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Eleonora Elisa Fiaschi Tennant (19 December 1893 – 11 September 1963) was an Australian political activist best known for her involvement with far-right politics in England. She and her husband Ernest Tennant had links with Nazi Germany and she was an outspoken anti-Semite. She stood for the House of Commons on three occasions, as a Conservative in 1931 and 1935, and as an Independent Conservative in 1945. She returned to Australia in 1952 and was a Democratic Labor candidate for the Senate in 1961.
During the Spanish Civil War, Tennant visited areas under Nationalist control, near the Portuguese border. She 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. Although she was only in the country for ten days, on her return to the UK, she published Spanish Journey: Personal Experiences of the Civil War. 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 Saroléa who, like Tennant, was based in Scotland at the time.Gavin Bowd, Fascist Scotland: Caledonia and the Far Right, Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2013, pp. 101–102
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.Mark Pitchford, The Conservative Party and the Extreme Right 1945–1975, p.15 Near the end of the war, Tennant came to lead two groups, the "Never Again Association" and the "Face the Facts Association", both extreme nationalist groups.Frank Honigsbaum, The Division in British Medicine, p.46 Though neither attracted a significant membership, she used them to promote various views, mostly notably her opposition to bread rationing. She stood in Putney at the 1945 United Kingdom general election as an independent Conservative. Opposing an official Conservative and three other candidates, she took only 144 votes and came bottom of the poll.
By this point Tennant had become outspoken in her anti-Semitism, stating that she was prepared to "go all out against the Jew". To this end she sought to work with Sylvia Gosse and Margaret Crabtree, two residents of Belsize Park who in October 1945 organised an "anti-alien" petition against plans to house Jewish refugees in the Metropolitan Borough of Hampstead. The petition gained some press support and had the backing of Conservative MPs Charles Challen and Waldron Smithers as well as Ernest Benn and the Society for Individual Freedom. 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. Before the meeting Hamm removed a portrait of Oswald Mosley for fear of scaring off the Conservative-linked Tennant although in the end he was impressed by the strength of her commitment to anti-Semitism.Stephen Dorril, Blackshirt – Sir Oswald Mosley and british Fascism, Penguin, 2007, p. 549 The initiative was largely unsuccessful however as Hamm's methods of provocative street politics and the heckling of leftist meetings were far removed from the high society circles in which the likes of Gosse and Crabtree moved.Graham Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Sir Oswald Mosley and the Resurrection of British Fascism After 1945, London: I.B. Tauris, 2007, p. 40
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