page_title: The Wodehouse
section_title: 20th and 21st centuries
hierarchical_section_title: The Wodehouse / Inhabitants / 20th and 21st centuries
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856-1931), "Taormina - Teatro Greco". English: Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856-1931),"Taormina - The Greek teater".
context_page_description: 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, though more than once the family has died out.
context_section_description: In the words of one local historian who has documented the gentry families of the area, "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; he was over, and she was almost, 60 years old: they had no children. The marriage was characterised as "disastrous, wild, brief" and his response was to leave England and set himself a new project. He moved to Sicily, then in its heyday for the British visitor, and settled in Taormina, a place welcoming to artists and homosexuals, and made more so by the artistic nude photographs of Wilhelm von Gloeden. One of his expat friends there was the artist Robert Hawthorn Kitson; another in his circle was the writer Robert Smythe Hichens. 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, 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.)
  Fiona MacCarthy, the biographer of the architect, judges it "the most impressive of Ashbee's remaining buildings". It survives as the Hotel Ashbee.
  She also gives some insight into the life and spirit of the Colonelle inglese. Ashbee was gay or bisexual, and she thinks Shaw-Hellier may have been too. 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.
  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. On his death in 1922, the estate passed to Evelyn's daughter Evelyn Mary Penelope Shaw-Hellier, his son having been killed in World War I. The two surviving Shaw-Hellier sisters lived in the Wodehouse (and possibly also in the Villa San Giorgio), maintaining their connections with the church and village (e.g. donating a substantial sum of money towards the building of a second church) and were described as "delightfully Edwardian [with] a taste for fast motoring". The last of the pair died in 1980, and the Wodehouse—still without being sold—passed to distant relatives, the Phillips, who live there privately, occasionally opening the house and grounds to the public. The Wodehouse still holds a significant collection of 18th century drinking glasses, as well as portraits and porcelain.
  There is a Shaw Hellier Avenue named after the family, in the nearby Brierley Hill.
caption: The Greek Theatre in Taormina, by Wilhem von Gloeden
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