BECAUSE of her involvement in the Miners’ Strike I already knew a lot about Anne Scargill before we met in 1992.

Anne and her comrades were camped outside Grimethorpe Colliery hoping to save the pit from closure when Pete Bevis and I delivered much-needed funds. We’d spent weeks collecting donations from Athersley school teachers and ancillary workers.

Many years later I was speaking to a large audience, at the Rotary Club, about a statue we were hoping to build in honour of Barry Hines. When I sat down, Anne Scargill approached me.

“Hello Anne. You don’t need to introduce yourself – I met you fleetingly at Grimethorpe in ‘92.”

“Oh, in that case I’ll not beat about the bush. It’s a little favour I’m after, Ronnie?” Anne went on to explain that she and her daughter, Dr Margaret Scargill, had spent ages trying to contact Richard Hines – the brother of author, Barry. Richard had been Margaret’s form teacher at Bank End Primary School and she was hoping to thank him for being a particularly caring educator.

“Funnily enough I’m currently exchanging emails with Richard so I can pass on Margaret’s email address.”

“Oh, that would mean so much to us, Ronnie.”

Margaret and Richard met up at the unveiling of Barry’s blue plaque in Hoyland in 2019 and two years later we invited Anne to the unveiling of the Kes statue in Barnsley.

When Ken Loach spotted her in Parkway Cinema that day, he dropped everything and ignored everyone else. To Ken, for a few minutes, no-one else in the world mattered except Anne Scargill and it dawned on me that I was witnessing the coming together of two giants of the working class movement.

A few months later, I went to the launch of Anne and Betty Cook’s joint autobiographies: United by the Struggle. Anne’s health was deteriorating but it didn’t stop her from becoming a regular attendee at the Butterflies’ social afternoons, where I often entertained. It was wonderful to see her enjoying herself – first up to dance and last to get down.

When I heard of her death I felt depressed for days, and was discussing her achievements with my son, when my granddaughter interrupted: “Who was Anne Scargill, Granddad?”

This is what I told her:

Anne Scargill was an ordinary lady who achieved extraordinary things. When Mrs Thatcher tried throwing thousands of miners out of work, they went on strike and so Anne Scargill, and thousands of other women, formed a miners’ support group called the Women Against Pit Closures.

The bitter dispute was a class war between the miners and Mrs Thatcher’s government – aided and abetted by the National Coal Board, the police, MI5, the judiciary, the mass media – and some even say, the army.

The disagreement hinged on who was telling the truth: Mrs Thatcher said the pit closures were minimal but the miners claimed they had written proof she was lying and intended massacring the coal industry.

Anne and her female comrades – whose traditional role was to play second fiddle to their men – opened hundreds of soup kitchens so that the miners and their children wouldn’t starve. But as the strike progressed the women became more militant.

They began picketing the pits where beaten or gullible miners sided with Mrs Thatcher. Many, like Anne and Betty, cast off their old servile ways and toured Britain, Europe and the world, speaking passionately to thousands and raising funds.

But Mrs Thatcher and her supporters employed the dirtiest of tactics, and after 12 months of struggle the miners were, indeed, starved back to work.

Mass pit closures soon followed, including those whose workers had foolishly stayed loyal to Thatcher. But now all they could do was bow their heads with regret and cry, “Oh, what have we done?”

The defeat may have led to the greatest income inequality since Victorian days but, in the course of the struggle, the women had unintentionally created a seismic shift in society. No longer would most women obediently accept their old role of main house-keeper, child-rearer and wage-earner. Thanks to Anne and her ‘sisters’, the fight for the equality of the sexes was happening and there’d be no turning back.

At Anne’s funeral next week I can’t wait to hear the mourners belt out, with tearful pride, their famous anthem: “And it’s here we go, here we go/We’re the women of the working class.”

n Anne’s funeral is at 2.10pm on Tuesday at Barnsley Crematorium.