Shaw ordered that his assets were to form a trust to pay for fundamental reform of the English alphabet into a phonetic version of forty letters, writes Gerry Moran

 

George Bernard Shaw won the Nobel Prize for literature one hundred years ago in 1925. Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856, he died in 1950 aged ninety-four leaving behind one of the largest fortunes ever left by a writer.
Not content to have been a passionate advocate of social reform while he lived, Shaw left a fascinating will in which he attempted major educational reform – from the grave!

He bequeathed a sizeable portion of his estate for the establishment throughout the English speaking world of the so-called Proposed British Alphabet. This alphabet consisted of forty letters and was one of Shaw’s life-long pet projects.

In 1898, aged forty-two, Shaw married Charlotte Payne Townshend, a wealthy Irish heiress. The marriage was, by mutual consent, chaste and lasted thirty-five years, during which Shaw conducted various affairs, the best known being with the actresses Ellen Terry and Mrs. Patrick Campbell.

When his wife Charlotte died in 1943, the playwright, then eighty-seven, became reclusive. Although he had achieved almost legendary status as a playwright and wit, had won the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature and was very wealthy after early years of adversity all he longed for now was death.

He lived, however, to celebrate his ninety-fourth birthday on July 26th. 1950, at his home in Hertfordshire. A short time later he fell in his garden while pruning an apple tree, fracturing a thighbone. His recovery was complicated by an operation for kidney stones and the playwright sensed his decline.
“You won’t be famous if I recover,” he told his physician. “Surgeons only become famous when their patients die.”

While waiting for ‘a natural death as I mean to’ Shaw read over his will. “I desire that my dead body should be cremated and its ashes inseparably mixed with those of my late wife.” He wanted their joint remains scattered in the garden of the home where they had lived for thirty-five years.

In his will Shaw was hard on religion. Never fearing he’d offend a God whose existence he questioned, he included a statement to the effect that he championed Darwin’s millennial saga of creation over the Bible’s six-day synopsis.

He demanded that there be no religious services that might imply to the world that he “accepted the tenets particular to any established church.”

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