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. For almost 200 years the family owned the Hellier Stradivarius.
It is claimed that the Wodehouse has not been sold for over 900 years,"Friends of Broadfield House". From the Stourbridge News, 18 May 2007 though more than once the family has died out.
House, garden, and estate
The Wodehouse is situated on the Wom Brook, to the east of the village, and the estate has existed since medieval times. The manor house itself was listed by English Heritage in 1953 as Grade II*,English Heritage list entry as were the stable block and coach house in 1963.English Heritage list entry The early-eighteenth-century Wodehouse farmhouse and mill, across the road from the main house, were grade II* listed in 1973.English Heritage list entry In 1987, the barn,English Heritage list entry the dam over the mill pool,English Heritage list entry and the causeway over its other endEnglish Heritage list entry all received grade II status.
In the middle of the 18th century, the Wodehouse was turned into a centre of culture. The 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 18th-century gardening.J.R. Studd's review of The Victoria County History of the County of Staffordshire. Vol. XX. Edited by M. W. Greenslade. Oxford University Press for the Institute of Historical Research, 1984. xix+250 pp. 47 illustrations. 19 maps and plans. 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 features are all that survive.[Peter Hayden in Garden History, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring, 1985)] The Shaw Helliers and some of their properties are mentioned in the 1820 Survey of Staffordshire, but, curiously, not the Wodehouse itself.A survey of Staffordshire: containing the antiquities of that county by Sampson Erdeswicke, Thomas Harwood 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 Topographical Dictionary of England (1848)
The house has a fourteenth century core, with seventeenth-century additions and eighteenth-century internal refittings. It 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, made additions such as a billiard room and a chapel,Victoria County History, vol. XX,(1984) pp.205-6, quoted in the English Heritage list entry as well as many decorative external features. In 1912, just after the estate changed hands, the Wolverhampton architect J.K.H.E. Lavender was engaged. The gardens continued to be opened to the public on certain occasions; for example, in 1936 the Wodehouse joined the National Gardens Scheme, and as recently as in 2011 hosted the AGM of the Staffordshire Gardens and Parks Trust.
In 1984, the Victoria County History volume for south-west Staffordshire called the Wodehouse one of the "three great houses" of the area, along with Enville Hall.Vol. XX Staffordshire, VCH 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".Guide to Staffordshire and the Black Country, The Potteries and the Peak By Michael Raven, p372. 2004
Inhabitants
18th century: Sir Samuel Hellier The Wodehouse was acquired by Samuel Hellier by the 1720s. He was Oxford educated, and evidently, through his collections, open to new and foreign ideas. He was someone who first had a passion for eclectic knowledge and had already accumulated a substantial library and the core of an important collection of musical instruments. He died in 1751. His only son and heir, who bore the same name, was 14 and an orphan, his mother having predeceased his father. One of the boy's more sympathetic guardians was Charles Lyttelton, Dean of Exeter, who encouraged him to study at Exeter College, Oxford.Catherine Frew and Arnold Myers, "Sir Samuel Hellier's 'Musicall Instruments'", Galpin Society Journal, vol. 56, June 2003. Includes a full-page colour portrait. JSTOR link As a young man, he wrote of his longing to marry, but never did so, blaming in part his finances. His maternal grandmother, Sarah Huntbach of Seawall, a dowager heiress, controlled the Featherstone part of his estate.
Despite these constraints, he managed to redesign the Wodehouse's expansive gardens, as described above. He became High Sheriff of Worcestershire for 1762-1763, a position now largely ceremonial but then the principal law enforcement officer of the county, and was knighted in 1762. 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.
Sir Samuel spent a great deal of money on collecting a musical treasure trove of instruments and newly published works. He was particularly interested in Handel;Best, Terence, ed. Handel collections and their history, a collection of conference papers given by the international panel of distinguished Handel scholars. Clarendon Press, 1993 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".p 239. Handel, a celebration of his life and times, 1685–1759. Jacob Simon, National Portrait Gallery (Great Britain), 1985. He was also a "prominent figure at the Three Choirs Festival",The British Institute of Organ Studies. BIOS Reporter Volume 28, number 4, page 15. October 2004. one of the world's oldest classical choral music festivals.Three Choirs web site. Retrieved 15 August 2009
For centuries the families at the Wodehouse, as was usual for the squirearchy, were closely connected with the Church of England in general and the village church in particular, which holds several memorials to them.Staffordshire Encyclopedia Church Memorials: Wombourne Sir Samuel endowed both the ancient parish church of St Benedict Biscop in Wombourne and the new St John's Church, Wolverhampton, which opened in 1760. "A Tale of Two Squares: St. John's and St. James's" by Maureen Hunt He provided an organ for his parish church,Pitt, William. A Topographical History of Staffordshire. J. Smith, 1817. p187 and his correspondence with this organist regarding playing techniques has recently been rediscovered, and is cited approvingly.The Registration of Baroque Organ Music. By Barbara Owen. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. P102.
Sir Samuel's grandmother lived to be 99, and he survived not two years longer, dying in the autumn of 1784. He never married and left his property to his lifelong friend Thomas Shaw, minister at St John's WolverhamptonShaw, Stebbing. The History and Antiquities of Staffordshire p164 and perpetual curate of Claverley circa 1765–1810.Shropshire Archives "Some Notes on the Living of Claverley, Salop, based on the personal account book and other papers of the Rev Thomas Shaw, later Shaw Hellier" typescript by J S Allen A condition of inheritance was that the recipient change his name to that of his benefactor, and in 1786 Reverend Shaw became Shaw-Hellier. He lived at the 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. 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.New Monthly Magazine, 1820, p710. Sons of the house went into the ministry, including several successive generations named Thomas.Shaw-Hellier family history site
19th century: Colonel T. B. Shaw-Hellier For a period in the middle of the century Thomas Shaw-Hellier, the grandson and direct heir of the Reverend Thomas Shaw, rented out the property. Being a keen huntsman, he preferred the country seats of Packwood House and latterly Rodbaston Hall. 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. Stanhope was elected to Parliament in 1886, sitting first for nearby Wednesbury. One of their houseguests at the Wodehouse was William Ewart Gladstone.Review by Eugenio F. Biagini of Gladstone: Heroic Minister, 1865–1898. Professor R. T. Shannon. London: Allen Lane, 1999, xvii+702 pp.
The second historically significant musical person from the 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, where a prize for composition—a gold-mounted baton—was named in his honour."Band Gossip for Far and Near" by Tomtom. Star, Issue 6144, 2 April 1898, Page 6 He was responsible for the Musical Division of the Royal Military Exhibition at Chelsea in 1890. Over the five-month exhibition, he brought 74 military bands from all over the country to perform by the River Thames. A large collection of musical instruments, particularly wind instruments, was displayed, and a catalogue was issued the following year under his direction.A Descriptive Catalogue of the Musical Instruments recently exhibited at the Royal Military Exhibition, London, 1890. Issued under the orders of Colonel Shaw-Hellier and compiled by Captain Charles Russell Day, Oxfordshire Light Infantry. Eyre & Spottiswoode, Government and General Publishers, London. xii, 254pp. 1891. Shaw-Hellier's introduction is transcribed here 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 20th century.Full text of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, 2nd ed. 1905 His military career saw him rise to command the 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards.Hansard record, HC Deb 01 December 1882 vol 275 cc494-521 November 1862, London Gazette