Winifred Coombe Tennant

Mrs Winifred Margaret Coombe Tennant (1 November 1874 – 31 August 1956) was a British suffragist, Liberal politician, philanthropist, patron of the arts and spiritualist.

Born Winifred Margaret Pearce-Serocold in Britain on 1 November 1874, at Rodborough Lodge, Rodborough, Gloucestershire,[1][page needed] the only child of Royal Navy Lieutenant George Edward Pearce-Serocold (1828-1912), of a landed gentry family of Cherry Hinton, Cambridgeshire, and his second wife, Mary Clarke, daughter of Jeremiah Clarke Richardson, J.P., of Derwen Fawr, near Swansea.

On 12 December 1895[5] she married Charles Coombe Tennant (1852–1928), who was 22 years older than she; they lived at his family's house, Cadoxton Lodge, Neath.

As a nationalist, she was heavily involved in the Eisteddfod movement, becoming Mistress of the Robes to Gorsedd Cymru and receiving an honorary Bardic degree in 1918.

She was one of the mediums involved in the cross-correspondences, in which messages from the deceased Mary Catherine Lyttleton (who died on 21 March 1875) were supposedly transmitted by automatic writing to her lover Arthur Balfour.

Her papers are held in the archive of the National Library of Wales[15] After her death Cummins published the book Swan on a Black Sea, containing their correspondence, along with messages received from the alleged spirit of "Mrs Willett" describing the afterlife.