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A collection of Winifred Coombe Tennant’s best insults and caricatures at the League of Nations.
Photo: @WestGlamArchive
In September 1922, Coombe Tennant made history when she became the first woman to represent Britain as a delegate to the League of Nations Assembly. 1/9
Photo: @WestGlamArchive
In September 1922, Coombe Tennant made history when she became the first woman to represent Britain as a delegate to the League of Nations Assembly. 1/9
In this capacity, she found herself at the heart of international society, socialising with luminaries such as Arthur Balfour, Alfred Zimmern, and Eric Drummond, and invariably formed colourful opinions of these key players in international politics. 2/9
In her diary she sketched out the key actors as she encountered them, caricaturing them with an almost comedic honesty. The Swedish Prime Minister Hjalmar Branting looked, she thought, ‘like a meditative walrus’, his intellect outshone by his bushy upper lip. 3/9
The ‘fat and be-whiskered Frenchmen’ whom she found herself surrounded by were prime targets for this. Raymond Poincaré, the Prime Minister of France, reminded her of a ‘demented schoolmaster’, incapable of behaving reasonably. 4/9
Women faired little better in this colourful portrayal of life in Geneva. Coombe Tennant’s opinion of Bugg-Wishell, the woman representing Sweden, was defined by the perception that she was ‘less than four foot looking, like one of those carved wooden nutcrackers’. 5/9
In the case of Elena Văcărescu, twice poet laureate of Académie française and the only woman in the world ever to be made a formal ambassador to the League, Coombe Tennant struggled to see her as much more than a ‘mountain of fat’, despite their shared experience. 6/9
Even Jean Monnet, who later became an influential founder of the European Union, was described by Coombe Tennant as ‘that evil Genius of the League’, although declined to elaborate further on this statement in her diary. 7/9
Few individuals at the League escaped being caricatured in Coombe Tennant’s diary, and while some reviews proved more positive, Coombe Tennant often went to great lengths to describe the ‘hideous appearance’ of people she encountered. 8/9
In its colourful descriptions, the diary paints a vivid picture of life in Geneva, projecting humanity onto lifeless names upon the paper, albeit through the warped lens of Coombe Tennant’s humour. 9/9
Photo Credit: West Glamorgan Archive Service
