Party-loving Glenconner was a brutal wife-beater
Widow: Attack left me deaf in one ear
HE WAS the great showman of the aristocracy who bought the tiny Caribbean island of Mustique and transformed it into a playground for the jetset of the 1960s and 1970s, giving Princess Margaret a ten-acre plot as a wedding present.
But now the real Colin Tennant, 3rd Lord Glenconner, has been exposed — by his long-suffering wife, Anne, best friend of the Queen’s late sister.
Lady Glenconner, who was a maid of honour at the Queen’s Coronation, has revealed that her husband was a cruel wife-beater who attacked her so badly she was left permanently disabled.
In her memoirs, which sold 500,000 copies after being serialised in the Daily Mail, she had said only that he had a ‘temper’. Now, however, she has laid bare his brutality.
‘I didn’t write about what Colin did to me,’ explains Lady Glenconner, 89, who has a surviving son and twin daughters. ‘It was too difficult for the children.’
Detailing his physical abuse, she says: ‘Oh, God. He beat me up with sticks.’ Indicating her left ear, she says: ‘I can’t hear at all in that ear.’
Only a very few confidants apparently knew of the abuse. ‘I remember once a doctor telling me it was as if [Colin] had one skin too few,’ she says, referring to his temper.
Chatting in a pub near Holkham Hall in Norfolk, where she grew up, Anne says of his short fuse: ‘Sitting here with Colin, whether it would be something making a noise, or if we were waiting here too long...’ She imitates an explosion. Anne’s family have been friends of the royals for generations: her father, the 5th Earl of Leicester, was an equerry to George VI. Her mother, Lady Elizabeth, was daughter of the 8th Earl of Hardwicke. ‘My mother, once or twice when he was particularly abusive to me, did say, “It’s your last chance”.’
Speaking to a journalist from the Financial Times, she adds of Colin: ‘I felt very sad for him, in a way. Sometimes he was so sad afterwards. He did say sorry. But I think he could have done a little bit more, actually.
‘Because he was very frightening. Very, very frightening.’
There was a final insult from beyond the grave when Lady Glenconner discovered from her husband’s £20 million will that he had left all his Caribbean property to his former valet, Kent Adonai, who worked for him for 26 years and was with him when he had a fatal heart attack in 2010 aged 83. It prompted legal action by Cody Tennant, son of the Glenconners’ eldest son, Charles, a one-time heroin addict who died in 1996. The action was settled in 2014.
Before Christmas, Anne was due to meet the Duchess of Cornwall in Norfolk. She’s sure to have received a sympathetic reception: Camilla has made the issue of domestic abuse a cornerstone of her public work.