Socialite and green pioneer Tessa Tennant dies aged 59
AS a passionate environmental campaigner, Tessa Tennant devoted her life to making big business care about our planet.
But if her public life was dominated by her pioneering green politics the private life of Mrs Tennant, who has died of cancer aged 59, will be remembered for its equally colourful connections to the doomed Tennant clan.
She was a 19-year-old student travelling in Ecuador when she met Henry Tennant, a scion of the family once regarded as mercantile aristocracy which became a byword for the tragic and louche.
Henry’s flamboyant father Colin, the third Lord Glenconner, was the eccentric owner of the Caribbean island of Mustique, which in the 1960s attracted royal visitors such as Princess Margaret.
The young Tessa and her new love made an even more unlikely couple but she was drawn to the allure of the Tennant family with its disregard for convention and the two were married on Mustique in 1983. Soon afterwards their son, Euan, was born.
The marriage lasted barely two years before Henry caused a scandal by leaving her for a man before dying in 1991 from an Aids-related condition. Despite the marriage breakdown, the couple never divorced and stayed friends.
Their relationship was among many bizarre twists which meant the Tennants, who owe their fortune to Charles Tennant, an 18th century Scottish scientist and businessman who patented bleaching powder, were rarely out of the gossip columns.
Lord Glenconner continued to shock until his death in 2010, aged 83, when he left his island paradise not, as expected, to his grandson and heir Cody but to Kent Adonai, a St Lucian fisherman.
Lawyers for Cody, 24, educated at Edinburgh Academy and Aberdeen University, contested the legacy but he and Adonai settled the case after years of wrangling.
Mrs Tennant never commented on family wrangles, preferring to concentrate on her own work. She co-founded the UK’s first green investment fund and launched the Carbon Disclosure Project, which now has more than 6,000 companies pledged to disclosing their environmental policies.
Her husband’s death left her with Glen House, a Victorian mansion in Peeblesshire.
In 2012 Mrs Tennant was treated for ovarian cancer and when it returned last year she chose not to have further treatment.
She wrote recently: ‘It’s been a struggle to come to terms with my situation but I am blessed to have so much love around me.’
Mrs Tennant died on July 7 and in the week of her death she travelled to Edinburgh to receive an OBE for services to sustainable investment from the Queen.
Colleague and friend Mark Campanale said it was a fitting honour, adding: ‘She did things that were years ahead of their time.’