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Wodehouse (formerly also Woodhouse) is a country house near Wombourne, Staffordshire, notable as the seat of the Georgian landscape designer and musicologist Sir Samuel Hellier. For almost two hundred years the family owned the Hellier Stradivarius. It is claimed that the Wodehouse has not been sold for over 900 years, though more than once the family has died out.

The house and garden

The Wodehouse is situated on the Wom Brook, to the east of the village, and the estate has existed since medieval times. In the middle of the 18th century, the house was turned into a centre of culture. The 18 acres of grounds were laid out in fashionable style:

The Wodehouse [...] became in the later 18th century, an early Alton Towers, the resort both of ‘people of consequence’ and of ‘tag, rag and rabble’ for here, in 1763, Sir Samuel Hellier laid out a pleasure garden which, besides having all the usual decorative features of gardens of the time, temples, grottoes, a root house, a druid’s circle, also had a music room with working organ, a hermitage with life-sized model of a hermit and boards set up along the paths with appropriate verses to enlighten visitors. The whole garden was a clearly a caricature of the finest achievements in l8th-century gardening.

Some of this, such as Handel's temple, was the first commission of James Gandon after leaving the studios of Sir William Chambers. A series of drawings of the garden feaures are all that survive Curiously, the Shaw Helliers and some of their properties are mentioned in the 1820 Survey of Staffordshire, but not Wodehouse itself . Samuel Lewis in the 1848 edition of A Topographical Dictionary of England describes the property as "a noble mansion in the Elizabethan style, situated in a beautiful vale".

The house was restored by George Frederick Bodley, the Gothic revival architect, in the 1870s. A generation later, in the late 1890s, Charles Robert Ashbee, a leader in the English Arts and Crafts Movement, designed many of the decorative features of the house. At the turn of the 21st century, Michael Raven describes Wodehouse as "unspoilt", with the house having "a certain serene and mysterious charm" and the property overall "the classic configuration of an early medieval settlement" .

Inhabitants

At least two people associated with Wodehouse have added to the musical life of the country, one ecclesiastical and one military.

Samuel Hellier died in 1751. His son of the same name was 14, and one of his more sympathetic guardians was Charles Lyttelton, Dean of Exeter, who encouraged the boy to study at Exeter College, Oxford . As a young man, he wrote of his longing to marry, but never did so, blaming in part the tight financial leash his maternal grandmother, a dowager heiress, kept on him Despite these constraints, Samuel Hellier managed to collect a musical treasure trove and redesign Wodehouse's expansive gardens. He was High Sheriff of Staffordshire like his father before him , a position now largely ceremonial but then the principal law enforcement officer of the county, and was knighted in 1762. He was a "prominent figure at the Three Choirs Festival", one of the world’s oldest classical choral music festivals. In addition to the items for which he was famous, he collected beautiful or unusual objects: a gold cane-handle depicting several intertwined family emblems was bequeathed to the Ashmolean Museum.

He spent a great deal of money on collecting musical instruments and newly published works, endowing both the church at Wombourne, with which the family had long been associated, and St. John's, Wolverhampton, which opened in 1760. His grandmother lived to be 99, and Sir Samuel survived not two years longer, dying in the autumn of 1784. He never married and left his property to his lifelong friend Thomas Shaw, vicar of Claverley circa 1765 -- 1810. A condition of inheritance, common in earlier times, was that the recipient change his name to that of his benefactor, and in 1786 Reverend Shaw became Shaw-Hellier. He lived at Wodehouse with his wife Mary, worked at St. John's Wolverhampton and at Tipton, and died in 1812. His son James, manager of Netherton colliery, died in 1827; he had also been known to steward the races at nearby Penn Common.

For centuries the family was closely connected with the Church of England in general and the Wombourne parish church in particular, which holds several memorials to them. Several successive generations named Thomas went into the ministry, for example. Sir Samuel Hellier's correspondence with his parish organist regarding playing techniques has recently been redisovered, and is cited approvingly

From time to time, Wodehouse was rented out to cover costs. Philip Stanhope, 1st Baron Weardale, the Liberal politician, pacifist, and philanthropist, and his wife Alexandra Tolstoy apparantly lived for a time there. Stanhope was elected to Parliament in 1886, sitting first for nearby Wednesbury. One of their houseguests at Wodehouse was William Ewart Gladstone.

The second historically significant musical person from Wodehouse is Colonel Thomas Bradney Shaw-Hellier (1836 - 1910). He made a career in military music, spending several years as commandant of the Royal Military School of Music at Kneller Hall. He was responsible for the Musical Division of the great Military Exhibition at Chelsea in 1890, including performances and displays of collections. He was also a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Musicians, donating a banner and co-organising the tercentenary celebrations at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In the words of one family historian, "The whole inter-marrying and single child families came to a sterile conclusion in 1898 when Thomas Bradney Shaw-Hellier married Harriet Bradney Marsh Evans". They were distant cousins and she was almost 50 years old: they had no children. In 1910 he died in Taormina, Sicily, where he had commissioned Ashbee again, this time to build the Villa San Giorgio. Wodehouse passed to two surviving Shaw-Hellier sisters, who lived in the house and maintained their connections with the church and village. In 1955, one donated £1,000 to the building fund for a second church in the village; this became the Venerable Bede. The last of the sisters died in 1980, and Wodehouse -- still without being sold -- passed to distant relatives, who live there privately, occasionally opening the house and grounds to the public.

Musical legacy

The Hellier Stradivarius of circa 1679 is a violin made by Antonio Stradivari of Cremona, Italy. Cozio, an instrument authentication business, states that it was in the possession of Sir Edward Hellier in 1734, so it is possible that the Englishman bought it directly from the elderly luthier himself, perhaps during a grand tour. It was kept by the family for almost two hundred years. In 1880, it was sold by Colonel Shaw-Hellier, but he repurchased it ten years later. Upon his death in 1910, it passed out of the family.

A catalogue of the 860 items of the Shaw-Hellier collection held at the music library of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham was compiled by Ian Ledsham in 1999. Another large collection is held by the Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments. A single instrument that was chosen or commissioned by Sir Samuel Hellier -- in this case a trumpet -- has been described in half a dozen journals and catalogues. In addition to musical instruments, the collections include rare copies of musical works, such as the Ten Voluntaries by John Bennett. They also include 165 letters he wrote to his estate manager, specifying how instruments were to be played and stored, a boon for the music historian.

Non-musical gifts were made to museums as well. For example, a model of a 64 gun ship with rigging, made in the late 18th century, was donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum in the late 19th.

Further reading

• "'A sweet pretty instrument' -- Sir Samuel Hellier's Obsession" by Percy Young. British Institute of Organ Studies ISSN 0309-8052. BIOS Reporter Volume 28, number 4, page 15. Oct 2004.
• Some of the complexity of the inheritances can be seen at the Nottinghamshire Archives.

External links

• As part of the Jack Leighton Lectures at Keele University. GARDENERS & GARDENING IN 18th & 19th CENTURY STAFFORDSHIRE - Sir Samuel Hellier (d1784) of Wodehouse, Wombourne, landscape gardener and man of taste by Douglas Johnson. Landscape and garden making at Keele 1700-1900 by Dr Keith Goodway. 9 Nov 1983 Staffordshire Encyclopedia.
• A diagram of the descendents of Rev. Thomas Shaw here
• And a Victorian photograph of the house and modern Google Map image here