Eleonora Elisa Fiaschi Tennant was the Tory candidate for the Labour stronghold of Silvertown, Essex, in 1931 and 1935. Born in Sydney in 1893, she moved to England for her education and married Ernest Tennant, a relative of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. She drove ambulances in the Spanish Civil War and wrote Spanish Journey, an account of her experiences in the conflict, in which she noted: “Communism calls out the vilest in human nature.”
During the Blitz, she was an ARP warden in London. She left her family and moved back to Australia in 1949, buying a run-down farm in Tasmania, which she sold at a profit. She did the same twice again before moving to the Diddleum Plains, where she died in 1963.
Stephen Brasher
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