Edith Pretty

Edith May Pretty (née Dempster; 1 August 1883 – 17 December 1942) was an English landowner on whose land the Sutton Hoo ship burial was discovered after she hired Basil Brown, a local excavator and amateur archeologist, to find out if anything lay beneath the mounds on her property.

[1] From 1907 to 1925, Edith's father took a lease on Vale Royal Abbey, a country house near Whitegate, Cheshire, the family seat of Lord Delamere.

[1][3] During World War I, Edith served as quartermaster at the Red Cross' auxiliary hospital at Winsford, and helped to house Belgian refugees.

[11][failed verification] After the War, Pretty continued to serve the Suffolk Regiment, obtaining the rank of lieutenant colonel and commander of the 4th Battalion[12] in 1922,[8] while also working in the family business.

She served as a magistrate in Woodbridge,[1] and in 1926 donated the Dempster Challenge Cup to Winsford Urban District Council, her former Red Cross posting.

[20][21] Redstone and the curator of the Ipswich Corporation Museum, Guy Maynard, met Edith in July regarding the project, and self-taught Suffolk archaeologist Basil Brown was subsequently invited to excavate the mounds.

He soon unearthed the remains of a large burial site, containing what was later identified as a 7th-century Saxon ship, which may have been the last resting-place of King Rædwald of East Anglia.

[17][1] The excavation was subsequently taken over by a team of professional archaeologists headed by Charles Phillips and included Cecily Margaret Guido and Stuart Piggott.

[22] A portrait of a 56-year-old Edith was painted by the Dutch artist Cor Visser and donated to the National Trust by David Pretty, her grandson.

Pretty was the subject of a play by Karen Forbes performed at Sutton Hoo in 2019,[24] and features in the novel The Dig by John Preston, published in 2007.