Archbishop of Canterbury's father remembered as a 'social climber'

The family of the young American woman who was briefly married to Gavin Welby regarded the father of the future Archbishop of Canterbury as a social climber who was "always looking for something new and better".

Mr Welby married Doris Sturzenegger, the daughter of a wealthy New Jersey factory owner, in New York in January 1934. The newly-weds, both aged 23, moved into an apartment on Manhattan's elegant Upper East Side, but the marriage did not last long.

The Sunday Telegraph has established that Miss Sturzenegger put the failed relationship behind her and married Alfred Henry, a corporate accounting executive whom she met while she worked as an instructor at a prestigious dance academy.

The Henrys moved to Los Angeles, where they had two children in the mid-1940s. In 1952 they bought a department store in the Californian city of Bakersfield and Mrs Henry lived there until her death in 2002 aged 92.

She rarely spoke about her time with Mr Welby, even to those closest to her. "I knew my mother had been married before, but she didn't really talk about it," her daughter Diane Stephens, 65, told The Sunday Telegraph.

And her son Charles Henry, 67, who still lives in the family's long-term home, a ranch-style 1950s bungalow in Bakersfield, insisted that he had not even known she had been married before she met his father.