Arthur Scargill - Early Life

Early Life

Scargill was born in Worsbrough Dale, Barnsley, Yorkshire. His father, Harold, was a miner and a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. His mother Alice (née Pickering) was a professional cook. Arthur was doted on by his parents as he was an only child, and his mother had previously been told that she was unable to have children. He did not take the Eleven plus exam and went to Worsbrough Dale School (now called the Elmhirst School), leaving at 15 to become a coal miner at Woolley Colliery from 1953, where he became the pit delegate ten years later. Scargill was a member of the Young Communist League from 1955 to 1962, when he joined the Labour Party.

In 1953, at the age of 15, he left school and went to work at the (now closed) Woolley Colliery which at that time employed 3,000 miners. He remained at Woolley, training to become an underground and coal face worker, for over 19 years.

By 1955 he had become involved in politics as well as trade union activity; he joined the Young Communist League, becoming its Yorkshire District Chair in 1956 and, later in the same year, a member of its National Executive Committee.

Taking a deep interest in education, he regularly attended Workers' Education Association (WEA) classes and Cooperative Party educational programmes (much later, in 1970, he was elected a member of the regional committee of the Cooperative Retail Services in Barnsley and a delegate to its national conference. He also represented the Barnsley Coop. at Cooperative congresses).

Later, in 1962, he undertook a three-year, part-time course at the University of Leeds, where he studied economics, industrial relations and social history.

In 1957 he was elected NUM Yorkshire Area Youth Delegate, and attended the World Youth Festival in Moscow as a representative of the Yorkshire miners. In 1958, he attended the World Federation of Trade Unions' youth congress in Prague.

He joined and has remained a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Dismarmament to which the NUM is affiliated. He has also been an active opponent of civil nuclear power for 45 years.

In 1961, he was elected a member of the Woolley NUM Branch Committee; in 1965 he was elected Branch Delegate from Woolley to the Yorkshire NUM Area Council and in 1969 was elected a member of the Yorkshire NUM Area Executive Committee.