SUTTON HOO - My Buried History
Bianca:
The Sutton Hoo Boat was ‘Britain’s Tutankhamun’,
the most significant archaeological site ever
discovered in this country
My buried history
29/04/2007
When John Preston discovered his aunt had helped unearth Anglo-Saxon gold at Sutton Hoo, he decided to dig further. He uncovered a story of intrigue and heartbreak that provided perfect material for his new novel
Journalists tend to have an ambivalent attitude to letters from readers. On the one hand it can be gratifying to have provoked a reaction. On the other, there’s always the possibility that the correspondent may be mildly – or not so mildly – unhinged.
Nearly three years ago, when I received a letter from a woman claiming to be my long-lost second cousin, I had no hesitation in sticking her in the latter category. Very guardedly, I wrote back asking her why she thought we might be related.
Back came another letter listing various names and dates. As I looked at them, her claim began to look worryingly plausible. At the end of her letter she suggested we meet. ‘But don’t leave it too long,’ she added. ‘I’m 83.’
A few weeks later we had what proved to be an extremely enjoyable lunch together. As I was about to go, my newly found cousin said – almost in passing – ‘I assume you know that your late aunt found the gold at Sutton Hoo.’
I didn’t, but then I didn’t know my aunt at all well. I knew that she’d been an archaeologist, and that she had written a two volume study of Roman beads. That, though, was about it. I didn’t know much about Sutton Hoo either, except that it was in Suffolk. I also had some dim recollection that a boat had once been found there, buried in a mound.
Back at home I began to do a little research. It turned out that my aunt had indeed found the gold at Sutton Hoo in the summer of 1939. This, however, was only a small part of what turned out to be a remarkable story of intrigue, ambition, heartache and, of course, buried treasure. At the time it had been hailed as ‘Britain’s Tutankhamun’, the most significant archaeological site ever discovered in this country.
Not only that, the Sutton Hoo treasure had been discovered just as Britain – and the world – stood on the brink of war. As my aunt said later, ‘It was extraordinary to be uncovering the remains of this lost civilisation at a time when our own seemed about to be blown to smithereens.’
Somewhere in the back of my mind, a seed began to take root. Here, surely, was a terrific subject for a novel – one that would try to recreate the excitement of the dig while examining the relationships between the people concerned.
Over the next few days, I started reading everything I could about the 1939 excavation. A trip to the London Library revealed that several of the main players had left diaries and there were also exhaustive analyses of the discoveries.
The next week I went up to Sutton Hoo. On a bank above the Deben estuary stood a group of burial mounds. At first glance, they looked disappointingly like bunkers on a golf course. And yet it was here, beneath the largest of the mounds, that the treasure had been found. Two or three hundred yards away is a large white Edwardian house with views out over the water and, on the opposite bank, the town of Woodbridge.
In 1939, the house was occupied by a 56-year-old widow called Edith Pretty and her nine-year-old son, Robert. Mrs Pretty, it soon became apparent, was a woman of considerable abilities. A keen traveller, she had visited the Pyramids in her youth and she later became one of the first women magistrates.
She had also given birth to her only child at the then almost unheard-of age of 47. Four years later, her husband died, leaving her and Robert alone in the 15-bedroom mansion.
Edith Pretty was a keen spiritualist and made regular trips to London to see a medium. There, it’s thought, she tried to make contact with her dead husband. It also seems likely that her interest in spiritualism had some bearing on her decision to start excavating the mounds in the summer of 1938. According to some accounts, ghostly figures had been seen there, along with a man on a white horse.
When she approached Ipswich Museum for advice, they recommended a local archaeologist called Basil Brown. Socially, at least, Basil Brown was Edith Pretty’s polar opposite. He’d left school at 12 to become a farm labourer, and had later worked as a milkman and a wood-cutter.
His great interest, however, was archaeology. He read voraciously, taught himself four languages and proved to have a remarkable flair for sniffing out antiquities. A colleague wrote of him later: ‘His method was to locate a feature and then pursue it wherever it led, in doing so becoming just like a terrier after a rat.’
Bianca:
In June 1938, Basil Brown started work at Sutton Hoo, assisted by a gamekeeper and a gardener from the estate. Over the next two months they excavated three of the mounds. All, it transpired, had been robbed – probably at some point during the 16th or 17th centuries. They did, however, find a gilt bronze disc that suggested the mounds were much older than had first been thought: Anglo-Saxon rather than Viking.
Next May, Brown was back again, this time excavating the largest of the mounds. He started off, as he’d done before, by driving a four-foot wide trench into the middle of the mound. At around midday on 11 May, one of the men gave a shout: ‘Here’s a bit of iron!’ Immediately, Brown ordered work to be halted and began scraping about with his trowel.
Soon he found five more pieces of rusted iron beneath pinky-coloured discolourations in the soil. Brown deduced – rightly as it turned out – that these pieces of metal were rivets and that what they had uncovered was the remains of a boat.
The actual wood had decayed long ago, but what remained was a thin crust, rather like a photographic negative imprinted on the sandy soil. When they uncovered more rivets, the outline of the planks could clearly be seen, stretching off into the depths of the mound.
Brown moved into nearby lodgings and for the next month the three men kept digging. As they did so, the ship got bigger and bigger. Previously, the largest ever buried ship had been found in Norway. That had been around 70ft long.
The Sutton Hoo ship, it became clear, was much larger. It was, Brown acknowledged to his wife in one of his daily letters to her, the find of a lifetime. And that wasn’t all. As far as he could tell, the mound had never been robbed. If that was the case, it was possible that there was still an intact treasure chamber in the middle of the ship.
But unbeknown to him, trouble was stirring. Word had got out about the discovery. In Cambridge, the formidably bluff and bellicose Charles Phillips, Fellow of Selwyn College and an expert in Anglo-Saxon archaeology, was especially intrigued. On 6 June, Phillips paid his first visit to Sutton Hoo.
What he saw left him stunned.‘I was not prepared for the astonishing sight which met me,’ he wrote later. ‘At a quick estimate the boat could hardly be much less than one hundred feet long.’
It now seems clear that Phillips began lobbying to have Basil Brown removed so that he could take charge of the dig himself. Plainly ego played a big part in this, although there were other factors – the imminence of war, in particular.
Phillips felt – with some justification – that a discovery of this importance could not be left to two estate workers and a man with no formal training in archaeology. If there was to be a war, it was imperative that the excavation be finished and any finds taken away for safe keeping before hostilities commenced.
A number of meetings were held between representatives of the British Museum, Ipswich Museum and the Ministry of Works to try to work out what should happen next. They did not go at all well. Afterwards, the president of Ipswich Museum referred to Charles Phillips as ‘overriding, bumptious and tactless – a typical product of modern Cambridge’.
In June, the British Museum told Basil Brown to stop excavating. However, he took no notice and carried on. Soon he found what he believed to be the remains of a roof that had once sat on top of the treasure chamber.
Then, on the evening of 14 June, he uncovered a large iron ring. Using a soft brush, he cleared away more of the sandy soil, finding some green-coloured bronze objects and a piece of extremely decayed wood.
He had discovered what appeared to be the remains of a cauldron. When he tapped the piece of wood with his finger, it gave out a hollow sound. ‘This may only contain bones, but I shall see very soon now,’ he wrote to his wife.
But before he could go any further, the British Museum announced that Charles Phillips would be taking charge of the excavation. Basil Brown’s dream of exploring the treasure chamber was dashed just as he was on the brink of fulfilling it. Subsequently, he was relegated to carting away earth in a wheelbarrow and he seldom set foot inside the ship again.
Bianca:
Although Phillips was now in charge, he was unable to do any of the digging himself. Basically, he was too fat. As the ship was extremely delicate, there were fears that he might damage the thin crust of sand.
Clearly, more help was required and Phillips recruited two archaeologist friends, Stuart Piggott and his young wife Peggy – my aunt – to come and lend a hand. On 21 July, just two days after she had arrived at Sutton Hoo, Peggy Piggott was working away in the centre of the ship when she uncovered a small pyramid-shaped object, intricately fashioned out of gold and garnets.
Later that afternoon she found another one. ‘Of course, from that moment we were immensely excited,’ she recalled when she was interviewed for a BBC documentary in the 1960s.
This, however, was only the start. The next day they found an array of treasure: beautiful gold plaques patterned with birds and animals, gold coins and an enormous gold buckle. That evening, when the excavation team returned to their hotel in Woodbridge, a man came up to Stuart Piggott in the bar and asked him how he was getting on: ‘Well, old boy, found any gold today?’
Piggott replied, quite truthfully, ‘As a matter of fact, my pockets are absolutely crammed with it.’
‘Splendid,’ said the man.‘You’d better have a drink.’
‘Thanks,’ said Piggott.‘I think I need one.’
Piggott wasn’t the only one to be left reeling. When the Keeper of Medieval Antiquities at the British Museum was shown one of the gold buckles in the waiting room at Woodbridge Station, the shock was so great that he nearly keeled over.
Over the next 15 days, Phillips’s team found 263 objects, including more gold jewellery, a sceptre, the remains of a shield and a helmet, along with a great silver dish bearing the stamps of the Emperor Anastasius (491-518).
Everyone present agreed that the jewellery dated from the early 7th century – the middle of the Dark Ages, when it had been thought that people had slid back into a hopeless primitivism.
However, the discoveries left that theory in tatters. The quality of the jewellery alone revealed that these people had been extremely sophisticated, while the stamps on the silver dish proved that their trading routes stretched as far as Constantinople.
What the archaeologists had failed to find, though, was a body – or any evidence of one. If this was a grave, then it evidently belonged to someone important.
But who? The most popular candidate was Raedwald, who had been King of East Anglia from about 599 to his death in about 625. What then had happened to his body? This was less clear, though the most likely theory was that the high acidity in the soil had destroyed any sign of it.
There was also the big question of whom the treasure belonged to.
On 14 August, 1939, a Treasure Trove inquest was held at Sutton Parish Hall; public interest was now so great that it was broadcast by the BBC Home Service. Having heard the evidence, the jury retired to deliberate in the Gents lavatory – the only room available – and decided that Mrs Pretty was the rightful owner.
A week or so later, Mrs Pretty decided to give the entire Sutton Hoo finds to the British Museum, thus becoming the largest living donor in the museum’s history.
Invited to become a Dame of the British Empire, she declined. By now the international situation had deteriorated to the point where the museum felt the finds should be placed in as safe a place as possible – they were stored in a disused Tube tunnel between Holborn and the Aldwych.
On 3 September war was declared. In the ensuing panic, the ship was covered with bracken and pieces of sacking. During the war, Sutton Hoo was used as a training ground for Sherman tanks. When a team from the British Museum visited the site in 1965, they found that the mounds were covered in tank tracks and the great ship now appeared ‘twisted in a bed of agony’.
The novel that I’ve written sticks, as far as possible, to what actually happened. By using three different narrators – Edith Pretty, Basil Brown and my aunt – I have tried to imagine how they were affected by the events of those few hectic weeks.
Life, for each of them, would never be the same again. Although the book is not a morality tale, there is, I suppose, a moral in here somewhere – namely, don’t be too hasty in consigning your long-lost cousin to the madhouse. She just might end up doing you a bigger favour than you ever dreamed of.
Inspiration of John Preston's Novel THE DIG
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/04/29/svhoo29.xml&DCMP=OTC-Autonolnk
Bianca:
Edith Pretty
The woman who gave us Sutton Hoo
21 December 2006
MARY Skelcher was like a girl on Christmas morning. She'd been handed a tin trunk full of letters and other personal documents that once belonged to Edith Pretty - the woman who unlocked the treasures of Sutton Hoo. Mary was writing a book on this “gentleman's daughter”, about whom little was known. What secrets lay inside?
She had travelled down to the south-coast home of David Pretty, Edith's grandson, to pick up the collection - and hadn't left his living room before giving in to temptation. Her first peek inside brought instant results.
“One of the first things I saw was a letter that had 10 Downing Street on the front. It was a letter from Winston Churchill's secretary.” It offered Edith Pretty an honour, Commander of the Order of the British Empire, in recognition of her gift to the nation of the treasures found on her estate overlooking Woodbridge.
“That was something we'd heard from the family - that she was offered an honour but turned it down - which is a nice story but, until then, without any firm evidence,” explains Mary. Here, in black and white, was proof.
Mary Skelcher and Chris Durrant
A second letter made clear Edith's decision to decline - a decision for which sister Elizabeth called her “a goose!”
Sutton Hoo, it's said, marked the first page of English history. As Suffolk fretted about the dawning of a new world war, ornate items of gold and silver were found beneath and earth mound on Edith's estate. The treasures, crafted by people creative and cultured, shed light on the so-called Dark Ages.
It's believed the ship-burial was for Raedwald, the king of East Anglia, who died early in the seventh Century. Most of us have heard of him and the Anglo-Saxons, thanks to the discovery in 1939, but the woman whose money and desire made it happen has a much lower profile.
As Chris Durrant puts it, she was “off the edge of the page”.
A replica of the Sutton Hoo mask
That's a shame, because the life of Edith Pretty is the stuff of which movies are made, featuring nouveau riche ambition, the glamour of foreign travel, the self-sacrifice of duty, the ghastliness of war, unrequited passion, and - most poignantly - love and lives cut short.
That colour is captured in Edith Pretty - From Socialite to Sutton Hoo. Co-author Chris last year published a biography of Basil Brown, the archaeologist charged to investigate the mounds, but he credits Sutton Hoo visitor services manager Mary Skelcher for the idea of a book on Edith.
“She twisted my arm to become involved,” he smiles, “and I'm very glad I did.”
Mary worked as a tax lawyer before deciding on a change of direction and getting involved with the National Trust, which has owned the Sutton Hoo estate since 1998 and opened the impressive visitors' centre in the spring of 2002.
“When I was volunteering in the exhibition, it's amazing how many of the visitors asked about Edith: what was she like and where she lived,” explains Mary. “We didn't know much about her at all.”
Chris, a retired engineer who lives near Saxmundham and now does some work for the National Trust, confirms: “Without a bit of digging, we didn't even know simple things, like her maiden name.”
Gradually, the jigsaw pieces came together. Edith's husband, Frank, had been in the Suffolk Regiment, so there were military records to explore. Somehow, they found out Edith had been at Roedean, and the school supplied information that added colour: such as details about her sports teams. It was there she acquired her nickname: Dempy.
Help came, too, from Edith's grandchildren; and an article in the EADT brought a response from two former housemaids with rich memories of life at Sutton Hoo House.
Edith May Dempster was born on August 1, 1883. Her father, Robert, was a rich industrialist in northern England whose own father had clawed his way out of poverty to become a factory owner.
Journals tell of extensive family expeditions to Egypt, Greece, Austria; a love of dancing; giggling with teenage friends; spending the first half of 1901 in Paris, to polish her language skills.
Later that year came a world tour with her parents. Christmas Day saw them at the Taj Mahal. After sailing from the Bay of Bengal, she had to endure cockroaches in the ladies' cabin! Edith celebrated her 19th birthday on a train to Salt Lake City.
In 1907 the Dempsters leased the imposing Vale Royal in Cheshire. There were 18 gardeners and so many timepieces that it took a specialist four hours to wind them each week. However, Edith wasn't frivolous. She carried out public and charitable work, including buying land for a mission hall.
Life changed dramatically with the First World War, when Edith was 31. She became quartermaster of the Red Cross military hospital at Winsford, and then in 1917 served with the Red Cross in France.
During this time she exchanged letters with Frank Pretty. His family ran the William Pretty and Sons corset-making business in Ipswich. The brother of one of her school friends, he had apparently proposed on Edith's 18th birthday and every year afterwards - without success.
Her mother died in 1919 and Edith, the unmarried daughter, devoted the next six years to her father.
Robert Dempster died in 1925, leaving an estate valued at more than £500,000 (£16 million today). It made the two sisters wealthy women.
The following year Edith agreed to marry the devoted Lt Col Frank Pretty, then living in Stone Lodge Lane, Ipswich. They married in Cheshire in the April of 1926 - a high-society affair with 200 invited guests. The bride was 42, her groom 47.
That year she gave up lease on Vale Royal and the couple lived briefly in Ipswich before Edith bought the 526-acre Sutton Hoo estate for £15,250 (about £480,000 in today's money).
There, she entered into local life: sitting as a magistrate in Woodbridge, joining her husband in the Essex and Suffolk Hunt, sending gifts to sick folk in Sutton, and hosting a new year's party for estate staff.
Then, at the age of 46, Edith discovered she was pregnant. Son Robert was born in 1930, but there is a suspicion the pregnancy left its mark on her health - and, in the early summer of 1934, Frank fell ill. It was diagnosed as stomach cancer, but specialists persuaded his wife he shouldn't know the truth. Edith carried that burden; and her own health seemed to ebb and flow in parallel with her husband's.
He died three days after Christmas, on his 56th birthday. The couple had been married less than nine years.
It was quite late in the day - last August, probably - that David Pretty gave the authors the trunk of documents.
“Some of it was incredibly moving, because there are letters from Frank Pretty home during the First World War,” says Mary. Frank was wounded twice; his brother was killed.
Meanwhile, letters written by Edith's sister Elizabeth - a frequent visitor to Sutton Hoo during Frank's illness later on - were illuminating.
“I'd always thought this notion of dying of a broken heart was romantic nonsense; but actually, when you read Elizabeth's letters, Edith's illness matched Frank's. So suddenly it doesn't seem quite as silly,” says Mary. “For me, it made me feel that Edith really loved him.”
For nearly 45 minutes we've been talking in what used to be Frank's office, but we've barely mentioned the treasures . . .
“Almost incidental,” says Chris. “People know her because of that, but the story stands very well without them.”
The earth mounds lay about 500 yards from the house, but it wasn't until 1937 that Edith decided to have them investigated. There are stories about people seeing ghosts near the mounds. Mary and Chris suggest it could simply be that the landowner, now on her own, simply wanted something to occupy her mind.
In May, 1939, Basil Brown's excavation of the largest mound revealed an Anglo-Saxon ship burial “of heroic proportions”. An inquest jury sitting at Sutton Village Hall ruled the treasure was Edith's, and a few days afterwards she decided it should be given to the nation.
Edith Pretty died suddenly in Richmond Hospital on December 17, 1942, of a blood clot on the brain. She was 59. Only two weeks earlier, she'd been sitting as a magistrate in Woodbridge.
Her gross estate was valued at nearly £400,000 - approaching £11 million in today's money. Most passed in trust to son Robert, who went to live with Elizabeth. He went to Eton and then into farming. Robert died in 1988 of cancer, aged 57, leaving children Penny, David and John.
The War Office used Sutton Hoo until 1946. A few years later the estate was sold.
The view of Mary and Chris is that Edith was “extraordinarily generous and strong-minded, yet self-effacing”. She was, too, a game soul.
There's also, for Chris, a certain sadness. Edith was a product of her upbringing and her own ambitions undoubtedly took second place.
As a young Victorian, she was constrained in many ways. “We see that 'picture' in her diaries of a happy-go-lucky schoolgirl - the sheer joy of messing about in Paris for six months with her school friend and all that - but her society had her in an iron grip.
“She would have been expected to do the good works. . . Her life was channelled in a way a young woman today could not conceive of; not being allowed to have free choice but being constrained by the views of her parents and her society.”
The sense of duty to her widowed father could have been why she didn't marry earlier. Also, it was likely her parents had harboured ambitions for her to marry into aristocracy, rather than choose the son of a draper from lower down the scale.
Mary unlocks the small private chapel that leads off Frank's office. It used to be carpeted in blue, and have a crucifix and candles in the window - somewhere the widowed Edith could “talk” to her husband.
You can breathe the history - and feel a film scripting forming. All the elements are here: the emotion of a period story, the original set, and wonderful light and views.
Chris smiles. “Another role for Helen Mirren . . .”
Edith Pretty: From Socialite to Sutton Hoo costs £8.99. ISBN 978-0-9554725-0-3
ONE of the legends attached to Edith Pretty is her involvement with spiritualism.
It seems to have started when her sister came to Suffolk. Frank was ill and Elizabeth suggested faith healing might help. London-based William Parish worked from a distance, as it were, and both Frank and Edith did seem to perk up for a while.
Mary Skelcher says there was always a Christian basis to Edith's involvement.
She formed a strong friendship with William Parish and his wife, giving the financial backing that allowed him to set up a healing house in East Sheen.
There's also a tale that Edith, helped by Parish, held a seance at which an apparition appeared of a man on a black horse and told her to plunge a sword into the mounds. This is pooh-poohed by Sheila Norman, whose father ran the spiritualist church in Woodbridge that Edith supported financially but which she didn't attend. Sheila Norman also doesn't believe that seances took place at Sutton Hoo House, say the authors.
AN exhibition complementing the book is running at the Sutton Hoo visitors' centre until the spring. The centrepiece is the restored portrait of a 56-year-old Edith Pretty that was painted around the time of the excavations by Dutch artist Cor Visser.
It was donated to the National Trust this year by David Pretty, her grandson, after it had been stored in a garage for about 30 years.
The two authors travelled to the Bournemouth area to collect the painting. They dare not leave it in the car, so it rested overnight in Mary's room at the Express by Holiday Inn.
“I hope Edith saw the funny side,” says Chris Durrant. “In the same way that the Sutton Hoo treasures allegedly spent their first night under Edith's bed, her portrait spent a night in Mary's hotel bedroom.”
http://www.eadt.co.uk/content/eadt/features/story.aspx?brand=EADOnline&category=Features&tBrand=EADOnline&tCategory=features&itemid=IPED20%20Dec%202006%2010%3A23%3A10%3A217
Bianca:
SUTTON HOO - Edith Pretty Home
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