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
|
|