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"Broken Blood: The Rise And Fall Of The Tennant Family" 1987 BLOW, Simon

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"Broken Blood: The Rise And Fall Of The Tennant Family" 1987 BLOW, SimonBLOW, Simon [224] pp. Faber & Faber 1987 8 3 4" x 5 3 4" VG VG Scroll Down for (12) Additional Scans: And yet, could the age of the conquering bourgeoisie flourish, when large tracts of the bourgeoisie itself found themselves so little engaged in the generation of wealth, and drifting so rapidly and so far away from the puritan ethic, the values of work and effort, accumulation through abstention, duty and moral earnestness, which had given them their

BLOW, Simon

[224] pp.

Faber & Faber

1987

8 3/4" x 5 3/4"

VG/ VG

Scroll Down for (12) Additional Scans:

‘And yet, could the age of the conquering bourgeoisie flourish, when large tracts of the bourgeoisie itself found themselves so little engaged in the generation of wealth, and drifting so rapidly and so far away from the puritan ethic, the values of work and effort, accumulation through abstention, duty and moral earnestness, which had given them their identity, pride and ferocious energy? ... The fear – nay, the shame – of a future of parasites haunted them.’ These sentences, from the Marxist historian E.J. Hobsbawm’s The Age of Empire, 1875-1914, would make the perfect epitaph for Simon Blow’s history of his maternal grandmother’s family, the Tennants. Or for a Thatcherite tract on Britain’s decline from Victorian values. Or for a great novel like Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. The rise and fall of a mercantile dynasty is a rich old subject, and can be approached from several angles. Which will Simon Blow’s be? ‘If I was more Tennant than anything else,’ he writes, ‘I began to wonder who the Tennants were. Should I be proud, worried or ashamed? What influence was this blood likely to have over my destiny?’ It sounds like another search for identity – ‘the curse of the age’, as E.S. Turner recently remarked à propos of Gloria Vanderbilt’s autobiography.


Well, at least this isn’t an autobiography – though perhaps it would be more amusing if it were. The first half traces the Tennants back to their origins as subsistence farmers in Ayrshire. At the turn of the 18th century, one of them was apprenticed to a weaver and developed an interest in bleaching – then an area of growth in the textile industry, since everyone was looking for a fast chemical process to replace the space and time-consuming laying-out of linen on meadows. Tennant teamed up with a trained chemist called Macintosh, who later immortalised his name by inventing a waterproofing method. Together they patented a bleaching powder and set up a factory at St Rollox near Glasgow. By 1830, it was the largest chemical factory in the world, creating a lot of wealth for Glasgow and a sky black with fumes.

The next Tennant, John, went on developing, expanding and diversifying the business, which already had a branch in the City of London. A multi-millionaire by the age of 25, John was a typical early Victorian entrepreneur, perhaps not even all that untypical in not being married to the mistress of his solid Glasgow mansion who was also the mother of his children. Her name was Robina. Robina’s son Charles was born in 1823 and succeeded his father as head of the firm. He bought an estate at Glen in Peebleshire, and built a baronial castle on it where he brought up 12 children by two successive wives to hunt, shoot and fish. He sent the boys to Eton and acquired a collection of paintings, a house in Grosvenor Square and, in 1885, a baronetcy – after which he was known as ‘the Bart’. By this time the business empire was already beginning to decline, partly because of a general recession, and partly because Ludwig Mond, the founder of ICI, was using more advanced chemical methods: in the end he was able to force Tennants into a partial merger.

Up till now, Blow has munched his way conscientiously through uncongenial material: the Scottish Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, Radicalism, even insider dealing and the defeat of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar – none of these subjects really seems to turn him on, though some of the Tyrian purple has leaked into the prose and produced phrases like ‘Society gave a brittle laugh.’ But with the Bart’s children he is at last into Society, and things begin to brighten up. Society, according to Blow, was slumbering under a pall of stuffy philistinism, waiting for the unconventional Tennants to kiss it awake. The kiss was administered by the girls: Charlotte, who married Lord Ribblesdale; Lucy, who married Thomas Graham-Smith; Laura, who married Alfred Lyttelton; and Margot, who considerably later married Asquith and had the highest profile of them all. The male Tennants of that generation were not conspicuous for profiles. Laura and Margot’s unconventionality consisted in managing without chaperones and turning their bedroom at Glen into a snuggery where they discussed books and ideas with men. This, says Blow, was ‘to crystallise that group of leisured but sensitive country-house people who came to be dubbed “the Souls”. Lately the group has had a revival of interest shown in it.’ Blow does nothing to keep the interest going. The character he homes in on is his own great-grandmother Pamela Wyndham. As described by him, she is such an outsize monster that she brings the book to life and runs away with what there is of it. She was a great aristocratic beauty; her vanity and self-absorption were monumental; and she smothered her sons with the kind of love that has to be instantly and demonstratively returned with knobs on. When her eldest son was killed in the First World War, she turned to Spiritualism. She was horrid to her daughter (Blow’s grandmother), who consequently failed to develop a heart and turned into another kind of monster, a bolter. (She was, in fact, one of the models for Nancy Mitford’s famous Bolter in The Pursuit of Love.) She abandoned her children and had an insatiable ‘need to be noticed’. Blow rather imprudently describes this failing as ‘a feature among Pamela’s descendants’.

The feature didn’t come out in her eldest surviving son, Christopher, the second Lord Glenconner: so Blow doesn’t devote much space to him, though he regrets that in 1963 he sold the family firm to Consolidated Goldfields. He has more to say about the two younger brothers, David and Stephen. David led a rackety life with three wives and a lot of drink. Blow gives him no credit for founding the Gargoyle Club. But he descrves some: in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, the Gargoyle, though a nightclub and not a café, was a London version of the artists’ and intellectuals’ hang-outs in Paris, Vienna and Berlin.

Stephen Tennant became an enfant terrible, the love of Siegfried Sassoon, and a fairly famous aesthete. He died this year. In 1894, a decade or so before David and Stephen were born, Kipling wrote a poem which might have been about them – ‘The “Mary Gloster” ’. He rolled them into one and made them the child of a Glasgow shipowner, though it could just as well have been an industrialist. The self-made old man, ‘Sir Andrew Gloster, dying, baronite’, addresses his son:

I know the kind you are.
Harrer an’ Trinity College! I ought to ha’ sent
you to sea –
But I stood you an education, an’ what have you
done for me?
The things I knew was proper you wouldn’t
thank me to give,
And the things I knew was rotten you said was
the way to live.
For you muddled with books and pictures, an’
china an’ etchin’s an’ fans,
And your rooms at college was beastly – more
like a whore’s than a man’s.

It’s lucky Sir Andrew didn’t see the sale, in October, of Stephen Tennant’s house and collection of camp bibelots. And it’s a shame Blow didn’t decide to end his book with Stephen’s death. He clearly has it in for the present Lord Glenconner. The pages devoted to him are unpleasant (without being in the least bit interesting). Of course one wonders a bit what happened to make Blow so disgruntled: but even more how Faber and Faber could decide to publish a book written in media-speak clichés, punctuated by mistakes of grammar and syntax, and even with its whiff of rancour so very dull.

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Miguel Denyer
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★★★★★ 1
Don't waste your money - these people will not help you
On March 9th 2024, I purchased a MCombo Lift Chair costing $785. On the same day, through the same Amazon account (my PERSONAL account since I also have a business account), I purchased an Asurion Complete Protect policy at the cost of $16.99 per month plus taxes. About one month ago, a problem arose with the chair that required me to make a claim using the "Complete Protect" policy that I had purchased for that very item. The claim was initiated on January 1st, 2025 - On January 3rd, I received an email asking me for photographs showing the damage for which I was making a claim. I sent those photographs via email to the address provided on January 6th. On January 27th, having not received ANY response from Asurion, I contacted them via phone and was told that my purchase had been made with a business account, that it was being used for business purposes, and was therefore not covered. I assured the Asurion Representative that it was most certainly not a business use, and that the chair that I was claiming for had been purchased because I had extensive shoulder surgery done that made it impossible to get in and out of bed. After speaking (unsuccessfully) with the Asurion Rep, I then contacted Amazon Customer Service. I spoke with an Amazon Customer Service Representative on the phone who confirmed that I had in fact used my personal account to purchase the chair and the Asurion Complete Protect policy. That representative went on to send a message to Asurion on my behalf confirming that the purchase was for personal use and not business use. Asurion responded, asking me to call them with the order number for the Asurion purchase. The number I gave was the exact same order number on my order history, however, the Asurion Rep could not find it. I was finally able to discover that the order number in Asurion's system was entirely different and isn't even in the same format as an Amazon order number. Upon the Asurion representative finding my plan, she informed me that the chair was listed as being purchased for business use (despite Amazon confirming that it was NOT) but that I should give them "a couple of business days" to resolve the issue. Five business days later, still no response and so I called them again (Yesterday - February 1st 2025)... Lo and behold, I got the same crap yet again... the purchase was listed as business use and was therefore being denied, but she promised to remove the business use commentary and put the claim through again. Today, February 2nd, I called Amazon yet again to escalate and had to call THREE times because the first two calls resulted in me finally being connected to an Asurion representative (two different reps) and each time, the Asurion representative hung up the phone as soon as my name was mentioned. It has become clear to me that the Asurion "Complete Protect" policy is a SCAM - they will NOT take care of your issue, regardless of how long you've been paying. I have been paying every month since March 9th last year - so they've received over $170 from me thus far, with zero other claims, and if I am able to cancel right now, I will only receive $16.99 back. All I want, is the chair that I purchased the policy for coverage of, to be repaired or replaced. Asurion are NOT helping, and are actively avoiding contact. At this point, I am considering legal action against Asurion for fraud - perhaps even a Class Action. I'll wait and see if my issue gets resolved within the next 10 days or so.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 2, 2025
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CamRam
San Leandro, US
★★★★★ 5
Asurion is AWESOME!
Ok, so let me start with the fact that you should NOT waste your time calling Amazon's customer service if you think you have a claim under Asurion's monthly protection plan. CALL ASURION! I wasted almost an hour with Amazon representatives that have absolutely no training in how the Asurion plan works, or even any idea if my item was covered. In fact, they told me the mechanized chair I purchased under the plan wasn't covered! Finally, my call got escalated to a manager who was just as clueless about my coverage, but had the best idea ever... call Asurion! The smartest thing I did that morning was hang up with Amazon, and reach out to Asurion as I should have done in the first place. Dealing with Asurion's customer service, after my Amazon call, was like being elevated to VIP status! 😄 Asurion's rep nicely took all my info, including the chair's purchase date and order number. Then they asked that I upload a couple of pictures of the product, along with a written description of the malfunction I had mentioned over the phone. This is where it gets really good. They told me they'd review the claim to determine if they'd send a repair specialist or reimburse me the cost of the item. In less than 48 hours, they determined that a payout was in order, and sent me an email that included an Amazon gift card for the total cost of the item minus the taxes I had paid, which I loaded directly into my Amazon wallet. Apparently, Asurion does not include the purchase taxes in their coverage. But, I can live with that. All in all, Asurion's claims division get a double thumbs up 👍🏽👍🏽, and the company gets big ups from me for not only standing behind their protection plan, but doing so expeditiously! Special note: If you buy a lot of stuff from Amazon, and have Asurion's monthly protection plan, scroll the item listing before pulling the trigger on your purchase... you need to see the green streamer that indicates your product is protected by the plan. If you don't see that, check to see if there are alternative products that might be covered. There are very few electronic or high ticket items that aren't covered, but looking for that green banner in the item description that says it's covered is key to foregoing any future headaches.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2026
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This protection plan that i pay monthly for paid for itself ten fold. My 3D printer just quit working and after the manufacturer warrenty had ran out at that. I submitted my claim they emailed me a shipping label in which I shipped out my printer that same day. Two days later they received my printer determined it couldc not be fixed and sent me a Amazon gift card for the full price of my printer. Today I will be receiving my new 3d printer thanks to Complete Protect. I highly recommend anyone and everyone to purchase this policy. This warrenty is like having a home warrenty like Homeshield but for your electronics and probably other stuff that i just have not read to see what else. This insurance will save me so much money over the corse of this year and every year after that. Thank you Complete Protect.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2026
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Chromebook coverage.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2026
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Toveth Noyse
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