The true story behind Netflix film The Dig: how two remarkable people found the Sutton Hoo treasure
Right now, nobody’s allowed in Room 41 at the British Museum, where the Sutton Hoo treasure sits silently in its glass cases, but once it’s open again, there’s likely to be lots more people making for those famous Anglo Saxon remains – of which the scary metal mask and helmet are the best known. The Dig, a film about how the treasure was discovered, is released on Netflix at the end of the month. It stars Carey Mulligan on terrific form as the Suffolk landowner Edith Pretty (except prettier, with a better haircut), who had an instinct that the mounds on the fields around her home contained something really interesting. Ralph Fiennes plays Basil Brown, the taciturn, self-taught excavator who first realised the significance of the remains. And it is these two people, the wealthy widow who funded the excavations and the farmer’s son who left school at 12, who, in 1939, really brought to light one of the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries ever made in Britain: a ship-burial, likely of a king.
An archaeological dig is frankly dull for most outsiders – all those trenches, all that mud – but the interest of the film is as much in the personalities associated with the find as the treasure itself, of which you don’t see much. Brown finds first the rivets (beautiful only to an expert) and the ghostly outlines of a ship in the mound that Mrs Pretty has a hunch about. The film’s plot focuses on the tensions that arise when the authorities – the British Museum but mostly the Office of Public Works – bring in an academic, Charles Phillips, to take over the dig from Brown. Phillips excavated the central part of the ship where the spectacular remains were found.
Phillips - played here by Ken Stott - was a large (certainly overweight) and combative individual (“bellicose” according to Brown). In the film, Brown resents him taking over the show. In fact, according to Sue Brunning, the curator of the Sutton Hoo treasure at the British Museum, this wasn’t quite the case. Brown was “quite philosophical” about Phillips taking charge of the project, but “was clear his ultimate boss was Pretty”.
Mrs Pretty was in fact 56 when the dig took place but was quite as feisty as the 35 year-old Mulligan plays her; we don’t, however, get to see her interest in spiritualism. In the film there’s a further subplot, perhaps to make up for all the mud, involving the pioneering young woman archaeologist who took part in the excavations, Peggy Piggott, played by Lily James, and the breakdown of her marriage to her husband Stuart (they divorced years later).
The novel on which Moira Buffini’s screenplay is based is by Peggy’s nephew, John Preston. He never knew his aunt, because she and his father didn’t get on, and only found out about her involvement from a chance remark by a second cousin: ”you know that your aunt found the first gold to be discovered at Sutton Hoo?” He got a copy of her journal from his half-sister who had grown up with Peggy, which helped him get to know her voice. “The more I read about the excavations the more interested I became. It seemed like buried treasure for grown ups. It was about class and about digging up the remains of a lost civilisation at a time when people’s own civilisation was on the brink”.
It’s Peggy who provides the slightly gratuitous sexual tension for the film, with a fictional cousin of Mrs Pretty played by Johnny Flynn. Brunning says cheerfully, “dramatic license is fine, if it means that people come to see the artefacts.”
In any case there’s enough real human interest here to satisfy anyone. Brown was indeed a remarkable man, a complete autodidact. When we first see Fiennes with his coat awkwardly buttoned at the top, that’s pretty well how Brown looked in photographs (in fact, a BBC film from 1965 about the Sutton Hoo find, The Million Pound Grave - alas, not available from the BBC archive - shows him as he was). Fiennes stays loyal to the excavator’s strong East Anglian accent. Brown read voraciously – we see him in the film, as in life, with a pile of books by his bed, and the British Museum has his diaries of the dig, which Fiennes consulted, where he records excitedly on 29th June, 1939: “Roughly the ship measurements are approximately 82 ft. long with 15 feet beam. A ship of this size must have been that of a king or a person of very great importance and it is the find of a lifetime.”
Was he disappointed to be made an assistant to Philips on the dig he had begun? His diary seems phlegmatic: “Anyway I shall not have so much bother and responsibility now in case anything went wrong. I think we shall be able to co-operate all right, at least I hope so.”
And according to Brunning, it wasn’t snobbery that meant Brown was not given proper credit (though it looks a lot like it in the film). “After the war, when the treasure was put on display there was so much attention given to the artefacts, there really wasn’t much emphasis on how they were found. Nowadays, we’re just as interested in how finds are made. When I was studying Sutton Hoo at university, Basil Brown was up there with Howard Carter.”
Though she could have sold the Sutton Hoo treasure for a tidy sum, Pretty chose to gift it to the nation. It remains one of the most generous gifts ever given to the British Museum. Now these glorious artefacts are in a splendid space, The Sir Paul and Lady Ruddock Gallery of Sutton Hoo and Europe, AD 300-1100 - one of the museum’s most visited spots. And yes, there Basil Brown finally gets his due.
The Dig is on Netflix from January 29. The Dig by John Preston is published by Viking (£8.99)
