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.” 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. Fiennes stays loyal to the excavator’s strong East Anglian accent. 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). Brown was indeed a remarkable man, a complete autodidact. In any case there’s enough real human interest here to satisfy anyone. Phillips excavated the central part of the ship where the spectacular remains were found. 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. 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. 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.Īn 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. Ralph Fiennes plays Basil Brown, the taciturn, self-taught excavator who first realised the significance of the remains. 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. The Dig, a film about how the treasure was discovered, is released on Netflix at the end of the month. Ight 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. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.
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