Sutton Hoo: Twenty-Five Years After

Extract

The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial, with its great store of treasure from the early Kingdom of East Anglia, was discovered and excavated in 1939, between May and 26th August. That is now twenty-five years ago. Eight days after the work's determinedly unhurried close, the country was at war. Jubilee reminiscence of those extraordinary weeks has had no space, till now, to spare for the almost miraculous alliance of fine weather with human enterprise and skill, which gave us from Suffolk this 'finest archaeological discovery ever made in Great Britain, perhaps in Europe' [I]. The roll of fame is nevertheless well known, and was rehearsed last year by Mr Charles Green in his book on the discovery [2]: Mrs Edith Pretty, the landowner, author of the enterprise, and donor of the whole find to the nation; Basil Brown and his chief Guy Maynard of Ipswich Corporation Museum; the fuller muster of talent assembled soon beside them, under Mr C . W. Phillips, for the Office of Works (as the Ministry then was called), among which the names Piggott, Grimes and Crawford stand out especially; and the late Commander Hutchison, R.N., then of the Science Museum, who drew the lines of the 85-foot ship.