Considered the "spiritus rector" of such research,[1] he oversaw the production of the monumental three-volume work The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, termed by the president of the Society of Antiquaries as "one of the great books of the century".

The ship-burial was excavated in 1939, weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War; Bruce-Mitford spent 1940 to 1946 in the Royal Corps of Signals, and returned with a warning from the department's Keeper: "You will also be responsible for Sutton Hoo.

In his other duties, Bruce-Mitford excavated at the Mawgan Porth Dark Age Village, published significant works on the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Codex Amiatinus, as well as the posthumous opus A Corpus of Late Celtic Hanging-Bowls, translated P. V. Glob's book The Bog People into English, and oversaw the acquisition of the Lycurgus Cup and Courtenay Adrian Ilbert's collection of thousands of clocks and watches, considered "the greatest collection of horology in the world".

[22] In 1903, and likely on the basis of his book and articles on Weihaiwei,[23][24][25] he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society; he subsequently became interested in geography and vulcanology, writing additional works on the country.

[32][33][note 2] She was the eldest daughter of early settlers of British Columbia, Susan Louisa (née Moir)[36] and John Fall Allison, an explorer, gold prospector, and cattle rancher.

[33] In 1908, however, by which time the family had three sons, William Awdry, the Bishop of South Tokyo, announced from the pulpit of Christ Church that "certain marriages of British subjects celebrated in Japan" might not be legally valid, and if so "the couples ... will find that they have been and are living together ... in concubinage and that their children are 'illegitimate'".

[37][38] Though a legal technicality, and one which was remedied by an Act of Parliament in 1912, the announcement disgraced the Bruce-Mitfords, and Eustace lost his leadership of the Yokohama Modern School.

[44] Meanwhile, Bruce-Mitford was active in school events, including playing rugby and cricket, acting in (and directing the orchestra for) John Galsworthy's The Little Man, debating at the Horsham Workers' Educational Association, and writing his first article, on a ten-day signals camp held over the 1931 summer holiday.

[44] By the time Bruce-Mitford was 16 or 17, his studies had been switched from classics to history; "I was not very good at Greek and Latin", he later wrote, despite devoted tutoring by his brother Terence.

[46][44] Around the same time, he came across Samuel Gardner's English Gothic Foliage Sculpture in the school's library,[47] and upon reading it discovered his love of the concrete and visual.

[46][44] But at Oxford Bruce-Mitford "fell in love with the atmosphere and smell of the oldest part of the Library where, under the flat-arched 15th century ceiling, cases displaying illuminated manuscripts were set out".

[46] One, the twelfth-century Ashmole Bestiary, open to a folio of a red eagle on a background of gold, so captured his attention that "after some weeks I could stand my ignorance and quell my curiosity no longer", and, "[s]crewing up my courage", asked for permission to see it; he remained absorbed in the work through lunch and until evicted at the end of the day.

[51] The same year, the University Appointments Board recommended Bruce-Mitford for the curatorship of the York Castle Museum, writing that he "would do well in a trading or administrative post, but has an exceptional gift for research, a sphere in which he could do work of outstanding merit".

[56][55] The Society, in turn, created a subcommittee consisting of E. T. Long, Edward Thurlow Leeds, and William Abel Pantin,[56] the latter of whom wrote an article on the houses and commented on the "practical consideration or morals to be drawn" from their destruction.

[57][55] Demolition lasted from December 1936 to March 1937,[58] after which began, according to the geologist William Joscelyn Arkell, "the removal of the greatest quantity of subsoil ... ever taken out of one hole within the City of Oxford".

[46][54] Much of his work involved waiting for the well in front of each house to be dug out, revealing two or three feet of mud at the bottom, filled with broken medieval pottery and other artefacts.

[60] Because the wells quickly silted up during their use and be replaced by new ones every 50 or so years, Bruce-Mitford found it possible to accurately date pottery within uniquely short time-frames.

[51] The following year Bruce-Mitford was reacquainted with archaeological work, spending three weeks with Gerhard Bersu at the Iron Age site of Little Woodbury in Wiltshire.

[67] Joining as a lance corporal and initially assigned to a territorial unit in Essex, he transmitted morse code during the day, after which he watched for fires from the dome of St Paul's Cathedral.

[88] The Sutton Hoo finds, excavated in 1939 and nearly immediately taken to the safety of the tunnel connecting the Aldwych and Holborn tube stations,[90] had been returned to the museum only a year or two before.

[91][92] Herbert Maryon, a Technical Attaché recruited for the task,[93] set to work restoring what Bruce-Mitford later termed "the real headaches – notably the crushed shield, helmet and drinking horns".

"[5] Early in 1946, Kendrick and Bruce-Mitford placed restored artefacts from Sutton Hoo on display in the museum's King Edward VII Gallery.

[154][note 15] Bruce-Mitford studied the cross over the ensuing two years, including four days spent in a bank vault in Zurich, assembled a file an inch and a half thick, and successfully persuaded the treasury to allocate £195,000 for its purchase.

[158] The Metropolitan Museum of Art had been waiting in the wings; its curator Thomas Hoving, untroubled by the issues with the cross and owner, stayed up with Mimara and purchased it immediately.

[158][note 16] Frank Francis took over as director from a retiring Kendrick in 1959,[161] and the following year made two floors of a Montague Street house available for Bruce-Mitford to devote to Sutton Hoo.

[163] By then, criticism over the delays in publication had begun to mount; a 1964 article by Christopher Hawkes lamented the fact that "[a] quarter of a century has passed ... and Sutton Hoo is still not published", and concluded that the museum "really must go to it".

[166] After the volumes were ultimately published, Hawkes and his wife Sonia went as far as to translate, privately publish, and distribute amongst colleagues, a biting German review by Joachim Werner;[167][168][169] Sir David M. Wilson, who became director of the museum in 1977, disparaged Bruce-Mitford in his 2002 book The British Museum: A History,[note 17] and wrote that work on the Sutton Hoo volumes "presents a precautionary, if unique, tale of procrastination and obfuscation".

A. J. Taylor, then president of the Society of Antiquaries, hailed the publication as "one of the great books of the century",[2][175] and the art critic Terence Mullaly suggested it marked a "com[ing] of age" for archaeology, writing that it "sets standards for archaeologists everywhere".

[202][193] The result, a 500-page tome with 800 illustrations, was reviewed as "a fitting memorial to Dr Bruce-Mitford whose contribution to early medieval archaeology — and to metalwork studies in particular — was immense".

[77] A professional cellist, Myrtle Bruce-Mitford herself contributed to the Sutton Hoo finds, being employed by the British Museum to work on the remnants of the lyre and co-authoring a paper with her father.