his father gave him. As a result, his ‘aspirations for a college education slowly faded’.3
Elsie Leach’s smart young son was now, according to one of his former classmates, ‘a scruffy little boy’4 who was a promising scholar and a good athlete, but who also had a mischievous streak and was often a disruptive influence. ‘It depressed me to be good, according to what I judged was an adult’s conception of good’, Grant recalled, ‘and matters around me were not going well.’5 When Cary Grant made his triumphant return to Bristol on a visit in 1933, Archie Leach’s old teachers told reporters of their memories of ‘the naughty little boy who was always making a noise in the back row and would never do his homework’.6 The irascible piano teacher whom Archie was obliged to visit had taken to rapping the knuckles of his left hand with a ruler (he was naturally left-handed,7 which caused him to struggle sometimes to play as she instructed). ‘My head seemed stubbornly set against the penetration of academic knowledge,’8 although he admitted, grudgingly, that he quite enjoyed studying geography, history, art and chemistry. What he did become was an avid reader of comics, such as The Magnet and The Gem, as well as a popular and eye-catching footballer (playing in goal and experiencing the ‘deep satisfaction’ of being cheered when making a good save – ‘one of those fancy ballet-like flying jobs’9). It was, in fact, as a result of his increasingly uninhibited sporting exploits that he suffered an accident that would alter his appearance in a subtle way: he snapped off part of a front tooth when he fell over in the school playground; the gap closed up in time, but he was left with only one front-centre tooth.10 Similar – if less dramatic – mishaps followed. His teachers began to give up on him: ‘I was not turning out to be a model boy.’11
He found an additional outlet for his energies in the 1st Bristol Scout troop. At the end of his first year at Fairfield he volunteered for summer work wherever his Boy Scout training could be used for the war effort: ‘I was so often alone and unhappy at home that I welcomed any occupation that promised activity.’12 He was assigned to working as a messenger and guide on the military docks at Southampton. For two months he watched thousands of boys not much older than himself sail off towards France; some had already lost an arm or a leg in combat but were being sent back for a second time. It was a poignant experience for him, but it was also, in an odd way, an exhilarating period in his life. When he returned to Bristol, he began to spend time at the docks, where schooners and steamships sailed right up the Avon into the centre of the city. ‘You always had a sense that Bristol was a port, a gateway to somewhere else,’ he said, and, seeing the ships ‘that could take you all over the world’, he came to see the city as ‘a place you could leave, if you wanted to, and, at that age, I did.’13 He was restless and lonely, and it appears that he contemplated signing on as a cabin-boy until he discovered that he was too young.14 Although, years later, he described Bristol as ‘one of my favorite places in the world’,15 he admitted that, at the time, ‘I didn’t like it where I was, and I wanted to travel’.16
Back at the dark, quiet, cramped house in Picton Street, he was aware that his father, on those irregular occasions when he saw him, was growing increasingly withdrawn and melancholic. ‘He was a dear sweet man, and I learned a lot from him,’17 but as a father he no longer exerted much influence on Archie’s life. The shadow of Elsie hung over them both. Years later, Cary Grant wrote of a long-held desire to ‘cleanse’ himself ‘perhaps of an imagined guilt that I was in some way responsible for my parents’ separation’.18
An opportunity to escape from the emptiness of his home life opened up unexpectedly when he encountered an electrician who was helping out in the school laboratory as a part-time assistant. Grant remembered him as a ‘jovial, friendly man’19 whose attitude towards his own family was considerably more responsible and positive than that of Elias Leach. This unnamed benefactor took a kindly interest in the bright but rather pathetic young boy who was clearly eager for companionship. He was also working at that time at the Hippodrome, Bristol’s newest variety theatre, which had opened in 1912; a fully electrified theatre was still something of a novelty in those days, and he offered Archie the chance to explore the house that he had helped to wire. Archie, without any hesitation, accepted:
The Saturday matinee was in full swing when I arrived backstage; and there I suddenly found my inarticulate self in a dazzling land of smiling, jostling people wearing and not wearing all sorts of costumes and doing all sorts of clever things. And that’s when I knew! What other life could there be but that of an actor? They happily travelled and toured. They were classless, cheerful and carefree.20
From that moment on, Archie Leach spent as much time as he possibly could at the theatre. The electrician introduced him to the manager of the Empire, another Bristol theatre, where he was invited to assist the men who worked the limelights. There he began to learn the ways of showbusiness people, absorbing the lore of the theatre. This unofficial job came to an abrupt and embarrassing end when, working the follow spot from the booth in the front of the house, he accidentally misdirected its beam, revealing that one of an illusionist’s tricks was achieved with the aid of mirrors. Archie reappeared, his enthusiasm undimmed, at the Hippodrome, where he became a familiar sight, running errands and delivering messages backstage. His father and grandmother were, it seems, quite content to allow him to pursue his new activity without any interference. ‘I had a place to be,’ he said, ‘and people let me be there.’21
During 1918, Archie recorded his daily activities in his Boy Scout’s notebook and diary, a four-by-three-inch leather-bound volume which was preserved by Cary Grant in his personal archive. A few typical entries from January of that year give one a good sense of how his free time had come to be dominated by the theatre:
14 Monday. After school I went and bought a new belt. And a new tie. Empire in evening. Daro-Lyric Kingston’s Rosebuds.
17 Thursday. Stayed home from school all day. Went to Empire in evening. Snowing.
18 Friday. My birthday. Stayed home from school. In afternoon went in town. In evening, Empire.
21 Monday. School. Wrote letter to Mary M. Empire in evening. Not a bad show. Captain De Villier’s wireless airship at the top of the bill.
22 Tuesday. School all day. In evening, Empire. All went well, first house. But second house, wireless balloon got out of control and went on people in circle. Good comedy cyclist called Lotto.22
He was nearing the age when he could leave school, and he was convinced that he wanted to work full-time in the theatre as soon as he possibly could. He was watching – and often meeting backstage – a broad range of music-hall acts, and he was eager to begin performing himself. At some unrecorded point during that period, probably late in 1917,23 he made contact with Bob Pender, who was the manager of a fairly well-known troupe of acrobatic dancers and stilt-walkers known as Bob Pender’s Knockabout Comedians.24 He had never