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. | |  | | The Sutton Hoo Boat was ‘Britain’s Tutankhamun’, the
most significant archaeological site ever discovered in this country |
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.’ | 
