A tribute to Judith Miller

Friends and colleagues of the hugely respected and loved antiques expert share their thoughts and memories

- JANET GLEESON

If someone had said to me 40 years ago I would still be looking at Beilby tumblers and doing valuations, I would have been shocked. And I'm dealing with my dog, Vlad, who has pancreatitis and thinks I'm starving him,' Judith Miller quipped. It was the final stages of lockdown. She was compiling the latest edition of her Miller's Antiques Handbook & Price Guide, working from home with her husband, John, using 'two enormous computers with an enormous database that we've been using for 20 odd years'. She was missing her Roadshow friends, or as she put it: 'reminiscing about a very average Pinot Grigio in the Premier Inn in Leith'.

I laughed and sympathised. Having worked alongside Judith as part of the Roadshow team for more than a decade, we had often shared gossip, jokes and warm wine in various unglamorous hotel bars, and I knew her sense of the ridiculous was inseparable from her formidable knowledge, her love of her family, and fondness for dogs. We first met in the early 90s, when I joined the editorial team publishing Miller's Guides. By then her star was firmly fixed in the antiques firmament, and I remember her as a glamorous, dynamic figure, who wore eye-catching jewellery and put everyone at ease, but not until later did I learn the unlikely trajectory that had brought her there.