Colin Tennant, 3rd Baron Glenconner

Colin Christopher Paget Tennant, 3rd Baron Glenconner (1 December 1926 – 27 August 2010) was a British aristocrat.

He was the son of Christopher Grey Tennant, 2nd Baron Glenconner, and Pamela Winefred Paget.

He was also the nephew of Edward Tennant and Stephen Tennant, and the half-brother of the novelist Emma Tennant.

Colin Tennant was born at 76 Sloane Street in Chelsea, London, on 1 December 1926, the son of the second Baron Glenconner.

His mother, Pamela, was the daughter of Sir Richard Paget, 2nd Baronet.

After his parents divorced in 1935, he was educated at Scaitcliffe and Eton College, but for years, Tennant rarely saw his father.

Holidays from Eton were spent with his maternal grandmother, Lady Muriel Paget, a formidable grande dame who had diverted a train from the Crimea to Siberia in World War I to save the lives of 70 British nannies.

After finishing his schooling at Eton, Tennant enlisted in the Irish Guards, serving during the tail end of World War II and attaining the rank of lieutenant.

After the war, he attended New College, Oxford.

At Oxford, he gained a reputation for being "terribly kind to plain girls with nice manners and extremely waspish to pretty ones with nasty manners".

After graduating, he worked for the family's merchanting business, C. Tennant, Sons & Co, and at the same time, began to attract the attention of the gossip columns as Princess Margaret's escort.

During the early 1950s, he was often involved in amateur dramatics; in 1953, he took part, with Princess Margaret, in a production for charity of an Edgar Wallace play, The Frog; Tennant played the title role (a serial killer), and the Princess was Assistant Stage Director.

After about three years, the restaurant, constructed as "an almost exact copy of Messel's stage set for the 1950s Broadway musical House of Flowers," went bankrupt.

It was eventually resurrected by the Hilton chain of hotels as the Jalousie Bar, part of the Jalousie Resort.

Glenconner and his involvement in Mustique has been the subject of multiple documentaries.

It was during this period that Tennant was spotted as a possible husband for Princess Margaret, who had been publicly hurt by the collapse of her hopes of marrying the divorced commoner Group Captain Peter Townsend during 1953.

The following year, he was forced to deny newspaper reports that he would shortly announce his engagement to the Princess.

"I don't expect she would have had me," he said in later years.

Lady Anne had been one of Queen Elizabeth II's Maids of Honour at the 1953 coronation, and was also a close friend and lady-in-waiting of the Queen's sister, Princess Margaret.

Lord and Lady Glenconner had five children, three sons and twin daughters:

Princess Margaret met her future husband Tony Armstrong-Jones, who was hired to take wedding pictures at Tennant's 1956 wedding to Lady Anne Coke.

On 21 April 1956, Tennant married Lady Anne Veronica Coke.

Lady Anne is the daughter of Thomas Coke, 5th Earl of Leicester.

In 1958, he purchased the island of Mustique in The Grenadines for £45,000.

After purchasing the Caribbean island of Mustique in 1958, Tennant built a new village for its inhabitants, planted coconut palms, vegetables, and fruit, and developed the fisheries.

In 1960, the British royal yacht Britannia carried Princess Margaret and her new husband, now Lord Snowdon, on a honeymoon cruise around the Caribbean.

The royal couple visited Mustique to accept a wedding gift from Tennant, a plot of land on which the Princess was to build her holiday retreat, Les Jolies Eaux.

The cost of running Mustique depleted Glenconner's family fortune, and he was obliged to take on business partners.

Eventually, he went into self-exile on St. Lucia, where assisted by Iranian investors, he built and for many years ran the "Bang Between the Pitons" restaurant.

In 1963, his father, the 2nd Baron Glenconner, sold the family business to Consolidated Gold Fields, and Tennant suddenly inherited £1 million.

At first, father and son were retained as chairman and deputy chairman, but after his father's retirement in 1967, Tennant failed to become chairman and resigned.

The Tennants became significant landowners and industrialists over the years.

Part of their land was in the West Indies, including a neglected 15,000 acres in Trinidad.

In 1971, he was interviewed by Alan Whicker for an episode of Whicker's World set on the island.

Before succeeding to the peerage in 1983, he had travelled widely, especially in India and the West Indies.

He was an avid socialite and a close friend of Princess Margaret, to whom his wife, the former Lady Anne Coke, was a lady-in-waiting.

Colin Tennant inherited the peerage title and the Tennant baronetcy, along with the family's Scottish estate of The Glen, in 1983, on his father's death.

In 2000, a documentary by Joseph Bullman, titled The Man Who Bought Mustique, included Glenconner's first visit to Mustique since his exile.

According to a reviewer, Tennant's "occasionally dictatorial manner" was "amply displayed" in the documentary.

To describe Tennant, he wrote, "You had to imagine your most crotchety uncle on his worst day and magnify that tenfold."