Thomas Shaw-Hellier

[4] 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.

[6] Sir Samuel Hellier (1737-1784) 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.

[8] He was particularly interested in Handel;[9] 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".

[16][17] For a period in the middle of the century Thomas Shaw-Hellier, being a keen huntsman, preferred the country seats of Packwood House and latterly Rodbaston Hall.

[29] In 1907 Shaw-Hellier commissioned Charles Robert Ashbee, a leader in the English Arts and Crafts Movement who in the late 1890s had made additions at The Wodehouse, such as a billiard room and a chapel,[30] as well as many decorative external features.

He named it Villa San Giorgio,[32][33] 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.

(Shaw-Hellier asked John Beazley, later a world expert but then newly graduated from Oxford, to catalogue all the potsherds unearthed by the construction.

"Taormina was an obvious place for Colonel Shaw Hellier, retired soldier as he was with some artistic leanings, as susceptible as Ashbee - if not more so - to the glories of Sicilian boyhood, to choose to end his days".

[36] 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.

He died in Sicily in 1910 when the estate passed to his nephew Evelyn Simpson, who changed his name to Shaw-Hellier; his ancestors had owned a brewery in Baldock since the 1770s.