"Broken Blood: The Rise And Fall Of The Tennant Family" 1987 BLOW, Simon
SKU: 34363437124

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

Sale price$87.30 Regular price$97.00
Save 10%

Shipping Estimate
USA
  • USA
  • CAN

Ships within 48 hours · Estimated delivery Jul 7 - Jul 12

Promo Codes Available:

For Your Every Summer RSVP, with Code: SUMMER15

Description

"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.

Shipping Notes
  • Free Standard Shipping on $100+ Orders to the USA.
  • Except Preorder products are shipped in 48 hours.
  • Delivery to the USA:
  1. Standard Shipping : 3-10 business days
  • If time is of the essence, please consider selecting expedited delivery for faster service.
Exchange/Return Notes
  • We offer a 30-day return/exchange service after receiving.
  • Final sale items are not eligible for returns or exchanges.
  • To process your return/exchange, please contact us at [email protected]
  • Please click here for more details>>> Return & Exchange Policy
SKU: 34363437124

Discover Niche Categories That Outsell

Top-Converting Item to Boost Your Average Order

4.4 ★★★★★
Based on 779 reviews
Sort
Highest Rating
Newest First
Oldest First
Product Reviews
C
Verified Purchase
C. Hunter
Charlottesville, US
★★★★★ 5
Beta, Alpha, Omega oh my!
Format: Kindle
Omegas are precious and given to Alphas & their packs... but the Betas want in too. To this end, the Beta government is rolling out its trial of assigning a Beta to each Alpha-Omega pack. But forcing a Beta into a pack where they are not wanted will not end well... Of course, no one expected the Omega to fall for the assigned Beta. Great read and cliffhanger
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2025
B
Verified Purchase
B. Stubby
Phoenix, US
★★★★★ 3
A familiar story, just with…..less.
Format: Kindle
So, as other reviewers make clear, this is very similar to Pack Darling and The Beta. It’s much closer aligned with The Beta, in plot and maybe more like Pack Darling with characters. That being said, I don’t hate this…..but it wasn’t great either. It’s both books mentioned but just….less. Less angst, less emotion, less feeling. The plot feels very half fleshed out, and the “bad guy” feels underwhelming. I didn’t really feel any real emotions from and of the male leads, except maybe Oliver. The others fell sorta flat for me. And Mika makes herself out to be this big bad ass straight outta training and then we never see it from here again with the one fitting room incident as the exception. SPOILER: The whole, “Oh, I’m actually probably an Omega, but I don’t wanna be but I do actually wanna be but no one can ever know my secret that I do nothing to hide “ thing fell so flat. She never commutes to believing she was secretly an omega, but also mentions her “secret” a lot. It just felt so manufactured. I’m intrigued enough to read part 2 and see how the author closes everything out, but this is not one I’ll recommend or ever come back to.
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2024
S
Verified Purchase
SR
Battle Creek, US
★★★★★ 5
Good start to a series
Format: Kindle
I delayed reading the series for reasons I don’t remember. But my TBR list is huge so I thought I’d take a shot of this and I was pleasantly surprised. I didn’t think the blurb about it was anything special. But it was a very good book. It took some interesting twists and turns. I am so glad the second book is already out. Because I would not have waited patiently. Very slow burn but good storyline. 🔥🔥/5
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2025
J
Verified Purchase
Jammie Clark
Lake Worth, US
★★★★★ 4
A good read
Format: Kindle
Multiple points of view. 3 Alpha men and an Omega male. She is a Beta in training for a new program placing betas in Alpha/Omega packs. Mila is only doing the program for the money to take care of her dad. She wasn't expecting to fall for a pack but when she sees this packs Omega she is done for. There is just something about him. His Alphas are good looking as well. Too bad she is hiding a secret and their government is acting shady. I liked it and can't wait to see where their story goes.
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on November 14, 2023
B
Verified Purchase
Bri Hires
Houston, US
★★★★★ 3
Slightly repetitive but I did love some things
Format: Kindle
I love this type of story. And omegaverse is one of my all time favorite genres. But there are a few things that pulled me out of my enjoyment while I was reading. It was repetitive at times as well as struggled with telling not showing. So we didn’t always feel like we were experiencing things with the main character. There were also some plot holes but they may still be answered in part 2. Now this isn’t to be said I didn’t enjoy parts of the story. I loved the almost instant love between Mila and Oliver. And how he started changing around her.
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2024

recommand products