Anne Harper obituary
One unexpected but significant outcome of the year-long miners’ strike 40 years ago was its impact on radicalising a generation of women who lived in the areas of the British coalfields,Anne Harper, who has died aged 83, then the wife of Arthur Scargill, the president of the National Union of Mineworkers, emerged from domestic obscurity in 1984 to embrace a life of political activism, and in doing so provided an inspirational role model for many thousands of others with similar backgrounds,She was arrested twice – once during the 1984-85 strike for obstructing a police officer, leading to a strip search and being held in a cell for 14 hours; and later, in 1992, after further pit closures were announced, for chaining herself to the railings outside the Department of Trade and Industry,During the strike she led marches, drove busloads of like-minded women pickets to demonstrations and organised soup kitchens and welfare support,Staging subsequent protests in 1992-93 against the closures that presaged the end of the British coal industry, she demonstrated at the Oxfordshire home of Michael Heseltine, the then relevant government minister as president of the Board of Trade; occupied the main conference room of Markham Main colliery, Doncaster; organised protest camps outside seven pits threatened with closure; and with three other women spent four nights on a sit-in 2,000ft underground at Parkside colliery, Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside.
On one occasion in 1993 she superglued the office doors of Jim Logan, the pit manager at Grimethorpe colliery, South Yorkshire; when she next met him, five years later, it was as the fiance of her GP doctor daughter, Margaret,Anne Scargill (as she was known until divorce in 2001) surprised herself when in May 1984, shortly after the start of the “Great Strike” – as she termed it – she plunged into direct political engagement after a march through her hometown of Barnsley,Thousands of women had joined the demonstration in support of their 165,000 menfolk, on strike although without a national ballot,There followed another, larger march in London and Women Against Pit Closures was formed with Anne Scargill as one of the founders,She learned to speak in public and grew in confidence, determination and audacity.
She did not look back and when the strike was over moved on to campaign on wider issues concerning human rights, equality and employment.Pin-box smart and always immaculately turned out, Anne Scargill proved to be a fearless leader of others.She was outgoing, a funny woman and immensely practical.“Get real girls!” she told her fellow activists if they got distracted by irrelevancies.She was acutely aware of the dinner-on-the-table traditional role of miners’ wives, as followed by her own family for generations.
She knew, too, that as she put it: “miners tended to be a bit male chauvinistic”,One of them told her after the strike that he wanted his wife back – “her who used to do the ironing”,She said once: “It’s fair to say that some women did go back to that, but most women were changed for ever by the strike,”She had joined the Labour party in 1982, the year after her husband became president of the NUM, but found her political independence through joint action with other women,She never told her husband what she was doing in advance, although she did once leave him a note on the kitchen table reading: “I will not be home at 5pm.
You will know why.”Yet in a memoir published in 2020, written with her friend and co-activist Betty Cook (Anne and Betty: United by the Struggle) she confessed she was “still a bit uncomfortable at calling myself a feminist”.The foreword to the book was written by the actor Maxine Peake, who also wrote the play Queens of the Coal Age, based on the women’s action to resist the pit closures.Anne was born in Barnsley, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and grew up in the nearby village of Barugh Green.She was the third of four children born to a miner, Elliott Harper, and his wife, Harriet (nee Hardy), from Skelmanthorpe.
She and her younger sister, Joan, were predeceased by two sons (Elliott, who was stillborn, and Ken, who died aged 10 months from meningitis).A former cook, their mother ran a tidy house – she was “tight enough to nip a currant in two” according to her daughter.Their father, who had taken part in the 1926 general strike, was politically active and a union official.He had a secondary job as a chimney sweep and money was always short.Anne went to Darton Hall school (now Darton academy), leaving, aged 15, for a job winding wire for electric motors.
Her world would change four years later when a young Arthur Scargill called at the family home on NUM business.The couple married the following year, in 1961, and moved in with Arthur’s father, Harold, a retired miner, who remained with them until he died in 1989.Margaret was born in 1962.Although Arthur provided some early education for his young wife in politics, of more practical use was that he taught her to drive.He also encouraged her to study for a diploma, which enabled her to take a job as an accounts clerk at the Barnsley Co-op, joining in 1967.
She had worked there for 31 years when she was made redundant and offered £4,000 in compensation for the job, which was then earning her £7,000 a year.She refused the money, challenging Co-operative Retail Services at an industrial tribunal on the grounds that they were advertising for new staff, and was reinstated in 1998, shortly before the hearing took place.In the same year she stood unsuccessfully for the Worsbrough ward of Barnsley council as a candidate for the Socialist Labour party, founded by her husband two years earlier in protest at the Labour party’s abandonment of its commitment to nationalisation.She had been lonely in the course of her marriage and would write later that the couple had little in common, apart from a shared interest in their airedale terriers and subsequently in politics.She liked jazz, rock’n’roll and holidays, none of which were of much concern to her husband.
They had grown apart by the time they separated in 1998, but she wrote in her memoir that his decision that they should part still came as a shock.She is survived by Margaret and by twin grandsons, Henry and Thomas.Anne Harper (Scargill), political activist, born 12 October 1941; died 10 April 2025
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