Tessa Tennant
Free spirit who married the bohemian Henry Tennant and became a pioneer of ‘green’ investment
TESSA TENNANT, who has died aged 59, was a pioneering advocate of “green” investment and the chatelaine of Glen House, the Scottish seat of the eccentric and ill-starred Tennant dynasty into which she married. A passionate, free-spirited activist, unafraid to challenge entrenched interests, Tessa Tennant made her mark in the City of London as co-founder in 1988 of the Merlin (later Jupiter) Ecology Fund, the first green unit trust to be launched in Britain. She went on to be head of sustainable investment at the National Provident Institution, where she launched the NPI Global Care Asia Pacific Fund in 1997. It was in part due to her campaigning that UK pension fund legislation was changed to require schemes to set out policies on ethical, social and environmental issues.
Radical ideas espoused by Tessa Tennant in the 1980s and 1990s entered the vocabulary of mainstream investment and her influence in later years was global. She led a Hong Kong-based initiative to encourage responsible investment in Asia and was the first chairman of the Carbon Disclosure Project which enlisted some 6,000 corporations and 500 cities to publish annual disclosures of their environmental impacts.
Another recent initiative, following the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2015, aimed to help translate signatory countries’ emission reduction commitments into investment projects.
Her last project was to raise funds for “the world’s first sculpture dedicated to conveying the transformational power of green finance” – to be erected in the City of London. The artwork will also commemorate Tessa Tennant herself, alongside fellow standard-bearers.
Teresa Mary Cormack, always known as Tessa, was born at Bletchingley, Surrey, on May 29 1959, the third daughter of John Macrae Cormack and his wife Jean, whose father was the 1st Lord Davies, a Welsh Liberal politician and philanthropist.
Tessa was educated at Prior’s Field School in Godalming, Beech Lawn Tutorial College in Oxford and King’s College, London, where she read Human Environmental Studies before starting her working life as a project officer for the Green Alliance think tank.
Backpacking in Ecuador during her gap year, she had met Henry Tennant, second of three sons of Colin Tennant, 3rd Lord Glenconner – whose great-greatgrandfather Charles Tennant invented an industrial bleaching process that made him a fortune and brought his descendants all the foibles of aristocratic extravagance. Beloved of gossip columnists for his friendship with Princess Margaret, Glenconner was the owner of Mustique – and it was in the Caribbean island’s ecumenical church that Tessa and Henry were married in January 1983. Their son Euan was born later that year.
Henry was by then heir to the Glenconner fortune and Peeblesshire estate, his drug-addicted elder brother Charles having been disinherited. (Charles remained heir to the title until he died in 1996; his son Cody is now the 4th baron).
Part of Tessa and Henry’s early married life was spent in the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s commune at Skelmersdale, dedicated to transcendental meditation and “yogic flying”. But Henry was a troubled soul; in 1987 he came out as gay and formed an intense but platonic new partnership with Kelvin O’mard, a black actor and practising Buddhist, while continuing for a while to share the Tennant family’s London house with Tessa and Euan.
“I let them get on with the Buddhism,” she later told an interviewer. “I was quite content with my transcendental meditation … We all rolled along like before, a happy family, only bigger.” After Henry died of Aids in 1990, Tessa continued to think of him as “a wonderful, gentle human being whom I adored” and maintained a close friendship with Kelvin.
Her young son was now heir to The Glen, the 5,000-acre estate at Innerleithen which Charles Tennant had acquired in 1852. But the coffers had been diminished by the extravagances of Colin Tennant (who died in 2010, leaving his Caribbean assets to his manservant), and it fell to Tessa to realise the potential of the baronial Glen House as a wedding venue and film location, and to oversee the management of its farms, woodlands and steadings according to sustainable principles. Her boldest campaigns and projects were conceived with friends around the Glen House kitchen table.
Among many other commitments, she was co-founder of the UK Social Investment Forum, a non-executive director of the Green Investment Bank, a board member of Friends of the Earth UK, an ambassador for WWF UK and an adviser to Oxford University’s Socially Responsible Investment Committee. She was also one of an informal group who influenced the development of the Prince of Wales’s environmental opinions and projects.
Tessa Tennant was stricken by cancer in 2012; when it returned last year she decided not to tell anyone beyond her immediate family because “I didn’t want the issue to get in the way of work”; she also decided not to undergo further chemotherapy.
She was appointed OBE in the 2018 New Year’s Honours; four days before her death she received the decoration from the Queen at Holyrood Palace, having the previous week also received a lifetime achievement award from her peers in the investment world.
Tessa Tennant married secondly, in 2007 – after a voyage by open canoe down the River Tweed from Innerleithen to Berwick to test their compatibility – the New York-born architect Bill Staempfli. He brought groundedness and focus to the last phase of her life, and they worked together on the stylish refurbishment of several of The Glen’s redundant buildings.
She is survived by Bill and Euan, who is heir presumptive to the Glenconner barony.