At the Miners’ Welfare club in Worsbrough Dale, Tuesday afternoons are still a sacred affair. When I visit, 60 or so women, many in their late 80s, have gathered beneath the crimson banner of the National Union of Mineworkers. “Listen lad, you’re welcome to come in,” says one. “But you’ve only got ten minutes.” Why the rush? “Trust me,” she replies, “you don’t want to get in the way of these ladies and their bingo.”
Fortunately, when I mention the name of Worsbrough’s most famous resident, the bingo is momentarily forgotten. The room erupts: everyone has something to say about Arthur Scargill and the legacy of the miners’ strike, which ended in defeat 40 years ago this month. “Once it was over, he sold us down the river,” says one woman. “I went to school with him and he was a big-headed bone even then,” adds another. A third starts to tut: “He never really cared about us here.”
For a man once hailed as “King Arthur” in these parts, it is a remarkable fall from grace. After all, if Scargill had a Camelot, it was here in Worsbrough, the sandstone pit village in the West Riding of Yorkshire where he was born and raised. But just as Britain’s mining communities have dissolved in the decades since, so too has Scargill’s reputation. King Arthur was once one of the most famous men in the country: a fearsome orator, raised on coal and cold winters, whose articulate militancy was toasted in the New Left Review and despised in the Daily Mail. Today, aged 87, he lives a mile outside of Worsbrough. For those in the village who remember the strike, he might as well be in exile.
If Thatcher believed “there is no such thing as society”, the Worsbrough of Scargill’s childhood was proof to the contrary. Yes, it was a place of one-up, one-down houses without gas and electricity, and only storm lamps for lighting. But it was also a world of brass bands, bare-knuckle boxing and pigeon racing; a world where coal hung in the air and the clatter of industry echoed through the valley. It was, Scargill said in 1978, a “complete community”. Why would anyone leave?
The young Scargill never saw the need. As a child, he turned down the chance to take the 11-plus because it would’ve meant going to school in nearby Barnsley. As a young man, too, he stayed in Worsbrough despite working in another town’s colliery. Over the next two decades, as Scargill’s charismatic trade unionism saw him ascend the ranks of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), Worsbrough remained central to his identity. In 1960, as the 22-year-old representative of the local Communist Party, he promised to make “make Worsbrough a model mining village”. That conviction never wavered. It was from here that Scargill – by then the hero of the Battle of Saltley Gate, the defining victory of the successful miners’ strike in 1972, as well as of the strike that brought down Ted Heath in 1974 – launched his campaign to become NUM president in 1982. And it was from here, two years later, that Scargill triggered the biggest industrial dispute in post-war Britain.
“History will vindicate our action,” Scargill would later say of the miners’ courageous response to the government’s decision to close 20 mines in Britain. The reality was often less glamourous. What followed was a year of picket lines, paramilitary police brutality and widespread poverty, as the miners, described by Thatcher as “the enemy within”, fought to protect their livelihoods. A year later, on 3 March 1985, they were forced to concede. “SURRENDER,” gloated the front page of the Mail.
Countless autopsies have been performed in the decades since. Did Scargill split the strikers by refusing to ballot the NUM’s members beforehand, leading to accusations of anti-democratic leadership? (Probably.) Did, as Scargill insisted at the time, Thatcher lie about her intention to close 50 more pits? (Definitely.) Forgotten, meanwhile, were the strikers themselves and the communities they’d fought to protect. Forty years after being crushed, what has happened to “the enemy within”?
Visit Worsbrough today and, except for a weathered monument and the weekly bingo at the Miners’ Welfare, there is little sign of the area’s industrial heritage. Woolley Colliery, where Scargill worked, has been turned into an anaemic housing estate. Nearby Cortonwood Colliery, the first to go on strike in 1984, is now a retail park – a plaque on the wall of a Morrisons supermarket the only clue to its history. Worsbrough’s brass band didn’t even get that: its closure last year was announced with a Facebook post.
Soon, all we be joined 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 current general secretary, believes it will be forced to close before it can commemorate the strike’s 50th anniversary. “Just looking at the age of membership and the cost of being a trade union, it’s not sustainable,” he tells me. Now, he explains, with every major coal mine shut and new mining licences banned, the NUM’s membership is largely made up of administrative staff, health and safety officers and legacy members. It still campaigns for improved pensions and compensation for its former members, but that won’t sustain it. “We may turn into some sort of association or charity to preserve the NUM’s legacy,” Kitchen explains. In fact, he tells me that plans for that transition are already underway, the final dissolution of a union that, in 1922, numbered over a million strong.
A former miner at Kellingley, the last deep pit to shut in 2015, Kitchen delivers the news of the NUM’s looming demise – and with it the symbolic end of Britain’s industrial era – with pragmatic resignation. As Kitchen observes, with the crises in the Middle East and Ukraine, the UK’s energy independence has never seemed so important. “Yet the government insists on pushing nuclear, which is more expensive than coal, or things like Drax [a power station largely powered by imported wood pellets], which is worse for the environment.” He’s quick to point out that the UK continues to import millions of tonnes of coal from abroad – much of it from the US and Australia – when Britain has around 80 million tons of it in shallow deposits. “But I can’t see Labour listening to us on this.”
Across the former coalfields of South Yorkshire, the fall-out from all this can be measured in two ways. First, on paper: in reports about its high rates of deprivation, poor mental health due to “post-mining woes”, and low life expectancy. But it can also be witnessed in the towns and villages themselves – in the cracks appearing on their surfaces.
In Worsbrough, what now passes for a high street is the antithesis to Scargill’s “complete community”: there is a tanning salon, a vape shop, a nail bar and an Asda – but not a single café or communal space. On one side, a community notice board advertises a scheme that offers discounted groceries for residents. Just up the road, the entrance to a derelict nursing home, closed since 2022 for health and safety breaches, still promises “a home away from home”.
“This place is horrible,” says Ann, who lives next door to the house owned by Scargill during the strike. It seems an ungenerous characterisation, given Worsbrough’s sweeping Pennine views and occasional chocolate-box charm. “It’s the crime,” she explains. “I can’t even leave potted plants in the garden – a few weeks ago, some kids stole my gnome!”
Along with a third of the Barnsley South constituency that contains Worsbrough, Ann voted for Reform in last year’s general election – and blames the Labour government, along with the Labour MP who won, for the area’s decline. Most locals I speak to share her concern about crime, but not her diagnosis. Roy Bowser, a Labour councillor in the ward, agrees there is “a real problem with drugs and crime” in the area, but blames the Conservative government that, after the strike, “ripped out the heart of this community and put nothing back”.
“It’s all Thatcher’s fault,” nods one woman who lives on Pantry Hill, next to where Scargill’s childhood home once stood (it has since been knocked down and rebuilt). She wishes to stay anonymous because “there’s still tension in the area about the strike”. She describes how one neighbour, a local ex-miner, is still called a “scab” for crossing a picket line 40 years ago. “The adults here still have to live with it,” she says. “It’s their children who are able to move on.” But on to what?
Jamie, 23, is supposed to be one of those children. I meet him on his way home from a job centre in Barnsley. “I’m looking for something in retail,” he explains, “but there isn’t much around. Most people my age just want to leave.” He goes on to describe how his father used to help with the machinery at the nearby mines, but when I ask about Scargill, he replies: “Who’s that?”
It’s a surprising but forgivable response. After all, Scargill had stood down as the leader of the NUM by the time Jamie was born. And even among ex-miners in Worsbrough, there’s a sense of unease about how Scargill should be remembered: as the local hero who went to war with Thatcher, or as the traitor who turned them and their community into collateral.
In September 1985, six months after the strike ended, Scargill decided to cash out. As Worsbrough’s unemployed miners reckoned with a year of poverty and mounting debt, King Arthur purchased the most glamorous property in the area, Treelands – a four-bedroom detached house described at the time by estate agents as a “monument to elegance”. The optics weren’t lost on Worsbrough’s locals: Scargill, the grumble began, had “started the strike with a big union and a small house, and ended it with a big house and a small union”.
The reality was even more unedifying. As well as buying Treelands, reportedly with a loan from a separate miners’ organisation, Scargill also held on to an apartment in London’s Barbican estate that he had rented – using NUM funds – since becoming leader. Unaware or uncaring of the irony, in 1993 he tried and failed to purchase it under Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme. Kitchen, who has since fought various legal battles with Scargill over his expenses and the flat (which he eventually succeeded in buying), refused to be drawn on the subject. Yet he has previously said that he doesn’t “see much difference between the way Arthur has lived his life and the capitalist system he built a reputation for fighting”.
Meanwhile, with his property portfolio secured, Scargill turned his attention to more pressing matters. In 1996, with New Labour in ascendance, he founded the rival Socialist Labour Party, and stood against Peter Mandelson in Hartlepool in the 2001 general election. On that balmy June night, Scargill, then 63, walked away with a measly 2.4 per cent of the vote, as well as one of his campaigners who, she says, he later seduced and persuaded to have a threesome. Whatever the truth, around the same time, Scargill and his wife Anne, the Barnsley-born co-founder of the National Women Against Pit Closures movement, divorced after four decades of marriage, having separated in 1998. The following year, he stepped down as leader of the NUM.
And what of Scargill today? In 2024, he stepped down from the leadership of the Socialist Labour Party, and now makes only very rare public appearances. He attended just a handful of the events commemorating the 40th anniversary of the start of the strike this time last year; at one in Doncaster, he was photographed alongside George Galloway, wearing a red tie and Free Palestine badge. “To be honest, he’s pretty reclusive,” says a long-time ally. “I saw him the other week in Asda,” adds one of the bingo ladies.
When I fail to find him in Asda, I drive to Treelands. You can’t miss it: a secluded grey-stone manor guarded by CCTV, conifers on two sides and the M1 on the other. Across the road, a sign points to a cattery down the lane.
Almost as soon as I knock, the door is opened by Nell Myers, the former NUM press officer and Morning Star journalist who is now Scargill’s partner. Now 82 but sharp as ever, she smiles and elegantly dances around the conversation. It won’t be possible to speak to Scargill, she says. But she’s happy to play the press officer. When I ask about Worsbrough’s decline, she talks of the strength that comes from a “continuous struggle” and how Scargill still holds the “same values and principles”; she insists the strike’s end “was clouded in misinformation”.
And then something peculiar happens. When I mention the NUM’s impending closure, a third person, hidden from view, starts to slowly close the door. It can’t be Myers, who is standing to one side of it, and there is only one car in the driveway. After Myers flashes a glance at our hidden companion, I ask if it’s Scargill, and if he might consider coming out for a chat. “No, no, no,” Myers stutters unconvincingly. “It’s somebody else.” She checks to see if I believe her. (I don’t.)
It quickly becomes clear that our conversation is over. As Myers shuffles to one side, the person behind the door starts to shut it again. Even in his castle, it seems King Arthur does not want to talk. But should we be surprised? What else could be expected from the man who led his army into battle, and abandoned them after defeat?
[See also: The economic consequences of the miners’ strike]
Content from our partners
Related
