Wales' Unknown Hero: Soldier, Spy, Monk

A biography of Henry Coombe-Tennant (1913–89), whose family lived at Cadoxton Lodge near Neath and created Port Tennant at Swansea, Wales.

Henry’s mother, Winifred Coombe-Tennant, was a well-known British suffragette, political campaigner and psychic medium, and Henry was the result of an extra-marital affair with the brother of the Prime Minister. According to Winifred, her spirit-world contacts claimed that Henry was to become the ‘New Messiah’, bringing peace to a troubled world. After Eton, Cambridge and China (having taught himself Mandarin), Henry went into the Welsh Guards, before being captured during World War II, escaping from his POW camp and getting back to Britain. He joined Special Forces, parachuting into occupied France to assist the Resistance. Post-war, he served with NATO and then the British Secret Service, becoming ‘our man in Baghdad’ after a bloody revolution in Iraq. Converting to Catholicism in the early 1960s, he ended his days as a Benedictine monk at Downside Abbey near Bath.