Arthur Scargill (born 1938) was the militant, controversial president of the British National Union of Mineworkers who led the longest and most violent miners' strike in British history.

Arthur Scargill, the son and grandson of coal miners, was born in Worsborough, South Yorkshire, in 1938. The house in which he was born and in which he lived for his first three years had neither plumbing nor electricity. In time he and his family moved to a more comfortable, modern home in the town where he grew up.

Scargill was an only child, and his parents, Harold and Alice, doted on him. His father was a loyal member of the Communist Party, and The Daily Worker was read regularly in the Scargill household. As a boy Scargill read of starvation and injustice in such books as The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and of the courage and nobility of the revolutionary working classes...