Tessa Wheeler
Peripatetic society photographer who married the spread-betting pioneer Stuart Wheeler
TESSA WHEELER, who has died aged 72, had a career as a photographer before she married the spread-betting tycoon Stuart Wheeler. One of three daughters, Teresa Anne Codrington was born on September 26 1944. Her father, William, was descended from the Codrington sugar barons, and from the admiral who distinguished himself at Trafalgar. Her mother, Katherine Theodosia Sinclair, had been left a house in Tangier by her own father, which Tessa would inherit.
Tessa was educated at St Mary’s, Wantage, where in 1960 she was the ringleader of a group of girls who applied a coat of pink paint to the town’s statue of Alfred the Great. After doing the Season as a somewhat unwilling debutante in 1962, she set off on travels and worked for a time for “Kelpie” Buchanan, a London antiques dealer.
On a visit to Tangier in the early 1960s she had met the writer Paul Bowles, and when she lived in Tangier for two years in the 1970s, Bowles once brought Tennessee Williams to dinner.
In the late 1960s she became the studio assistant of the photographer “Madame Yevonde” Middleton (1893-1975) who had introduced colour into portrait photography.
Tessa soon established herself as a well-known society photographer in her own right, before moving on to Scaloni Studio, where she became a full-time photographer, and later to Woburn Studios. In the early 1970s she travelled from Cairo to the Cape.
She had always had glamorous boyfriends, and at one point she was accompanied on her wanderings by Rashid, the grandson of the late King of Morocco. She met her husbandto-be, the spread-betting pioneer Stuart Wheeler, at a dinner party in late 1978. They married in July the next year.
Wheeler had founded his spreadbetting firm, IG Index, in 1974. The couple were well off, and threw generous dinner and post-election night parties at their home in south west London, as well as house parties in Tangier.
By 2008 sales of Wheeler’s shares in IG Index had netted him a fortune that the Sunday Times Rich List put at £40 million. In 2002 they had used some of the proceeds to buy Chilham Castle in Kent, a listed Jacobean pile built by Sir Dudley Digges in 1616. Their friend Christopher Gibbs helped them find furniture and furnishings and Mary Keen was consulted to redo the 20 acres of gardens.
They entertained there on a lavish scale, the only rule being that guests were obliged to serve themselves from the amply stocked drinks table in the first-floor drawing room.
Stuart Wheeler’s support for Ukip is well known – the views he shared with Tessa less so, but anti-torture charities were high on their joint list.
In the 2001 election campaign he gave the Conservative Party £5 million, still the single largest donation ever made to a political party, but switched his support to Ukip, giving the party £100,000 in 2009.
When in 2011 he was appointed the party’s treasurer, his daughter Jacquetta recalled that her mother “rang me up and said: ‘Darling, we have to face facts. We are now the wife and daughter of a madman.’ ”
A slow-growing tumour affected the last 10 years of Tessa Wheeler’s life, but despite increasing tiredness, she insisted on keeping her charitable activities going, especially HemiHelp, which supports people with hemiplegia, and coping with the big organisational challenges of her Chilham Castle International Horse Trials.
She is survived by her husband and their three daughters. Tessa Wheeler, born September 26 1944, died December 11 2016