The Cork Mother Jones Committee is sad to announce the passing on Thursday 10th April 2025 of our great friend Anne Scargill following a long illness with Alzheimer’s disease.
Anne was a lifelong community activist in the North of England.
She was a co-founder of the Women Against Pit Closures (WAPC) who took a key part in the struggle in defence of their mining communities during the Miners Strike in 1984/85. Later she remained active on social justice issues alongside her great friend Betty Cook for over 40 years and took part in the occupation of the Parkside coal mine over the Easter weekend in April 1993. This underground sit-in required extraordinary courage, made international news and highlighted the dreadful treatment of the mining communities after the strike was long over.
Anne Harper was born on the 12th October 1941. Her background was totally connected to coal mining.
“I was brought up in the heart of the Barnsley coalfield with my mam, dad and sister Joan in a terraced row in Barugh Green. There was a pub called the Phoenix at one end of the row and a Co-op at the other. My dad was Elliott Harper, a coal miner from a big family of colliers in Gawber. My mother was Harriet Hardy from Skelmanthorpe near Huddersfield.”
From Anne & Betty United by the Struggle. 2020
Anne Harper met a young trade union and political activist Arthur Scargill in Barnsley when she was 18 when he visited her father who was also a trade union man. They married in 1961. In their book with Ian Clayton, Anne describes their life and adventures as the union activist Arthur rose in the ranks of the National Union of Miners (NUM) to eventually become the president of the powerful NUM. She traveled extensively and experienced life in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. She attended the World Social Forum in Mumbai, traveled to Australia and visited Cuba where she encountered Fidel Castro. She met Hortensia Bussi, the widow of Salvador Allende in Cuba also.
She remained very proud of the way, her then husband, Arthur led the miners and proud of the women who joined in at the pickets, at the food kitchens and the marches. She also noted that as the men marched back to work at the end of the strike, many women had been changed by their activism during the strike. Anne began to spend time with women’s activist groups. Taking inspiration from the Greenham Common women, the WAPC organised several pit camps outside mines to highlight the mine closures by the Tory government, Anne spent a year in the Grimethorpe pit-camp. She even sat in a camp outside the Tory party offices and the Department of Trade in London. And like Mother Jones, she was arrested on several occasions, once placed in a van prison cage and strip searched! She became even more determined to continue picketing and did so up and down the country wherever she was needed..
In recent times Anne accompanied by her friend Betty Cook, she visited the Spirit of Mother Jones Festival in Cork in 2014 and 2015 and returned in 2019 to take part in the March of the Mill Children recreated in Shandon that year.
Anne and Betty spoke at the festivals and sang Mal Finch’s great anthem ‘Women of the Working Class’. She enjoyed signing the visitors book in the Cork City Mayoral Office in the presence of the Lord Mayor of Cork, Chris O’Leary in 2014.
The women marched each year in the huge Durham Gala and proudly carried their ‘Daughters of Mother Jones’ banner along the parade route. Anne was just so happy to be amongst mining community friends. She also visited Jonesborough in the Appalachian mountains to meet up with the Daughters of Mother Jones colleagues such as Marat Moore and Libby Lindsay.
With a glint in her eye, Anne loved to tell funny and hair raising stories about her activities. Laced with wit and shrewd and perceptive observations,she certainly did not stand on ceremony in the presence of the famous or those charged with upholding the law if she felt she was right. Her humour was ever present and her positive energy radiated through her activism. She always knew which side she was on and followed passionately in the footsteps of her hero, Mother Jones!
Ní bheidh a leithéid ann arís.
To Anne’s daughter Margaret and family we extend our sympathy and also to Betty Cook, her great friend and colleague in activism, and to her many comrades. May she rest in peace.
