Jennifer d'Abo

Tough and imaginative entrepreneur

Jennifer Mary Victoria Hammond-Maude, businesswoman: born London 14 August 1945; chairman, Ryman 1981-87; chairman, Roffey Brothers 1988; chairman, Moyses Stevens Investments 1990-99; married first David Morgan-Jones (one daughter; marriage dissolved), second 1970 Peter Cadbury (one son; marriage dissolved 1976), third Robin d'Abo (marriage dissolved 1987); died 30 April 2003.

Jennifer D'Abo was that rarest of phenomena, a serial female entrepreneur. She was a prime example of the "been there, done that" temperament usually associated with her male equivalents. For, once her latest venture had been fixed, she would move on to pastures new.

Her most successful venture was the purchase of the Ryman chain of stationery shops from Ralph Halpern of the Burton Group in 1981. She had the imagination to see that the normally unexciting business of buying stationery and office essentials could be made fun, even chic. Helped by such imaginative strokes as selling filing cabinets in cheerful colours and promoting different coloured Post-It notes – themselves an innovation – she transformed the previously down-at-heel shops into what were termed "office bazaars". In six years she multiplied the value of the business nearly tenfold, selling it to Terry Maher of Pentos for £20m in 1986.

In her career she suffered from a double disadvantage: she was a woman and she came from an upper-class background. As a woman she found that her rare failures tended to be highlighted at the expense of her more numerous successes. Not surprisingly she found bankers a problem. "If I put up a feasibility study for a business project," she said, "it's read by 10 analysts as opposed to two because I'm a woman." Not surprisingly she was furious to find as late as 1975 that she was disqualified from membership of the London Stock Exchange. To prove she was not useless she promptly qualified as a pilot, "so I had an education on meteorology, aviation law and navigation". She added, "I still get lost everywhere I go."

To make matters worse, her upper-class background ensured that she received a totally inadequate education and that her male counterparts simply could not cope with her – she was constantly put down. When she was 17 her father was shocked when she announced her intention to "go into trade" to achieve financial independence; and the break-up of her second marriage, to Peter Cadbury, was due, he said, to the fact that "she's a better entrepreneur than me". Her third and last husband, the stockbroker Robin d'Abo, once said, "You are such a bore because you won't come to Wimbledon or Ascot with me" – not only did she not have the time, she was also terrified of crowds. Her husbands' attitudes, as much as her own forceful personality, perhaps explain why she considered her private life a failure, even though she was the most social of animals.

She made a daunting figure, tall, firm-featured, theatrical, imperious, an effect tempered by her cornflower-blue eyes and the complexion of a classic English rose. But the appearance was deceptive – and not only because of what one observer described as her "naughty, childish giggle". For her appearance concealed an underlying vulnerability. For the first two years she served on a board with Dennis (now Lord) Stevenson, he thought,

she stank. I felt she was a pretend aristocrat, a pale imitation of Mrs Thatcher . . . then one day I found myself in the trenches with her and she was a complete brick – tough, compassionate and decent.

She was also so tactful that she remained on good terms with all her three ex-husbands, once arranging a – successful – dinner for all three and even going on holiday with one of them and her successor.

Like many women she admitted relying more on her intuition than did her male equivalents and like all strong-minded women she was described as bossy, even though she knew how to delegate. "I enjoy watching people grow," she once said. "I always let a young girl manage a shop if I think she has the ability."

Jennifer Mary Victoria Hammond-Maude was born on the eve of VJ Day, the daughter of a diplomat and a mother who was an invalid throughout her daughter's childhood, which she spent mostly with her beloved nanny and a loving grandmother. Never exactly a promising pupil, the last of her nine schools was Hatherop Castle in Gloucestershire, then, typically, unable to offer "gels" education beyond O level, and sending them, as was the case with the young Jennifer, to "finishing school" in Paris.

Despite her attempts to "get into trade" at the age of 18 she did the right thing and married an officer from the Household Cavalry, David Morgan-Jones, and produced a daughter, Sophy – who is now herself a businesswoman. During the 1960s she worked for Peter Cadbury, himself a leading entrepreneur, and married him in 1970. Unfortunately for the marriage she proved abler than her husband: it was she who urged him to tough it out when he was sacked as chairman of Westward Television, returning in triumph seven days later. She had learnt enough about investment from her grandmother (and from a stockbroker friend) to take over his investment portfolio, and against his opposition sold all his shares just before the crash of 1974.

It was only after her divorce from Cadbury in 1976 that she embarked on an independent business career. Her first success was to take over a rundown Wavy Line grocery shop in Basingstoke and, through sheer hard work and imagination, make it a success. She then converted a local store into a chic mini-department store modelled on Peter Jones and sold it for £1m a mere four years later. He next venture was Jean Sorelle, a toiletry firm in Peterborough which she controlled for three years before taking on Ryman's in 1981.

Her next venture was her only major failure. She had bought a "shell" company, Stormgard, in order to launch a takeover bid worth £17m for the textile company Selincourt, with the object of making it a major force in supplying clothing to chain stores. She survived an immediate financial crisis when the banks withdrew their backing and she had to find £23m within a few days. She succeeded, but rows with the other directors over the direction the company should take led to a stormy departure – "the nastiest time of my life", as she put it. "I could have said all sorts of ghastly things about the rest of the board. And I could have made all sorts of excuses but I didn't." But within a month she had been hired by a rival supplier, John Crowther, as a consultant.

In the 1990s she and her former colleagues bought up three very different businesses, Moyses Stevens, the purveyor of flowers to the Royal Family, a Bournemouth "turf dressing manufacturer" (in other words a supplier of compost, or, as d'Abo put it with characteristic bluntness, in "the shit business") and T. Parker, a distributor of supplies for golf clubs. Parker, bought just as the golfing craze was reaching a peak, proved a millstone and was sold a few years later. But Moyses Stevens perfectly suited d'Abo's style, background and love of the chic and fashionable – traits shown at their best at her elegant dinner parties (and in her favourite relaxation, gardening, which she described as her "switch-off time").

By the 1990s she had firmly established herself as one of the "great and good" – one of the few women to qualify for the title – in the business world. Her first job was an unusual one, as Chairman of the Museum Training Institute in Bradford. She later served as a director of a number of businesses, including the London Docklands Development Corporation amd Channel 4, and performed sundry "social" jobs as a fund-raiser for the Imperial Cancer Research Trust and the Natural History Museum.

It was characteristic that she refused to let the cancer responsible for her death to affect her work until the very end.

Nicholas Faith