![]() His health was considered frail, and this allowed him to travel to various desirable bits of Europe, always with Nannie Trusler at his side. For a year or two, in late adolescence, he attended – or rather, did not often attend – the Slade, forming a close relationship there with Rex Whistler and his brother, Laurence. The story goes that when Lord Glenconner once lined up his younger sons to ask them what they wanted to become, Stephen, to his father’s alarm, replied: ‘I want to be a Great Beauty, sir.’ The true centre of his emotional life now, and later, was his Cockney nurse Nannie Trusler. ![]() ![]() Tennant spent his childhood in the Glenconners’ mock-Jacobean mansion Wilsford Manor, in Wiltshire, being spoiled and doted upon by his mother (described by Hoare as a ‘dreamy beauty, yet with a steely will’) and seeing very little of his earnestly public-spirited father. Margot Tennant, who married Asquith, the Liberal prime minister, was his paternal aunt. ![]() ![]() He was born in 1906, the son of a rich industrialist, Edward Tennant, who became Lord Glenconner in 1911, and of Pamela Wyndham, one of the Wyndham sisters immortalised by Sargent in his painting The Three Graces. It is worth stating a few facts about Stephen Tennant, the subject of this excellent biography by Philip Hoare, in case some readers may not have heard of him. ![]()
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