Biography

The following biography appeared on the Order of Service for Miriam's funeral on Thursday, October 16, 2003 - for reasons of space, it was necessarily quite concise.  We hope to expand on this later.

Miriam Henderson was born Miriam Stahl on October 2nd, 1931 in Tel-Aviv, in British-occupied Palestine, now Israel.  Her father, Samuel Solomon Stahl (1895-1960) came originally from Poland; her mother, Dvora Stahl, née Yudilevich (1903-1969) was born in Israel.  She is survived by her younger sister Ruth.

Miriam was educated in Tel-Aviv and after the foundation of Israel in 1948 travelled to London to study drama.  She married Eli Karlin, son of Abraham Wolf Schweid and Sonia Bella Schweid, née Karlinski, on November 12th, 1951.  Eli, born in Haifa in 1926, was working for his uncle Serge in London. Eli and Miriam had three sons, all born in London: Michael (1952), Daniel (1953), and David (1958).  Their family doctor in those days was Stephen Blaikie, whose junior partner was John Henderson.  In 1958 the family left England; they lived for a while in Israel (1958-9), then America (1959-62), Portugal (1962-3), and France (1963-67).  For much of his life, Eli suffered from high blood pressure; he died in Paris on October 9th, 1966.

In 1967-8, the family moved to London, where Miriam took the lease at 28 Park Crescent Mews West. She began working as a secretary at a public relations firm, and became personal assistant to the managing director, Anne Dickinson.  She assisted Anne in the buyout of the company, which prospered as Kingsway Public Relations, and helped mastermind its eventual sale to Saatchi and Saatchi in 1985.

In 1974 she married John Henderson, whose first wife, Barbara, had died in 1968.  John and Barbara's children, Richard, Sally, and Jane, now became part of Miriam's extended family.  John and Miriam lived at 17 Addison Road, in Holland Park, spending weekends and holidays at The Cottage in Pheasant's Hill, near Hambleden.  In 1979 Miriam and John sold the Addison Road house and moved into the refurbished Mews.  In 1991 Miriam was diagnosed with ovarian cancer; the diagnosis was early enough for her to make a full recovery, though she was forced to retire from Kingsway.  John died in 1992, and Miriam sold the Cottage in 1995.  Apart from holidays and visits to friends and family, including winters in Mustique and California, she spent the remainder of her life in the Mews, which was kept in order devotedly by Laura Rodrigues and Irena Lopes.  She died of lung cancer on October 9th, 2003.

Though her children were, as the saying goes, her pride and joy, her greatest measure of happiness in life came from her two husbands, Eli and John.  In her last weeks she remembered them both with an equal intensity of sorrow and love.