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Newsletter February 2006

Obituary: Betty Heathfield: Miners' heroine who organised women's support groups to sustain the strikers

Geoffrey Goodman
Wednesday February 22, 2006
The Guardian

It is still generally assumed that the 1984-85 miners' strike was a battle between one woman and one man - prime minister Margaret Thatcher and NUM president Arthur Scargill. But there was another woman involved. Betty Heathfield, who has died aged 78, was the wife of Scargill's chief lieutenant, the union general secretary Peter Heathfield, and by the end of the bitter dispute she had become nationally known as "the miners' heroine".
.....Betty's role was to help create, organise, coordinate and sustain the women's support groups for the striking miners under the umbrella organisation she chaired, Women Against Pit Closures. Nothing on such a scale had been seen before in a British industrial dispute. Across the coalfields, women's groups sprang up, largely inspired by Betty's example from her small family home in Chesterfield. Even at the end of the strike, she could still organise more than 2,000 miners' wives to rally at Chesterfield football ground to demand help for the thousands of families left deprived, some penniless, by the dispute.
.....During the strike itself, Betty and Anne Scargill, Arthur's then wife, led the national campaign to help feed, clothe and sustain a lifeline of hope for miners' families in every pit village in the country. They organised school holiday breaks for children and, with financial aid from other trade unions and street and house-to-house collections, somehow kept alive a flame of hope. Much of the public support can be attributed to Betty's remarkable dedication, relentless courage and leadership.
.....Many observers believe the women's support movement was the most significant element of the miners' dispute; certainly, it was a powerful factor in sustaining the strike for 12 months from March 1984. In previous industrial disputes in Britain, certainly since the end of the second world war, strikers' wives have generally been regarded as reluctant allies or silent onlookers. The Betty Heathfield campaign changed that.
.....Even after the return to work, the women maintained a platform, lending support to other disputes, most notably Rupert Murdoch's clash with the print unions that followed his move to Wapping in 1986. Betty and Anne Scargill toured the mining areas of the United States and Canada seeking help for the depressed mining communities of Britain.
.....Betty Heathfield was born into a working-class mining family in Chesterfield. Both her grandfathers had been Derbyshire miners; her father, Billy Vardy, was a miner before the first world war, and then, having been wounded, moved into the gas industry.
.....His exceptionally intelligent eldest daughter excelled at Chesterfield girls' high school - the top local grammar school - and won a county scholarship which should have taken her to university. As a teenager, however, she was nervous, shy and reluctant to push herself. Her headteacher sought to persuade the family to let her continue, but they were too poor to support such ambitions and she left school at 16 for a secretarial job at a local engineering company. Her weekly wage was vital to the household.
.....Leaving school in 1943, in the middle of the second world war, Betty joined the local auxiliary fire service, and it was here that she became interested in politics. Her family were characteristic Labour party people, but at the end of the war the experience of hearing the Communist party leader Harry Pollitt speak at a local meeting persuaded her to join the Young Communist League. Her path to a radical leftwing lifestyle was established and she went on to become a full member of the Communist party.
.....She met her future husband at Chesterfield's youth cycling club. He was a leftwing radical active in the Labour party and the NUM. They married in 1953, when he was still a working miner and 13 years before he became a full-time NUM official.
.....The most poignant moment of Betty's life came four years after the miners' strike when, in 1989, her 36-year-long marriage broke down. She and Peter had been a devoted couple, with four grown-up children and her very much the driving political force. Friends were stunned by the separation; Peter moved to Worksop to live with Sue Rolstone, a woman 22 years his junior, whom he married after divorcing Betty in 2001.
.....Many who knew the Heathfields blamed the marital break-up on the pyschological impact of the strike on them both, particularly on Peter. The Scargills, too, were divorced in 2001, after 37 years of marriage.
.....Betty tried to reconstruct her life by picking up on her earlier educational talents and studying for a politics degree at Lancaster University. At the final stage, however, she fell ill with Alzheimer's disease and her last four years were spent in a Chesterfield nursing home. Peter survives her, as do their three sons and a daughter.

[Betty Heathfield, miners' heroine, born March 30 1927; died February 16 2006.]

Date this page updated:
September 29, 2006