Elias Leach

Elias James Leach was a tailor's presser employed at a Bristol garment factory, work that was physically hard and often irregular, leaving the family in recurring financial hardship. He married Elsie Maria Kingdon in 1898, and the couple's first son, John, died in infancy before Archibald was born in 1904. In 1915, when Archibald was nine, Elias had Elsie committed to the Bristol Lunatic Asylum (Glenside) without informing his son of the reason for her disappearance; the boy was told only that his mother had gone away, and later understood her to be dead. Elias subsequently moved with Archibald's knowledge to Southampton, where he began a second, unofficial family. Archibald left school and Bristol at sixteen to join Bob Pender's troupe of knockabout comedians, sailing for New York in 1920. Elias Leach died in December 1935, and it was only after his father's death that Archibald — by then Cary Grant, and freshly divorced from his first wife, Virginia Cherrill — learned that his mother was in fact still alive.