The Wodehouse
The Wodehouse is a Grade II* listed English country house near Wombourne, Staffordshire, notable as the family seat of the Georgian landscape designer and musicologist Sir Samuel Hellier and, a century later, Colonel Thomas Bradney Shaw-Hellier, director of the Royal Military School of Music.
The 18 acres (73,000 m2) 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.
[10] 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".
A generation later, in the late 1890s, Charles Robert Ashbee, a leader in the English Arts and Crafts Movement, made additions such as a billiard room and a chapel,[12] as well as many decorative external features.
[15] At the turn of the 21st century, Michael Raven describes the 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".
In addition to the items for which he was famous, he collected beautiful or unusual objects: a gold cane-handle depicting the intertwining of the emblems of several local families was bequeathed to the Ashmolean Museum.
[19] Sir Samuel spent a great deal of money on collecting a musical treasure trove of instruments and newly published works.
[17] He was particularly interested in Handel;[20] indeed, the catalogue accompanying the National Portrait Gallery exhibition marking the tercentenary of the composer's birth calls Sir Samuel, and abolitionist Granville Sharp, two men of the late eighteenth century "who have left us solid evidence of the means by which they indulged their enthusiasm".
He never married and left his property to his lifelong friend Thomas Shaw, minister at St John's Wolverhampton[29] and perpetual curate of Claverley circa 1765–1810.
[31] The family continued its close ties with St. John's Wolverhampton; in addition to Sir Samuel's endowment and his successor's work there, in 1820 a daughter of the house, Parthenia, married the minister.
In his absence, Philip Stanhope, 1st Baron Weardale, the Liberal politician, pacifist, and philanthropist, and his wife Alexandra Tolstoy apparently lived for a time in the Wodehouse.
[40][41] Like his predecessor, he supported the established church, in his case commemorating the quincentenary of Winchester College by endowing the Cathedral with altar and fittings.
[48] In 1907 Shaw-Hellier commissioned Ashbee, who had renovated the Wodehouse a decade before, to build him a marble villa on the hilltop to rival Kitson's Casa Cuseni.
They named it Villa San Giorgio,[49][50] after the patron saint of England, and with a nod to John Ruskin's Guild of St George, which had been set up to re-value art and craftsmanship.
[53] The Ashbees saw him as childlike, "perpetually young" and sprightly even in his 70s, enthusiastic, unpompous, devoted "to all the little simple helpful things of life", and erratic in his musical taste.
The musical collection is most closely associated with Sir Samuel Hellier, but the most valuable item within it preceded him, and those who came after him maintained or added to the printed works and instruments.
Cozio, an instrument authentication business, states that it was in the possession of Sir Edward Hellier in 1734,[62] so it is possible that the Englishman bought it directly from the elderly luthier himself, perhaps during a grand tour.
[64] The other half of the collection, the written works, went to the music library of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham, where its 860 items were fully documented by Ian Ledsham in 1999.
In addition, and still at the Wodehouse, is a series of 165 letters Sir Samuel wrote to his estate manager, specifying how instruments were to be played and stored, a boon for the music historian.
