Following tradition, she was named after her paternal grandmother, as were four cousins in Holland, similarly named: Mirjam, Maya, Mary and Miriam.
Miriam had two brothers, to whom she was close: Albert, three years her senior, and Samuel (“Sammy”), seven years her junior. All three were academically gifted, and Miriam made the most of every opportunity that came her way.
Miriam in her wartime days[Missing Credit]
She recalled how, on her first day at nursery school, which was run along Montessori lines, she screamed at being parted from her parents, then decided she might as well make the best of it. She never looked back and loved learning and new challenges for the rest of her life.
Life changed in 1929, when her father was appointed head of the Montefiore College in Ramsgate and the family left Manchester for Kent.
Asked later if she had missed her friends and life in Manchester, she replied that it was like arriving in paradise, swapping a dirty industrial city for open countryside and sea. It was an idyllic childhood, with the freedom to roam the Montefiore estate, the only rule being to arrive at the table for meals.
She attended Clarendon Girls’ School in Ramsgate and, though the school wanted her to apply to Oxbridge, she chose not to. Instead, having won one of only 100 National Scholarships awarded that year, she went to King’s College London to study languages.
By then the Second World War had begun; she was evacuated for a time before returning to London to complete her degree. From university she was summoned to army headquarters at Guildford for basic training, then to London for specialist radio training, and on to Bletchley Park.
There she joined SIXTA, the traffic analysis section, receiving intercepts from stations monitoring German Air Force code broadcasts and watching for anomalies to report to the codebreakers.
She lived on site and later said her years at Bletchley Park were among the best of her working life, when everyone felt they were serving a useful purpose, there was no bureaucracy, and the camaraderie was great. Her one regret was that, bound by the Official Secrets Act, she was never able to tell her father what she had done in the war.
At the end of the war, Miriam applied to the Foreign Office. The application required details of her parents, and when officials discovered her “foreign father”, they turned her down, despite his having applied for British citizenship in the 1930s.
Undeterred, she went back to the person who had recommended her, and he intervened; she got the job. Sworn once again to secrecy, she never revealed exactly what her role involved, though she became fluent enough in Russian to read its newspapers during the Cold War. She stayed at the Foreign Office until she retired at 60, determined to enjoy her later years travelling the world.
Dr Richard Barnett, curator at the British Museum and Honorary Archivist of the Spanish & Portuguese Jews’ Congregation’s Advisory Committee on Congregational Records and Treasures, invited her to join the committee. She worked alongside him and, in 1985, succeeded him as Honorary Archivist; the following year she became Chairman of the Advisory Committee.
On taking up the posts, she wrote that her intention was “to continue the work of my remarkable predecessors to the best of my ability.” She held both roles for the rest of her life.
Alongside her work cataloguing treasures and selecting items for in-house national and international exhibitions, she edited the Community Bulletin, the print forerunner of SPIN (Spanish and Portuguese In the News, the weekly Friday community newsletter).
Her knowledge of the Congregation’s treasures was second to none, and she was consulted by researchers and institutions alike. The BBC drew on her expertise, filming at Bevis Marks Synagogue for two episodes of Who Do You Think You Are?, with June Brown, EastEnders’ Dot Cotton, in 2011, and Mark Wright of The Only Way Is Essex in 2019, as well as for the television adaptation of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.
For her 100th birthday, friends asked Bletchley Park to mark the occasion with a service medal and certificate and arranged a visit some weeks later. She was greeted by Jonathan Byrne, the Oral History Officer, who wheeled her to the Codebreakers’ Commemoration Wall, where she stood before the brick bearing her name and a Morse code V, which marked her as a Roll of Honour veteran.
She talked the entire journey there and back, full of wartime memories, and some months later gave Jonathan a full interview; her testimony is now lodged at Bletchley Park for posterity.
As is traditional among Dutch Sephardim, Miriam always wrote a birthday poem delivered with characteristic sincerity and humour. At 95, she ended hers with the lines:
“Long years, great days my wish for you
Success and joy in all you do
And take my motto, if you think it just
I’d really rather wear out than rust.”
At her 100th birthday celebration, she reflected that her life had been fun; perhaps a lesson for us all.
Miriam Rodrigues-Pereira: Born 4 July, 1922. Died 4 August, 2026.
With thanks to the Spanish and Portuguese Sephardi Community, which helped supply information for this article
