Friends and colleagues of the hugely respected and loved antiques expert share their thoughts and memories
FEATURE 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.
Brought up in Galashiels, Scotland, in a house devoid of antiques, Judith often described her parents as members of the ‘Formica generation’. Yet, from her teenage years, a fascination for history and an eye for the unusual inspired her to start taking an interest in antique ceramics. She began by buying broken plates from junk shops for a few pennies and, as a student at Edinburgh University, used them to decorate her student digs. ‘My poor dad carried boxes of them upstairs. There was no interest in the value in those days. For me, the value was the story. It was touching history. But my friends thought I was mad,’ she told me when I interviewed her for H&A two years ago. Undeterred, and still at university, Judith began visiting salerooms to watch and learn. Dealers humoured her, explaining how to identify hand decoration from transfer printing, Wedgwood from Worcester, majolica from Meissen.
Having thought she would become a history teacher, her hobby transformed into a career when she took a job as an editorial assistant with Lyle, a local publisher. Co-owned by her future husband, the entrepreneurial bon viveur, Martin Miller, Lyle published an antiques guide illustr
