Bob Pender

Bob Pender was born Robert Lomas in Bury, Lancashire, in 1867 (some records give 1871), into a family of fairground and theatrical entertainers going back to at least the 1860s. He began performing as a child, reportedly as a pantomime monkey alongside his father, and eventually took over and built what became known as the Pender Troupe, a knockabout act of acrobats, stilt-walkers and comic mimes that toured the British music hall and pantomime circuit for decades. Pender's troupe was known for its discipline and its physical variety act, blending tumbling, contortion, clowning and stilt work, and it became one of the more successful outfits of its kind touring provincial theatres in Britain in the 1910s and 1920s. He recruited and trained boys, housing and schooling them as apprentices within the troupe's traveling structure. Among the boys who joined was Archibald Leach, later Cary Grant, who first encountered the Pender Troupe as a child in Bristol and formally joined around 1918 at age fourteen, training in tumbling, stilt-walking, pantomime and mime under Pender's instruction. The troupe sailed for New York in July 1920, giving the teenaged Leach his first passage to America; when the troupe returned to Britain in 1922, he chose to remain in the United States. Pender died in Rochford, Essex, on 6 November 1939.