Ok. Thank you all so much for your suggestions. I have now successfully recovered the pictures using 'Recuva'. I did try the first suggested program and although it did find the deleted files I had great difficulty in registering the product (otherwise it would not work).
So thanks to all of you for your helpful suggestions and no doubt the bride's mother will be very happy indeed.
In self defence (!), she did seem to know what she was doing that's why I let her do it in the first place! Of course removing the memory card during the process was an extremely bad idea but we are talking 'housewife' here not a computer nerd and to people like that if it doesn't say 'don't pull me out until I say so' they see no reason why not to.
The card was Fat formatted and I could see about 10 corrupted images that were not recoverable. It did seem as though the first character of each picture file was deleted - as predicted.
I have made a back up of the recovered files. I've also used the wireless transfer method before, but given this was transferring to an iPad which seems, as a product, to have very little user interoperability to select files/destinations etc it did not immediately come to mind as a method.
Thank you all once again.