appears King Arthur doesn’t wish to speak. However ought to we be stunned? What else might be anticipated from the person who led his military into battle, and deserted them after defeat?
[See also: The economic consequences of the miners’ strike]