The Winslow Boy by Terrance Rattigan

The Winslow Boy is a play by Terrance Rattigan. It is based on the Archer-Shee case, and is about a young fourteen-year-old boy named Ronnie, who is expelled from the Osbourne Naval Cadets for stealing a five-shilling postal order. This essay is all about some of Ronnie’s friends and family, and their different views on the case.


Arthur is Ronnie’s father. He believes that Ronnie is innocent because he knows his son better than anybody and can tell when he is lying or not. On page 34-35, Arthur asks Ronnie,


“Did you steal this postal order?” Ronnie’s then replies,


“No, Father. I didn’t.” Arthur asks again, staring into his eyes,


“Did you steal this postal order?”


“No, Father. I didn’t.” Arthur continued to stare into his eyes for a moment, then relaxes. This tells us that Arthur has decided that Ronnie is innocent. At one point, he had been talking to Grace, and she had almost convinced him to give the case up, and he nearly did. He told Sir Robert Moreton and Catherine that he wasn’t going to go through with the case, but they knew that he didn’t mean it, so they gave him a few days and he decided that he had made the wrong decision and went back to Sir Robert.


Grace is Ronnie’s mother. She believes that Ronnie is innocent, and that he didn’t steal the postal order, but she was very shocked when Ronnie was expelled. However, she is not as involved in the case as Arthur, and believes that he is “Blowing the whole thing out of proportion”. On page 78, for example, Grace is having a conversation with Arthur,


“Oh! I wish I could see the sense of it all! (She points to Ronnie) He’s perfectly happy at a good school, doing very well. No need to ever have known about Osbourne, if you hadn’t gone and shouted it out to the whole world. As it is, whatever happens now, he’ll go through the rest of his life as ‘That boy in the Winslow Case’ “


She is very motherly and comforting towards Ronnie...