Obituary: Lord Glenconner, aristocrat

DESCENDED from Ayrshire farmers and Glasgow industrialists, Colin Tennant, better-known as Lord Glenconner, was the flamboyant aristocrat who courted Princess Margaret and turned a rocky, insect-infested Caribbean island called Mustique into a jet-set beach resort for royalty, including Prince William, and stars such as Mick Jagger, David Bowie and Pierce Brosnan.

Lord Glenconner, 3rd Baron Glenconner

Born: 1 December, 1926, in London.

Died: 27 August, 2010, in Soufrire, St Lucia, aged 83.

The strictly private, paparazzi-free island, for which Glenconner paid 45,000 in 1958, became a magnet for celebrities, who would party all night, usually in fancy dress or no dress at all, while the owner cavorted around in a bejewelled turban and his favoured white Indian pyjama-like cottons.

Princess Margaret, to whom he gave a villa named Les Jolies Eaux, was often the piano- playing life of the party and famously had a long affair there with a 25-year-old gardener, Roddy Llewellyn, 18 years her junior. Glenconner remained the princess's close friend and confidant until her death in 2002.

In 1976, not yet having succeeded as the 3rd Baron Glenconner (until his father died in 1983), he traded the cottons for a suit and one of his trademark bespoke straw Panama hats when, although from a traditional Liberal family, he sought, unsuccessfully, the Scottish National Party candidacy for Roxburgh, Selkirk and Peebles.

He had been partly brought up on the magnificent 5,000-acre family estate, known simply as Glen, near Innerleithen, Peebleshire, which is still in his family's hands.

He did, however, serve for a time as chairman of the SNP's constituency association, but his heart lay closer to the Caribbean than Scotland and he spent most of the past 50 years on either Mustique or latterly St Lucia, saying it was cheaper to live there than heat his Scottish mansion, Glen House.

He was estimated to have spent perhaps 100 million of the family fortune in Mustique and St Lucia, but he spent his latter days in a simple one-bedroom shack on the latter island, while still partying and planning a major tourist development. He had sold most of the family's valuable paintings, including a Constable painting of Waterloo Bridge, to survive.

He famously returned to Scotland in 1998 to participate in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe along with twins from St Lucia, known as Cletus and Marcellinus, who gave an energetic display of limbo dancing and fire-eating. The audience was delighted to see his Lordship himself, already 71, wriggling under a fairly low limbo bar.

Colin Christopher Paget Tennant was born on 1 December, 1926 in London, where his mother Pamela mostly lived, but he spent much of his childhood in Glen House, the family's neo-Gothic baronial mansion. He recalled trout fishing on Loch Eddy before being sent to Eton. He served with the Irish Guards during the last few months of the Second World War before going up to New College, Oxford, to study diplomatic history, a subject he said he found "not very helpful".

He could trace his family back to 17th century farmer John Tennant of Glenconner farm, Blairston, Ayrshire. His great-great-grandfather was Charles Tennant, a weaver friend of Robert Burns - Burns once called him wabster (weaver) Charlie - who moved from Ayrshire to Glasgow in the 18th century and invented dry bleaching powder, revolutionising the cotton industry by allowing cloth to be bleached indoors rather than in the sun.

He became one of Scotland's most successful industrialists whose fuming factory chimneys in Glasgow's St Rollox district - the highest known as Tennant's Stalk - became landmarks on Clydeside.

Colin Tennant started work at one of the family companies, C Tennant & Sons, often living at Glen House. It was in the Traquair church near there in the early 1950s that he was first spotted with the new Queen's sister, Margaret, a guest of his mother.

The princess's hopes of marrying the commoner Group Captain Peter Townsend had been stymied and rumours quickly spread that she and Tennant might be engaged. It was not to be and Tennant often said: "I don't expect she would have had me". He once added in a TV documentary: "I've got many abilities, including irritability."

Instead, in 1956, he married Lady Anne Coke, daughter of the Earl of Leicester, who was Princess Margaret's lady-in-waiting for more than 30 years. The couple would have three sons and twin daughters and remained married until his death.

They did, however, lead largely separate lives, she preferring the UK and spending holidays with him on Mustique or St Lucia. The Tennant companies had owned large swathes of land in the West Indies, notably Trinidad, and, after 15,000 acres in Trinidad were sold, Colin bought the barely-inhabited, parched island he had stumbled across while sailing.

There were only two white residents on Mustique, no roads, no modern conveniences. "A graveyard, very mouldy", was how he described it. Over the years, however, the eccentric millionaire turned it into what he called "Treasure Island" and a private retreat for the rich, the famous and the hangers-on.

It was in the late 1970s that the idyll started to crumble due to recession, his dwindling funds and loose management. He sold the island for 1m and eventually settled on St Lucia in 1992 with his pet elephant Bupa and his trusty valet, Kent. Two of Lord Glenconner's sons died young; Charlie from Hepatitis-C after being a heroin addict, Henry from an Aids-related illness. His other son with Lady Anne, Christopher, was seriously disabled in a teenage motorcycle accident.

Just last year, Glenconner learned, after DNA tests, that a 54-year-old London psychotherapist, Joshua Bowler, was his son from a relationship, before he was married, with society beauty Henrietta Moraes, a model for painters such as Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon.

Having lost two sons, Glenconner welcomed his new-found offspring into the family and, in June this year, flew in from St Lucia to throw a party at Glen House so that the family could get to know Joshua.

In recent months, having been diagnosed with prostate cancer, Glenconner was busily writing his memoirs. According to his friend the Daily Mail feature writer Glenys Roberts, the book, if ever published, promises "hair-rasing anecdotes about the Royal Family [which will] have Buckingham Palace on tenterhooks".

Roberts quoted Glenconner as saying: "They were horrible to Margaret at Balmoral and horrible to the children. And when she got ill, all they said was ‘pull yourself together!' The Queen Mother was the worst of the lot."

Lord Glenconner, will be buried on St Lucia on Saturday. He is survived by his wife Lady Anne, his sons Christopher and Joshua, his daughters Amy and May and his sister Emma.

His grandson Cody Tennant (the deceased Charlie's son), a 16-year-old Edinburgh schoolboy who lives in the Grange, becomes the 4th Baron Glenconner.

PHIL DAVISON