Eleonora Elisa Fiaschi Tennant was an Australian political activist best known for her involvement with far-right politics in England.
17 Facts About Eleonora Tennant
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Eleonora Tennant and her husband Ernest Tennant had links with Nazi Germany and she was an outspoken anti-Semite.
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Eleonora Tennant stood for the House of Commons on three occasions, as a Conservative in 1931 and 1935, and as an Independent Conservative in 1945.
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Eleonora Tennant returned to Australia in 1952 and was a Democratic Labor candidate for the Senate in 1961.
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Ernest Eleonora Tennant was a leading figure in the Anglo-German Fellowship, an organisation he helped to establish in 1935 which advocated closer relations between the UK and Nazi Germany.
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At the 1931 general election, Eleonora Tennant stood as the Conservative Party candidate for Silvertown, a safe Labour Party seat in the East End of London.
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Eleonora Tennant's candidacy was sponsored by Lucy, Lady Houston, and came despite the opposition of Ernest.
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Eleonora Tennant was driven around by a Falangist activist, and came to the conclusion that what she described as the "Glorious Uprising" was an unqualified success, the war being entirely the fault of communists, and that a dictatorship was necessary to save the country.
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At home she was a leading figure in Friends of National Spain, a group formed by Lord Phillimore in 1937 to win the support of leading members of the political elite and nobility for Francisco Franco, and in this group was close to the far-right academic Charles Sarolea who, like Eleonora Tennant, was based in Scotland at the time.
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Eleonora Tennant maintained contact with many far-right activists during World War II, and met regularly with Jeffrey Hamm, during which they discussed their support for anti-Semitism.
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Eleonora Tennant stood in Putney at the 1945 United Kingdom general election as an independent Conservative.
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Eleonora Tennant attempted to link Hamm in with this burgeoning movement and the pair held a meeting in Belsize Park on 21 November 1945 in an attempt to link Hamm with them.
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In 1948 Eleonora Tennant's husband brought a divorce petition on the grounds of desertion.
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Eleonora Tennant contested the petition on the grounds that she "objected to living with [him] because of his Nazi sympathies".
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Eleonora Tennant sold this on after a few years and bought a series of farms in this manner, the last being one she newly established on the Diddleum Plains.
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Eleonora Tennant again became politically active, and stood as a Democratic Labor Party candidate for the Senate in the 1961 Australian federal election, but took only 476 votes.
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Eleonora Tennant began developing heart problems, and returned to live with family in England, dying in Kettering in 1963.