Hoo’s On First
Writer John Preston has an interesting article in the Telegraph today detailing a bit of his family's connection to the discovery of the Sutton Hoo trove. If you aren't familiar with Sutton Hoo, this was an enormous (and enormously important) archaeological find made in Britain just before the Second World War broke out. A complete ship had been buried under a mound, along with many fabulous objects. The burial site dates from the Anglo-Saxon period and is believed to have been the tomb of one of the Anglo-Saxon kings. It turns out that Preston's aunt was the first person to find many of these artifacts.
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 archeology. 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.’
Preston has written a fictionalized account of the events at Sutton Hoo that will be published next month (ironically, by Viking). But his article is well worth reading. It puts a human face on the archaeological discovery. I've also found a few worthwhile links that discuss the Sutton Hoo site and the trove of objects. The Sutton Hoo Society has an interactive tour of the site itself. Wikipedia entry here. Pictures and history here, here, here and here.
The discovery of Sutton Hoo changed the way historians viewed the Dark Ages. At the time, it was thought that most of civilization had fallen into outright barbarity and isolation. But the trove contained objects from the Byzantine Empire proving that some trade routes were still operating even then.
By feeblemind, Sunday, 29 April , 2007 @ 3:28 pm
Interesting that the jury determined the artifacts belonged to the landowner. I bet a dollar that there is no way that would happen today. UK Government would simply confiscate it for themselves.