![]() In 1905 they toured South America.īut Edith didn’t need her family around her to pursue adventure. It’s not hard to understand where her fascination with archaeological excavation came from, and to appreciate the serendipity that took her to Sutton Hoo.Ī year later the Dempsters set off on an even more ambitious tour, this time to Egypt, India, Ceylon, China, Japan and the United States. In 1900 the family visited Pompeii, Athens and Egypt, where Edith and her sister climbed to the top of the Great Pyramid of Giza, the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient world. Happily for Edith, her father believed firmly that travel, especially to see great antiquities, broadened the mind. In a way, The Dig is not just about duty or even archaeology, but also about love, writes Brian Viner Ralph Fiennes as Basil Brown and Carey Mulligan as Edith Pretty. It was used by friends and even family for the rest of her life. She was born in 1883, the second daughter of a rich Manchester industrialist, Robert Dempster, whose own father, a penniless Scotsman, had parlayed a humble job in a gas-meter factory into a gas and engineering empire of his own.Įdith was sent to Wimbledon House School in Brighton, soon to be renamed Roedean - now one of the most prestigious girls’ schools in the country - where she became known as ‘Dempy’. That comes across powerfully in the film, yet it only scratches the surface of Edith’s beguiling story. It was an unlikely and entirely platonic love but Edith and Basil, although separated by class and wealth, were kindred spirits. In a way, The Dig - based on the 2007 novel by John Preston - is not just about duty or even archaeology, but also about love. But she declined the honour - almost certainly on the basis, according to Laura Howarth, the archaeology manager at National Trust Sutton Hoo, that she had ‘merely been doing her duty’. Two years earlier, Winston Churchill had offered her a CBE in recognition of her extraordinary generosity. Ralph Fiennes as working-class Basil Brown, an amateur astronomer and self-taught archaeologist, in The Dig, which is due to be released later this month But after suffering a blood clot on the brain, she had died in 1942, aged just 59. Basil was almost 90 when he died in 1977. Nevertheless, Edith promptly donated the entire haul to the nation, and in 1951, having been stored in Aldwych Tube station during the war, it went on display in the British Museum - albeit with no credit, not a single namecheck, for Basil Brown.Īlas, Edith was no longer around to object. In August 1939, a treasure trove inquest at Sutton Parish Hall determined that the astounding find - which would entirely revolutionise historians’ understanding of the Anglo-Saxons - belonged not to the Crown but to the landowner. Interred with it were many priceless, perfectly preserved gold and silver artefacts from the early 7th century, the products of breathtakingly deft artistry that even today, with precision tools and artificial lighting, cannot easily be matched. He then began the highly skilled, painstaking work which in due course, to their mutual astonishment, uncovered the 90ft skeleton of a ship, almost certainly buried to mark the death of an Anglo-Saxon king. Edith said he could lodge with her chauffeur and offered him 30 shillings a week, for what was originally thought likely to be a fortnight-long project. He put her in touch with the curator of the Ipswich Corporation Museum, Gus Maynard, who in turn suggested a quirky character, a former tenant farmer from the village of Rickinghall - not overly fond of authority but, in the words of a colleague, ‘extremely attached to his rather disreputable trilby hat’ and ‘somewhat moist and bubbling pipe’ - who might have the required expertise.īasil duly cycled to Sutton Hoo, just as he cycled all over the county on his digs, to meet her. The connection between Edith and Basil was made at the 1937 Woodbridge Flower Show, where she mentioned the mounds to a local historian, Vincent Redstone. ![]() It was Basil to whom Edith gave the precious job of excavating the strange low mounds of earth on her land that she was convinced were worth proper investigation. Carey Mulligan as Edith Pretty in a new Netflix film, The Dig, which tells the compelling story of how a lavish Anglo-Saxon ship was unearthed just before the outbreak of World War II
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