My one-time boss and dear friend, and Oxfam’s oldest alumnus, Tigger Stack, has died aged 95. Tigger first helped Oxfam’s then one-man-band relief operation in India during a famine in 1966. She made a brilliant, energetic and idiosyncratic contribution at a time when the NGO world was still untouched by “professionalisation”.

She was born Margaret June Waight, daughter of Dinah and George Waight, in Darjeeling, where her father was a circuit judge with the British Indian civil service. She was sent to several schools in the UK – where she gained her nickname – and travelled back and forth to India. She was married at 19, to Adrian Hayter, and their daughter, Gael, was born in 1943. The marriage ended in divorce, and some years later Tigger married Cecil Stack, managing director of Dunlop Rubber in India.

Cecil was transferred back to the UK by Dunlop in the late 60s; soon afterwards their marriage broke up and Tigger needed to work. So she went to Oxfam and asked if they could use her skills. Since she had done some PR work in the past, that was what they engaged her for. Tigger was an exceptionally able operator in the Indian subcontinent during the emergencies of the 1960s and 70s. As well as having lived in India for most of her life, and having an extraordinary network of contacts, she was deceptively tough and doggedly persistent.

In an environment where influence can work miracles of red-tape cutting, she was able to jump the queue for Oxfam relief goods and get them unloaded and moved up-country. She used her contacts mercilessly to borrow vehicles and telex machines, hitch rides on army helicopters and open otherwise impenetrable doors in the quest to save lives. She had an air of incontestable authority. She firmly protested against my uncouth suggestion that she was a “fixer”.

As Oxfam’s public relations officer in Oxford from 1969, Tigger also dedicated herself to getting the fact of extreme day-to-day poverty around the world – not just the emergencies – in front of the public via press and television. One successful project was the 1974 BBC television documentary Five Minutes to Midnight, made by the reporter Alan Hart with her assistance.

In the late 1970s and 80s, Tigger undertook various special assignments for Oxfam, including an evaluation of its groundbreaking programme of assistance to post-Pol Pot Cambodia in 1979-81. She never ducked controversy, and took Oxfam to task for over-reaching its capacity. She undertook assignments for many other aid organisations, and was on the board of AfghanAid for 20 years, until 2014. Despite her failing health, Tigger managed to attend the annual Oxfam Friends event in October, as a last farewell to the organisation closest to her heart.

From 1979 until his death in 2007, she was happily married to Donald Ramsay-Brown, a retired army officer. She is survived by Gael.