Ronnie Winslow and George Archer-Shee
The Winslow Boy by Terence Rattigan
West Yorkshire Playhouse, 1996
“The facts of the Archer-Shee case… had so fascinated and moved me that unlike many ideas that will peacefully wait in the store-room of the mind until their time for emergence has come, [this one] demanded instant expression.”
Terence Rattigan
Famous trials were one of Terence Rattigan’s hobbies. He collect7ed them the way other collected first editions. Towards the end of the Second World War, when the authorities were pressing for films trumpeting the best of British democratic institutions, the playwright suggested the Archer-Shee case to Anatole de Grunwald as a good advertisement for British justice., But de Grunwald was not enthusiastic and, indignant, Rattigan resolved to write his fictionalised account as a play, in the grand Edwardian style od Harley Granville-Barker.
The case of Archer-Shee v The King finally ended the month before the playwright was born, but it had been dragging on for almost three years before that and had been famous ever since. The matter went to the Court of Appeal once, to the High Court twice, and at one stage even held up a major debate in the House of Commons for three hours. And it all hinged on one question – did thirteen-year-old naval cadet George Archer-Shee steal, forge and cash a postal order for five shillings (25p)? The King, through the Admiralty, contended that he did. His father was equally adamant that he did not. The family in effect had to take their Sovereign to court to defend the boy’s honour and reinstate his name.
“Nothing will make me believe the boy guilty of this charge…”
George Archer-Shee came from a close-knit and devout Roman Catholic family. His father Martin, an agent for the Bank of England based in Bristol, had a reputation for upholding the highest standards of personal conduct. In 1907, his second son George entered the Royal Naval College in Osborne House, Queen Victoria’s old mansion on the Isle of Wight, as a naval cadet. Here, the Admiralty trained up young boys to become officers in the service. Parents, in return for a relatively cheap and excellent education for their sons, signed an undertaking whereby it was understood the boy would enter the Navy if he was considered suitable officer material while his parents agreed to remove him if at any stage the authorities deemed it necessary for whatever reason.
On 7 October 1908 a five-shilling postal order was found to be missing from the locker of Cadet Terence Back. An internal inquiry established that George archer-Shee had gone to the post office in the school grounds that afternoon to buy a postal order for fifteen shillings and sixpence for himself, and Miss Tucker the postmistress claimed that he was the same boy who had also cashed a five-shilling postal order payable to Terence Back, although later she was unable to identify him in a line-up.
These facts were forwarded to the Admiralty where the First Lord requested a formal comparison of the handwriting of the two boys involved., Thomas Gurrin, the current guru of graphology, stated that George had indeed signed Back’s postal order. In respect of these investigations, the Admiralty wrote to Martin Archer-Shee on 17 October formally requesting him to withdraw George from the college. The reply from Bristol was immediate: “Sir, I have received the above ‘confidential’ letter calling upon me to withdraw my son Cadet George Archer-Shee from the Royal Naval College in disgrace as a thief! Nothing will make me believe the boy guilty of this charge, which shall be sifted by independent experts.”
“Let right be done”
Fortunately for Martin Archer-Shee his elder son, George’s stepbrother and his senior by 22 years, was an MP with useful connections. The matter was put into the hands of Messrs Lewis & Lewis who realised that if they were to have any chance at all, they needed to engage a barrister who possessed not only great skill but the courage to take on the Crown itself. Former solicitor general Sir Edward Carson fitted the bill. His interest and passion were roused not least because his own son had only recently left Osborne. After subjecting George Archer-Shee to a gruelling three-hour cross examination, he became convinced of his honesty, and so the wheels were set in motion.
It took eighteen months for the case to reach court. The Admiralty had offered confidential talks which may have cleared the matter up to everyone’s satisfaction, but Carson had got the bit between his teeth and nothing less than a full hearing would do. After several possible courses of action had met with a dead end, Carson decided to pursue the case by Petition of Right. This was the only procedure by which a subject could sue his Sovereign as technically ‘the King could do no wrong’. In this instance the attorney general Sir William Robson KC, ruled that there was a case to answer, and so the claim was endorsed with the time-honoured words, “Let right be done.”
On 12 July 1910, the case eventually came before Mr Justice Ridley I the King’s Bench Division of the High Court. Sir Rufus Isaacs for the Crown immediately pleaded a legal ‘demurrer’, raising a point of law which required a judgemental ruling before the trial could proceed. In effect he was protesting that since the Crown had always reserved the right to dismiss anyone in its service, no contract could be admitted which limited those powers, so the defence had no case to answer. Carson’s heatedly argued response was that George would not be ‘in the service of the Crown’ until he had received his commission, besides which it was Martin Archer-Shee, the boy’s father, who was the suppliant, suing in respect of a contract between himself and the Admiralty whose undertaking to educate his son had involved the payment of a ‘consideration’. If his client was to be denied a fair trial before a jury, Carson concluded, it would be “the grossest case of oppression without remedy that I have ever heard of in the thirty-three years that I have been at the Bar”.
“I know nothing about that,” replied the judge, and promptly ruled in Sir Isaac’s favour, dismissing the case before a witness had been heard. Carson stormed out of the courtroom in disgust to lodge an immediate appeal. This was heard six days later before three Lords Justices who decided that although Mr Justice Ridley had been right in law to uphold the demurrer, the defendant should still be given the right to trial by jury.
“Gentlemen, I protest…”
That trial began on Tuesday 26 July before Mr Justice Phillimore. “Gentlemen,” said Carson in his opening speech, “I protest against the injustice to a little boy.” His emotive and belligerent style would lead to frequent clashes with the judge over the next few days. Sir Rufus Isaacs in contrast was more composed, stating that his main priority was to justify the course of action taken by the Admiralty, as Carson had also attacked their conduct in their initial investigations.
Throughout his cross examinations, Carson’s aim was to impress upon the Court how unlikely it was that a boy of George Archer-Shee’s character and background should do anything so aberrant as to steal a five-shilling postal order while holding ample funds of his own. When the postmistress Miss Tucker was on the stand, he astutely took the line of suggesting that she might have been mistaken rather than accusing her of being dishonest or vindictive.
For three days, as London sweltered through a heatwave, the boy’s future hung in the balance until on the fourth day, following the cross examination of Captain Christian, the officer commanding Osborne College, the solicitor general abruptly delivered the following statement: “As a result of the evidence… I say now, on behalf of the Admiralty, that I accept the statement of George Archer-Shee that he did not write the name on the postal order, and did not cash it, and consequently that he is innocent of the charge.” In response Carson conceded “I agree that the responsible persons acted bona fide and under a reasonable beliefe in the statements that were put before them.”
Most commentators now agree that the suddenness of this conclusion indicates that a deal must have been struck which would uphold the honour of both sides. George, a basically decent, sound boy, was reinstated without a blemish on his character, while the Admiralty was exonerated of any wrongdoing in attempting to protect the integrity of its procedures.
But that still wasn’t quite the end of the story. The Admiralty had not responded to the defendant’s claim for £10,000 compensation, and immediately the trial ended, Sir Henry Craik MP raised the matter in the House of Commons. On 16 March 1911 George Cave again brought it before the House at the same time as Messrs Lewis & Lewis were stoking up public awareness by releasing to the press much of their correspondence relating to the case. On 6 April the Commons were due to debate the battleship building programme, but this was delayed for three hours while a heated discussion arose over George Archer-Shee’s right to compensation. At the end of the day the general feeling in the House was that the Admiralty owed him a sizeable sum. The lawyers met again and three months later the family received £4,120 costs and £3,000 compensation “in full settlement of all demands”.
“If ever the time comes that the House of Commons has so much on its mind that it can’t find time to discuss a Ronnie Winslow and bis ball postal order, this country will be a far poorer place”
The Winslow Boy opened at the Lyric Theatre, London on 23 May 1946 and was an immediate hit, It won the first ever Ellen Terry Award for the best play produced in London that year, as well as the New York Critics’ Award for Best Foreign Play the following year. It was Rattigan’s fourth success in a row and the first to show he could turn his hand to something more weighty than the ‘notoriously insincere farces’ with which he had made his name.
As for the boy who started it all, George Archer-Shee did not return to Osborne College but completed his education at Stonyhurst then went to work in the United States. He returned home immediately the First World War started, enlisted, was commissioned – and died in the First Battle of Ypres in the autumn of 1914. He was nineteen years old.