At one time, Arthur Scargill's face was all over the news – pugnacious, hectoring, leading his men on the march and on the picket line as they fought for the life of their industry. He was a thorn in Margaret Thatcher's side, and he might not like the comparison, but, in their stubborn conviction and confrontational style, the two were alike.

In a couple of months' time Arthur Scargill will be 70. He still lives at Worsbrough, near Barnsley, close to the village one-up, one-down where he was born and the former council house where he did his growing up.

He's very close, too, to the former pit at Woolley, which he joined at 16 and likened to Dante's Inferno. It may in many ways have been hell, but it was where he learned about comradeship. His miner father Harold told other dads that young Arthur would become president of the National Union of Mineworkers, and he did – first leading the Yorkshire division from 1973, then becoming national president in 1981.

Scargill recalls how he led his first confrontation with management as a 17-year-old at Woolley. Some pitmen got to leave work early on the day before a holiday, while others didn't. Arthur led a walk-out of the rest of the staff at the same time as the favoured few, and that was that.

On his first meeting at Barnsley's Yorkshire NUM headquarters, he recalls, with tongue in cheek, that he was: "A quiet, reserved, gentleyoung man...who created havoc." He speaks with the trademark Scargill dry humour that few would suspect lies beneath the combative public manner.

"I uttered the most fearsome words that we should take strike action to gain recognition, dignity, proper wages and better conditions... And I couldn't get a seconder."

Ian Clayton, broadcaster, writer and a fellow Barnsley-dweller, took a trip down memory lane with Scargill for Arthur Scargill's Yorkshire, a documentary that looks at how Yorkshire shaped the famous trade unionist and how he in turn shaped the political landscape of not only his county but his country.

The provocative and combative Scargill was in the thick of things, leading flying pickets at the Battle of Saltley Gate, a coke works near Birmingham in 1972. A year later, he was part of the rescue team that struggled to save seven miners trapped underground at Lofthouse Colliery, near Wakefield.

He led from the front during the 1984 national miners' strike, getting arrested and charged with obstruction after his involvement in the clash between 10,000 miners and 8,000 police at Orgreave, near Sheffield.

He still feels keen disappointment at the way the stoppage ended "when we were within striking distance of bashing them into the ground". But "even to this day (I believe) we didn't lose. The greatest victory in that strike was the struggle itself..." There speaks a trade unionist the likes of whom we have not seen since nor are likely to see again.

Today, Scargill, honorary life president of the NUM, is at the office most days and is also writing his memoirs.

"He still works on behalf of the mining community, looking into legal problems and doing what he can for people," says Clayton.

"He's still unforgiving, and as true to his colours as ever. He quotes Castro and Che Guevara, and I think he sees himself as a hero unsung in his own land. He's
an extremely intelligent man
who's still very much engaged with trade unionism.

"He thinks you should not believe everything that people in power tell you. Although I don't agree with everything he says, he's right in that, and has been proved so again and again over the past
20 years."

The legacy of pit closures, in terms of the policy's catastrophic effects on former pit communities, will be felt for decades to come, and Scargill says Margaret Thatcher's treatment of the miners has created unemployment, deprivation and crime where they barely existed before.

"When you destroy a
community, you create problems – a sense of helplessness and hopelessness among young people. Before (the pits were closed) we had a place where young men worked and communities were lawful and stable, not full of crime and drugs."

The two men spent four days filming the programme together, and Clayton found Scargill genial company, as they retrod the byways of the older man's
youth, working life, and more recent obsessions, like tracing his family's roots.

"He was humorous, has a great sense of fun and talks a lot about his mum and dad. I like that
more than almost anything else in a person."

The former firebrand still relishes public debate, and continues to be a passionate advocate of the viability of coal. In one recent battle of wits, where he and a nuclear physicist played verbal tennis about the merits of
coal versus nuclear power,
Scargill (of course) won the war
of words.

"I told him that I used to suck a piece of coal to relieve acidity in the stomach. I challenged him that if plutonium was as wonderful as he said, then he should suck a lump of it in the same way..."

Scargill says "a real history of our nation" will be written one
day and it will acknowledge "those who fought back. They will be the real heroes. Standing up for my fellow men and women is the most important thing in
my life."


Arthur Scargill's Yorkshire will be shown on ITV Yorkshire at 7.30pm tonight.