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BLOW, Simon [224] pp. Faber & Faber 1987 8 3/4" x 5 3/4" 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.
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