Ken Capstick: Miners' union stalwart who was at Battle of Orgreave dead at 83
Ken Capstick, who has died at 83, was at the side of Arthur Scargill during the Yorkshire coalfield strikes of the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in the violent picketing outside the Orgreave coking plant near Sheffield.
Capstick, who became Scargill’s vice-president at the National Union of Mineworkers in Yorkshire, was among the crowds when clashes erupted with riot police.
It echoed what had happened 12 years earlier when he helped to organise the mass picketing of a fuel storage depot in Birmingham; it became enshrined in union history as the Battle of Saltley Gate.
Ken and Scargill remained close friends as the coalfields were wound down in the 1990s and worked together in Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, which Ken joined after Labour rejected him as a candidate in Hemsworth, amid much controversy.
During the 1984 dispute with Margaret Thatcher’s government Ken – whose parents and grandparents were also miners – was part of a committee at the Yorkshire NUM headquarters in Barnsley which organised flying pickets across the region.
Born near Wakefield, he left school in 1956 and went down the pit at age 15.
He worked at several collieries around the city before moving to the new ‘superpit’ at Selby, where he worked until 1994.
He was married to Sheila, who became locally famous for a battle of her own – to allow women to play snooker at her local club in Wakefield.
She died in 2018 and Ken is survived by his son and daughter.