Mary Howard was the Queen of Christmas fairs, having raised more than a £1 million for numerous charities including the NSPCC and Help for Heroes. She created and ran the Mary Howard Sales, which began in the 1980s and became the largest arts, crafts and home-cooked food fairs in the UK. In 2005 she was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the NSPCC for her tireless efforts on their behalf.

She was born Mary Johnson in January 1945 in Cheshire, the daughter of a young American doctor, Johnny Johnson, and his English society wife Betty. The couple divorced and Johnny was given custody of Mary and her three siblings, a rare event at the time.

She trained as a nursery school teacher, but shortly after beginning her first job at Lady Eden’s School, London, she was spotted by one of her father’s friends who ran a model agency who convinced her that she could make better use of her good looks with a career in modelling. She worked for the fashion designer Mary Quant for two years before marrying Patrick Howard, the son of the 20th Earl of Suffolk, Charles Howard.

The idea for the sales first came to Howard in 1982 when she organised an exhibition of needlework to raise money for the NSPCC. Such was its success that she decided to hold an event annually. Each year the number of stalls grew until she her husband moved the event to a nearby air hanger at an RAF base to accommodate the numbers. Howard and her husband ran the fairs purely for charity for ten years before the organisation grew large enough that they decided to make this their business and expand to venues in York and Sandown.

Howard’s dynamism in getting people involved in the charity and her direct involvement in all business matters all but ensured the success of her sales. Several of the regular stallholders benefited from this and went on to enjoy retail success themselves.

She is survived by her husband, Patrick, and their four sons.

Mary Howard, model and philanthropist, was born on January 3, 1945. She died in a car accident on November 9, 2008, aged 63