YEREVAN–LONDON — Grace Aidiniantz (1927-2015), the late London-based businesswoman of Armenian descent, is best known for her founding of the Sherlock Holmes Museum on Baker Street in 1990, a landmark that has since attracted visitors from around the world.
Aidiniantz spent her early years in Iran and India. Under the stage name Miriam Stark, she appeared in Indian films such as “Michael Madhusudhan” by Modhu Bose (1950) and “Vidyasagar” by Kali Prasad Ghosh (1952). Moving to London, she served as director and secretary of AID Armenia Limited and AID Armenia International Limited organizations.
To learn more about this remarkable woman, I reached out by email to her daughter, Linda Riley, a British journalist, publisher, and LGBTIQ+ rights advocate, who kindly agreed to this interview.
Dear Linda, I am delighted to share with our readers my admiration for your mother’s personality and work. Her obituary mentions uncertainty about whether Grace Aidiniantz was born in Armenia or London, noting that her family moved to London to escape persecution—first by the Ottoman Turks and later by the early Soviet regime that came to include Armenia. Given the “-iantz” ending of the surname, it is clear that her roots were in Eastern Armenia. What can you tell us about her ancestors?
Yes, my mother’s family was from Eastern Armenia. Grace was born in Iran. As a small child, she trekked from Iran to Kolkata, India. Unfortunately, Grace’s birth certificate was destroyed in an arson attack at the church in Iran. In 1956, Grace traveled to London on a one-year visa from India. When that visa expired, she received a deportation order and spent approximately fifty years living in England as an undocumented immigrant. In the late 1990s, she decided to apply for British citizenship and was officially recorded as having the longest-known deportation order at that time for someone applying for citizenship. Due to the lack of a birth certificate, she ultimately received leave to remain.
My younger brother, sister, and I were all named Riley because our mother had to change her name to Riley to avoid being detected as an illegal immigrant. Only later in life did my elder brother change his name from Riley to Aidiniantz. Despite this, we have always considered ourselves Armenian, as our mother insisted that we never lose our Armenian identity.
