Tessa Wheeler

Her adventures in the rag trade were merely the well-dressed bookends to an extraordinary life that mixed breeding and bohemianism and found her equally at home in all walks of society.

Tall and willowy with an innate sense of style that her supermodel daughter described as “eclectic and vibrant”, she came from a renowned military family; one of her ancestors was Admiral Sir Edward Codrington, who defeated the Turks at the Battle of Navarino in 1827. She was better known by her married name after marrying Stuart Wheeler, the spread-betting pioneer and founder of the company IG Index.

Wheeler floated the company on the stock exchange in 2000 and the couple “suddenly became terribly rich, sort of overnight really”, as Tessa put it. He raised £40 million from the sale and donated £5 million to the Conservative Party during the 2001 election campaign, the largest single donation made to a British political party.

He spent much of the rest on buying and restoring Chilham Castle in Kent, where Tessa took on the role of chatelaine, organising architects, builders and interior designers to renovate and refurbish the Jacobean house, gardens, lake and 18th-century parkland to make it one of the finest country house estates in England.

The project took several years to complete. “We found the house in a sorry state. There was a huge amount of work that needed doing from roof to cellar,” she reported.

To oversee the furnishings she employed the designer Christopher Gibbs, a long-time friend of Mick Jagger who was at Keith Richards’s home on the night in 1967 when the two rock stars were busted for possession of illegal drugs. Gibbs made Chilham his final project before retirement and the completion of the renovation coincided with Stuart Wheeler’s 70th birthday in 2005, when his wife threw a lavish celebration. It was the first of many famous parties. “We bought it to entertain and can seat 22 around our table,” she enthused. “Most weekends the house is full of guests, a mix of people discussing, arguing, eating and drinking.”

Giles Coren, the Times restaurant critic who was a regular guest, reported that weekends with the Wheelers were the last vestige of “a Woosterish lifestyle — motoring down to Kent on Friday afternoon, wondering who will be there and what we will eat and how much we will drink and how the lake will look in the early-morning mist”.

Much of the argument round the dinner table was political, with Brexit a hot topic of discussion. Tessa’s husband was a prominent campaigner over many years for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU and was expelled from the Conservative Party in 2009 after making a donation to Nigel Farage’s campaign fund. He subsequently became Ukip’s treasurer.

Away from the political intriguing of her husband, Tessa threw open the grounds to the public in summer, set up a thriving equestrian centre staging international competitions, organised events ranging from costume balls to antique car rallies and hosted the Chilham village fête and the local school fair in the castle grounds.

There were also gambling parties and card schools; betting was not only the profession from which her husband made his fortune, but also his private passion. He played bridge with Lord Lucan two days before his disappearance, competed in the world poker championship and expressed a belief that prowess at the card table was a fine training for business, hitting the headlines in 2013 when he opposed gender quotas in boardrooms on the ground that women rank “absolutely nowhere” as poker and bridge players.

Tessa’s view on such political incorrectness was not recorded, but she was not easily offended and had a mischievous sense of humour. She once played a practical joke on her husband by dispatching a stripagram nun to his office with a phoney writ claiming that his spread-betting firm was inducing a Catholic priest to gamble away the church funds.

When not playing the country house hostess she spent much of her time in Morocco, where she owned a villa in Tangiers. The house, known as Dar Sinclair, was built by her maternal grandfather after he retired from a life in the colonial service and as a child she spent long and happy summer holidays there.

By the 1960s she was hanging out with the Tangiers exotic demimonde of “artists, socialites, hippies and aristocratic black sheep”, which included the author Paul Bowles, David Herbert, the painter Marguerite McBey, and the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton.

Visitors to the house included Richard Burton, Cecil Beaton and Tennessee Williams. She recalled that when Williams drank them out of bourbon, a call had to be made to the American consulate to replenish supplies.

She continued to stay regularly at Dar Sinclair in recent years while being treated for a rare form of cancer. According to John Hopkins, a Tangiers friend for more than 40 years, she was the city’s “reigning eccentric”, keeping alive the spark of its exotic past with her “humour, energy and constant stream of house guests”.

She was born Teresa Anne Codrington on September 26, 1944 in Rutland, the youngest of three daughters. Her mother, Katherine Theodosia Sinclair, was the daughter of the British Resident (in effect the governor) of Zanzibar. Her father, William Melville Codrington, won the Military Cross in the First World War with the 16th The Queen’s Lancers and served in the Second World War as chief security officer to the war cabinet. One of his duties involved escorting a reluctant de Gaulle to meet Roosevelt and Churchill at the Casablanca Conference in 1943. He was later appointed lord lieutenant of Rutland, a post he held until his death in 1963.

Educated at St Mary’s School, Wantage, where her contemporaries included the future Conservative politician Emma Nicholson and the writer Candida Lycett-Green, she began her career in photography in the 1960s as an assistant to the pioneering portrait photographer Madame Yevonde, falling into the job “slightly by accident — I just knew I didn’t want to be a secretary”.

Embracing the freewheeling spirit of the times, she decamped with her camera to Tangiers for two years. “The whole point of that revolution was that you rebelled against everything you’d grown up with,” she said.

She took pictures for a brochure for game lodges opening in Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania and photographed Tangiers’ exotic cast of expat characters, planning to anthologise the portraits in a book with words by Paul Bowles. When she ran out of money and was forced to return to London, the book was shelved. The photographs, along with new material, were published 30 years later as Spirits of Tangier.

After her return she married Stuart Wheeler in 1979, having first met at a dinner party. He credited her with changing him “from being a hopeless bachelor into a real person”. They had three daughters — Sarah, Jacquetta and Charlotte — and moved to Kent when the girls went to King’s School, Canterbury, while continuing to maintain a town house in London.

The family took up residence in the nine-bedroom Dane Street House on the outskirts of Chilham village, until the Wheelers decided that it was “small and pokey and we couldn’t get more than ten people around the dining table”. The only logical move was to upgrade to the nearby castle.

Jacquetta embarked on her modelling career at 15 when she was discovered by the fashion designer Stephan Janson while on holiday with her parents. Weeks later she was on the catwalk in Janson’s Milan show, barefoot because she hadn’t learnt to walk in heels.

Sarah runs the photography department at the art auctioneer Bloomsbury and Charlotte worked for Lynton Crosby’s lobbying firm before setting up her own communications company.

“Mum always stood out from the crowd at the school gates because she was quite bohemian,” Jacquetta recalled. “When I was young, I was slightly embarrassed by it, but once I was 16 or 17, I thought, ‘Yeah! My mum rocks’. ”

Tessa Wheeler was born on September 26, 1944. She died of cancer on December 11, 2016, aged 72