The Road to Little Dribbling (28 page)

My interest was with a property called the Sea Marge and with the forgotten magnate who built it, Sir Edgar Speyer. Speyer was a German who spent most of his life outside Germany. He was born in 1862 in New York City to wealthy German parents, then went to England in his twenties to look after the family interests there. He made a fortune as a financier, built much of the London Underground, and became a generous patron of the arts. When the Proms got into financial difficulties, he stepped in and saved it. He became pals with King George V, our friend from Bognor, took out British citizenship, was knighted for his services to the arts, and was appointed to the Privy Council. He gave generously to hospitals and funded the Antarctic expedition of Robert Falcon Scott. When Scott died, he had a letter to Speyer in his pocket.

Speyer was, in short, a nearly ideal human being, except that it seems he wanted Germany to win all its wars and take over the world. This is, of course, occasionally a problem with Germans. Speyer’s house is a hefty edifice in the style of an Elizabethan manor standing on cliffs above the sea. Rumors have often had it that Speyer signaled German ships from the terrace during the First World War. It is an appealing image, but a slightly preposterous one. For a start, what would he tell them? (“Bit rainy here. How you?”) He had no access to information that would be of special value to the German war effort and it was unlikely that he would expose himself to the obvious risk of being observed.

Speyer’s real problem was that he was Jewish at a time when even the most enlightened members of society tended to be at least lightly anti-Semitic. Lord Northcliffe, owner of the
Daily Mail,
spoke for his generation when, in noting the proliferation of Jewish businessmen in England, he remarked drily, “We shall soon have to set the Society column in Yiddish.” Northcliffe loathed Speyer and persecuted him mercilessly. Eventually Speyer fled to America under a cloud of suspicion. A parliamentary committee stripped him of his honors and branded him a traitor, which he was insofar as he longed for a German victory.

The Sea Marge is now a hotel. I trespassed onto its grounds and looked over the garden wall at the sea, then wandered inside, wondering if anyone would challenge me, but no one did. There didn’t seem to be anything at all to recall Herr Speyer, so I wandered out again and went to have a look at the village, which was tidy and quite arrestingly normal.

It is a small miracle that it has survived as well as it has. Norfolk is the most out on a limb of English counties. It has terrible roads and a generally appalling rail service. When we first moved there, the train services were operated by a company called WAGN, which I assumed was short for “We Are Going Nowhere.” That company lost the franchise eventually and it was given to a Dutch company, but if there have been any improvements I haven’t seen them. The upshot is that getting to the east coast of Norfolk requires immense reserves of fortitude and time mixed with an eccentric desire to be on the east coast of Norfolk.

—

Just beyond Overstrand is Cromer, another old seaside resort, with a grand old hotel, the endearingly named Hotel de Paris. I can’t imagine where it gets its business from. I was here to see Cromer’s pier, which I think may be the best and handsomest in the nation. Once there were about a hundred piers in Britain, but today there are barely half that number and a great many of them—Bognor springs to mind, or it would if there was anything left in it capable of springing—are falling down or are scarcely worthy of the name. Cromer’s was badly damaged by a winter storm in 2013, and I’d heard that there was talk of tearing it down, which would have been beyond a tragedy, but happily it was repaired and seems as good as new now.

A few years ago, when Daniel and Andrew and I were walking this section of coast, Daniel discovered to his great and improbable excitement that the pier’s little theater was staging a show of songs from the Second World War, and that one of the performers was someone he had once worked with. Daniel insisted that we go to that day’s matinee. I was frankly dubious, but in the event enjoyed myself immensely. The performance was well attended, mostly by elderly people who arrived on buses from nearby nursing homes. I believe Daniel, Andrew, and I were the only members of the audience not sitting on incontinence pads. The cast consisted of just three performers, but they were excellent. It helped a lot that the female singer was pretty and talented and that the whole thing lasted only a little over an hour.

Cromer is a pleasant, old-fashioned place and I had a good look around it, then returned to Sheringham and had another look around it for want of anything more sensational to do. Then I returned to the Burlington Hotel, and sat very quietly until it was a respectable enough hour to go and have a drink.

III

You can’t go to East Anglia and not visit Sutton Hoo. Well, you can obviously, but you shouldn’t. The Sutton Hoo story begins with a man named Col. Frank Pretty, who didn’t do much of anything for the first fifty years or so of his life, then did rather a lot in quite a short period. He married a middle-aged spinster named Edith May, moved with her onto a big estate called Sutton Hoo near Woodbridge in Suffolk, fathered a son, and then abruptly died, on his fifty-sixth birthday.

Left on her own with a small son and large, lonely house, Mrs. Pretty took up spiritualism and developed an interest in the twenty or so grassy mounds that stood on heathland about five hundred yards from her house. Deciding to excavate them, she contacted the Ipswich Museum, which put her in touch with a curious figure named Basil Brown.

Brown was a farm laborer and odd-job man with no archaeological training. He had dropped out of school at twelve, but he continued to educate himself through private study, and acquired certificates of attainment in geography, geology, astronomy, and drawing. My own interest in him began when I lived in Norfolk and discovered that he had married a girl from our village and lived with her for some years on a neighboring property called Church Farm. Brown had a rustic Norfolk accent his whole life and was often likened in appearance and manner to a ferret, but he had a genius for archaeology. He spent nearly all his free time cycling around Norfolk looking for likely archaeological sites and, to an almost uncanny degree, often finding them.

Brown agreed to have a look at Mrs. Pretty’s estate, but had no great expectations. The mounds, it was well known, had been extensively picked over in the past. That was probably why the job was offered to Brown rather than someone of greater stature. Mrs. Pretty gave Brown a small salary and lodgings in the chauffeur’s cottage, and lent him two estate workers as assistants. Brown and his team had no special tools. They used jugs, bowls, and sieves brought down from the pantry. The most delicate work was done with pastry brushes from the kitchen and a bellows from the library. In the summer of 1938, Brown dug trenches through three of the mounds, but found nothing. Undaunted, he returned the following summer and excavated what is now called mound one. Almost at once he found a piece of metal, which he correctly deduced was a ship’s rivet and that this was a ship burial. This was quite an insight for there was no history of ship burials in Britain—this is still one of only two ever found—and anyway the mound was a mile or so from water. Nobody had ever found a ship burial this far inland. The only reference work Brown could find to guide him was a heavy volume in Norwegian from 1904 describing the excavation of the Viking ship
Oseberg
from western Norway.

It is important to remember that Brown didn’t find a ship. He found the
impression
of a ship—the indentations of a long-vanished structure. It was intensely delicate work—like trying to excavate a shadow. But what a payoff. Brown had found the greatest haul of treasure ever recovered in Britain—jewels, coins, gold and silver plate, armor, weapons, and decorative objects of every sort. The goods came from as far away as Egypt and Byzantium. No one knows who was buried in the ship, or indeed that anyone actually was, for it contained no remains. It may be that every bit of the body percolated away in the acidic soil, or it may be that the occupant was cremated and his ashes sprinkled among the relics. The person most often cited as the most likely occupant is Raedwald, king of the East Angles, but that is just a guess.

When it was realized how priceless a find this was, government archaeologists rushed in and Basil Brown was roughly cast aside. For years, his role in the discovery was either unmentioned or discussed with condescension. A typical assessment was that of the archaeologist Richard Dumbreck who described Brown as “having the appearance of a ferret” and said that he excavated “like a terrier after a rat. He would trowel furiously, scraping the spoil between his legs, and at intervals he would stand back to view progress and tread in what he had just loosened…The sad thing is that with training he might have been a brilliant archaeologist.” In much the same way, I suspect, with enough training Dumbreck might have become a decent human.

The discovery of the Sutton Hoo treasure came at exactly the wrong time, just as war was breaking out, and all excavations were halted for the duration. The military took over Mrs. Pretty’s estate and used it, amazingly, for tank training. When archaeologists returned after the war, they found tracks running right through the excavations. Mrs. Pretty gave the recovered treasure to the British Museum. It remains the single most valuable donation ever made to the museum by a living person. Curators spent years cleaning the finds. The biggest challenge was a golden helmet, which had broken up into more than five hundred fragments. A team of experts spent years trying to put it all back together, but ended up with several pieces left over and a helmet that other experts said was patently unwearable. For the next twenty years, that is what visitors to the British Museum saw. Finally, in 1971, the whole was taken apart again and reassembled into the form it has today, which uses all the pieces and is presumed to be correct. It is one of the most arresting and beautiful objects in the British Museum.

Basil Brown spent another twenty years riding his bicycle around East Anglia and sometimes farther afield, finding Saxon and Roman artifacts and even occasionally an entire farmstead or settlement. He retired in 1961, but lived until 1977, when he died aged eighty-nine. He occasionally went to the British Museum to look at the Sutton Hoo horde. He was never officially honored for its discovery.

I enjoyed a long walk around the site. The mounds are a fair hike from the visitor center. There are about twenty altogether, though all of them are much lower than they once were because of plowing and plundering, and several are barely visible at all. You can also now visit the Prettys’ house, which is decorated as it would have been in Mrs. Pretty’s day. Each room had a laminated information card giving details of Mrs. Pretty’s life there. These contained many errors of spelling and punctuation, which is a little unfortunate, but at least they attempted to convey useful information. I don’t remember the house being open in 2009, when I last visited, but then I don’t remember things I saw two weeks ago.

The visitor center was stylish and bright, and the displays are interesting and informative and give a good impression of what the burial would have looked like when it was new and again when it was found centuries later. The actual treasures are all at the British Museum, but the exhibition includes some very good replicas. I had a sandwich and a cup of tea in the café and was feeling so benignly pleased with the whole experience that I didn’t bitch even privately to myself that the sandwich was a little dry and cost roughly double what, in a reasonable world, it should have. Well, maybe I did bitch inwardly just a little, but I didn’t say anything grumbly to anyone and that is surely a mark of progress.

—

I drove on to Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast. Aldeburgh is a smart and good-looking town, well supplied with fashionable retailers, locally owned boutiques and cafés, and a good bookshop. Somebody needs to explain to me how it is that Aldeburgh and Southwold, another resort just up the road, remain thriving and chic while so many other resorts are dying. It can’t have anything to do with accessibility or underlying beauty—Aldeburgh and Southwold are harder to get to and no more attractively situated than Bognor Regis and much less blessed by nature than Penzance—so what does explain it? I am genuinely at a loss to say.

Once, in my more ambitious days when I made a television program for the BBC about the problem of litter in Britain, in the touchingly naive belief that people might want to do something about it, I visited a beach cleanup at Aldeburgh being undertaken by the Marine Conservation Trust, to interview the saintly souls who were doing the work. From them I learned that every kilometer of shoreline in Britain contains on average forty-six thousand pieces of litter, mostly tiny bits of plastic, much of which ends up in the stomachs of birds in fairly staggering amounts. In one study, 95 percent of fulmars washed ashore along the North Sea were found to have plastic in their stomachs—and not just a little but a lot: forty-four pieces on average. Transparent bags, meanwhile, choke a great many turtles because they mistake them for jellyfish.

From the Suffolk team I also learned that about ten thousand containers fall off ships each year. Sometimes after a period of years the container doors pop open and the contents float to the surface. One of the volunteers I met, an artist named Fran Crowe, showed me a potato chip packet she had picked up—one of several thousand that had washed onto the beach at Aldeburgh. The chips inside had long since dissolved, but the packets themselves were in pristine condition. The one Fran Crowe showed me bore a price label of 3p and came with an offer expiring on December 31, 1974. It had been under the water for forty years before becoming part of a fiesta of flotsam in Suffolk.

I mentioned that once when I was in the Scilly Isles I saw lots of clear plastic glistening on a beach at Tresco and it turned out to be thousands of saline drip bags, all empty, produced by a British company in Lancashire, but with writing in Spanish.