His mother died when he was four. He apparently spent his childhood in Ottery St Mary parish and then grew up at Harcombe with his father's second family. Aged 26, he came to Melbourne on the barque "Westminster" from Liverpool, arr. 30 July 1841. Fellow passengers were his brother William Henry, an 19-year-old girl named Eliza Tribble, and James Piper & Elizabeth Piper of Kilkhampton, later their neighbours and fellow Anglicans in the Barrabool Hills.
On 5 Aug 1842, before the present St James Old Cathedral was built, when Eliza's year of employment was up, she & John were married by the Rev A.C. Thomson of St James parish, Anglican Chaplain to the colony. Witnesses were "Wm. Hy. Leigh of Melbourne", & Ann Gale of Collingwood. The couple were living in a tent in Bourke St at Batman's Hill (Spencer St) when their first child Henry was born three months later; John's occupation was given as "storeman". Another child, Emma, was born 7 June 1844, and died 8 months later.
Perhaps in search of healthier surroundings, and probably influenced by James Piper's report on the district, the family moved to the Barrabool Hills in mid-1846, as tenants on David Fisher's Roslyn estate. The Leigh brothers were still business partners, and Wm Hy may have lived with John's family on the crest of Fishers Hill, W of the Lookout & S of Barrabool Rd, with access from a lane now unreachable above the deepened cutting. Their 164-acre lot was referred to as Leigh Farm in the early 1850s. In the Black Thursday fires of 6 Feb 1851 which swept up the gully E of Three Springs Rd, the house and a stack of wheat were saved by a potato patch which acted as a firebreak. By this time three more children, John (1847), Julia Mary (1848), and Mary Ann (1850), had been born, and Mary Ann may have died a few days after the fire. Caroline would be born at Leigh Farm that August, and probably William also, in May 1853. The Leigh brothers in that year were prosperous enough to buy both 285 acres at Darriwill near Russell's Bridge (7 July 1853) and Fairley, 104 acres, at Ceres (3 Sept 1853). Wm H may have been successful at the diggings in the 1850s; or else they were good farmers who had prospered from the increased demand for produce by the influx of gold-diggers. They bought a further 110 acres at Russell's Bridge from the Clyde Co on 27 Feb 1854.
In 1854, their landlord David Fisher's own financial difficulties had put most of the Roslyn estate into mortgagee's hands, and William Harding leased Leigh Farm to Thomas Gibson. It was possibly then that the Leighs built the old Fairley house, and the last child, George, may have been born there in October of that year. However, in May 1856 the Leigh brothers signed a lease of Fairley to Charles Cox. Cox bought land in Ceres village about the same time, and it is not clear if either the Coxes or the Leighs were living in the houses they owned or on the farms they were leasing.
In Jan 1861 Fisher advertises two farms to let on the Roslin estate "in the ocupation of John Leigh and John Honey", with "the lower farm ", including farm shedding and a dwelling house "occupied by Mr Leigh", distinguished from "the home farm" with a "large dwelling" (presumably Roslin itself) and four-&-a-half acres of garden and orchard.
In Jan 1857 the Leighs had bought the 222-acre farm now known as Prospect, previously rented by the widow Ann Wilson, which had a house on its N border E of the present Prospect Rd, so the Leighs could have been living there by 1861, though not at the time of George's birth.
Henry was a boarder at Geelong Grammar School in 1858 and 1859, and it was said that his first job after leaving school was to help cart stone from McCann's quarry with Henry Lacey to build the present (2001) two-storied stone house called Prospect. This suggests that Prospect was being built during 1860. Perhaps the process halted for lack of funds, but on 17 Nov 1860 John mortgaged his half share of the property to Charles Kernot for 700 pounds. 1861 has been regarded by the family as the year Prospect was built, a date which probably refers to its completion. It never seems to have been lived in by a very young, growing family -- in the next generation only the youngest child (Horace) was born there.
John was one of the signatories to a petition for a school in 1848, and one of the first Board of Guardians for Holy Trinity Church off Merrawarp Rd, which he continued to support all his life. He was one of those who petitioned for the formation of a Barrabool Roads Board, which became the shire council. When a company which was formed to help Mrs Thomas of the Wheat Sheaf Inn to mine coal in Ceres, John Leigh was the Treasurer.
He was also an inventor: in Nov 1856 & Jan 1857 the Geelong Advertiser reported his introduction of an improvement to a hay rower, which was "capable of rowing twenty acres of hay from the swarth together, in one day, with one horse, a man and a boy," and did it "much cleaner than the usual mode of throwing it together with forks." It cost about 4 pounds. Local farmers took it up promptly.
Walter Brownhill in his "History of Geelong and Corio Bay" writes of John Leigh: "Both he and his son Henry earned praise for their enterprise in adopting improved methods on the farm lands." Since Brownhill's book was published Henry Leigh's descendents have left Ceres, but descendents of John's third son, William, today (2001) hold both Fairley and Prospect in their capable hands.