AMONG the portraits in the National Gallery is one of Thomas Moore by a Dublin-born artist called Martin Archer-Shee (1769-1850). That “Shee” might sound exotic to modern ears, but it was just another variant of the much more common “Shea” or “O’Shea”. And the painter’s poor but respectable family had roots in Mayo and Kilkenny before moving to the city, from where, having been orphaned at a young age, the future artist moved to Bray to be raised by an aunt.
The Moore painting is typical of his style, which was formal and highly accomplished, if without any great emotional depth. “An Irish Rembrandt he was not”, as one critic – setting the bar unfairly high – put it. But his talents earned great success at the time, culminating many years after he had moved to London in his election as president of the Royal Academy.
Fast-forward several generations to 1895 when a great-great-grandson of the artist was born, under the name of George. The Archer-Shees, although still devoutly Catholic, were now English: in fact, George’s father worked for the Bank of England. As for the boy, he appeared destined for a career in the navy – he was enrolled in a naval cadet college in 1908, aged 12 – until he became the focus of one of the 20th century’s most famous court cases.
The drama began when, one day at school, a fellow cadet received a postal order from a relative for five shillings. The same afternoon, George Archer-Shee went to the local post office to buy a postal order of his own. But when he returned to the college, it emerged that the other boy’s order had been stolen. Whereupon the post mistress was called, to reveal first that the missing document had been cashed and then to identify Archer-Shee as the culprit.
This could only mean expulsion from college and a scandal that the family – especially the boy’s father – might never live down. But Martin Archer-Shee could not bring himself to believe that his son, schooled in the importance of financial probity, had done such a thing. Convinced of the young man’s innocence, he took the matter to law. And so doing, he hired a Dublin-born barrister who was one of the greatest advocates of the era: a man by the name of Edward Carson.
Before then – and ever afterwards – Carson’s best-known case was his defence of the Marquess of Queensberry against Oscar Wilde’s libel claim. He would come to bitterly regret that victory and its part in Wilde’s destruction. But through the Archer-Shee case, which he took without a fee, having first convinced himself of the boy’s innocence, he would achieve further dramatic and cinematic fame, this time for the right reasons.
Carson won that one too. Among other weaknesses in the naval college’s case was that the postmistress, whose identification of Archer-Shee was crucial, admitted under questioning that all cadets looked alike to her. The possibility of mistaken identity was finally admitted. And after a further legal and political battle, the British admiralty paid the Archer-Shees’ costs, along with £3,000 compensation.
Looming events on the continent – it was 1910 by then – would ensure that the teenage protagonist did not have long to enjoy his vindication. For a time he continued his education at Stoneyhurst College, where he had earlier been a pupil. After that went to work in New York, on Wall Street. Then, in 1914, a certain archduke was assassinated in Sarajevo. George Archer-Shee returned to England to pick up the thread of his thwarted military career, becoming an army lieutenant. But before the year was out, he was dead – killed at the First Battle of Ypres, aged 19.
Thirty years later, a young London playwright called Terence Rattigan dusted off the Archer-Shee legal case and dramatised it as The Winslow Boy. A hit in the West End and later Broadway, the play was in turn made into a famous 1948 film and remade in 1999 by David Mamet.
Although thoroughly English in his manner and themes, Rattigan too had Irish roots. He was descended on both sides from lawyers, which made the Archer-Shee case a natural choice of subject. That apart, the story in general played to his strengths.
He specialised in carefully-crafted plays about the British upper-middle classes, whose emotions were kept firmly below the surface of his polished lines.
It was a method that brought him much success in early life. Then in the mid-1950s, John Osborne wrote a play called Look Back in Anger,which changed the rules. Rattigan's mannered style soon fell out of fashion, where it stayed until his death in 1977 and for a decade or so afterwards. Since when, his stock has risen again, at least in Britain. The process continues, boosted by his centenary year. He was born, by the way, 100 years ago today.