KESWICK. Hon Lady (Hon (Annabel) Therese [Tessa] nee FRASER then Lady REAY) (1942-2022)
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She grew to love China and its people partly through her husband, Henry Keswick, taipan of the Far Eastern trading house Jardine Matheson
Tessa Keswick, who has died aged 79, was a well-known Society figure who surprised those who did not know her – and even some who did – by emerging in middle age as a far-from-grey eminence in the Conservative Party....
Annabel Thérèse Fraser was born on October 15 1942, the daughter of the 17th Lord Lovat, and into a family whose story was romantic but melancholy. The Frasers were Catholic highland chieftains who had once owned 250,000 acres, as well as their seat at Beaufort Castle in Inverness-shire.
An earlier Lord Lovat and MacShimidh – the clan’s name for its chief – took part in the 1745 rebellion and was beheaded after its failure. The peerage was attainted, but revived in the next century.
Tessa’s father was a famous soldier, a DSO and MC who led his commandos ashore on D-Day. He had married Rosalind, the only daughter of Sir Jock Delves Broughton, notorious as the acquitted defendant in the “White Mischief” murder trial in wartime Kenya. Tessa later said that the case was “never discussed in our family when I was young”, but that: “We all thought he was innocent.”
Politics was in the blood: “Shimi” Lovat was briefly a junior minister, his brother was Sir Hugh Fraser MP, and one of his sisters married Sir Fitzroy Maclean MP. But for all its social and political glamour, the family had many sorrows to come.....
In 1964 she married another Highland chieftain, Lord Reay, head of the Mackay clan. They had three children, but the marriage did not prosper. As she later said, it was a mismatch between lowland Protestant and highland Catholic – “and they’ve been fighting for hundreds of years”. The marriage was dissolved in 1978....
In the 1960s Tessa had briefly worked selling advertising for The Spectator. She became part of the magazine’s larger family again after 1975 when it was bought by the “taipan” Henry Keswick, scion of the Jardine dynasty whose fortune stemmed from Hong Kong, and an old friend of hers.
Friendship ripened, and in 1985 she and Keswick married....
In the 1990s Tessa Keswick’s family knew many sorrows. Her father died in great old age, but not before her brothers Andrew Fraser and Simon, Master of Lovat, had both predeceased him, one attacked by a buffalo on African safari, the other succumbing to a heart attack while hunting....
In 2013 she became a director of Daily Mail and General Trust, and was elected chancellor of the University of Buckingham, a post she held until 2020. That year, she published The Colour of the Sky After Rain, a memoir of the Chinese people and culture she grew to love during 40 years of travelling in the region.
Lady Keswick is survived by her husband Sir Henry (he was knighted in 2009) and by a daughter and two sons from her first marriage.
Tessa Keswick, born October 15 1942, died September 13 2022
