An interview with John Preston: On The Dig, Maxwell and a fascination with unsavoury characters
It’s been a great week for John Preston – his biography of the press tycoon Robert Maxwell, Fall, has hit the bestseller charts. He is also the author of The Dig, a novel about the discovery of the burial ship and Saxon treasure horde at Sutton Hoo in 1939. It has been made into a Netflix movie of the same name and has garnered considerable applause this week. The film, starring Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan, surprises with its downbeat rural charm, swathed in the melancholy of Suffolk mists as Britain headed to war in the autumn of that year.
Preston was a former colleague, arts editor and critic at the Evening Standard and the Sunday Telegraph before he turned to the lonely task of writing books – four novels in all and two wonderful biographical studies of two of the great narcissists of their time – Robert Maxwell, and before that the late leader of the Liberals, Jeremy Thorpe. His depiction of Thorpe in A Very English Scandal later became a huge television drama hit with Hugh Grant in the starring role.
Speaking on Zoom from his elegant and comfortable salon, Preston’s conversation is full of the same fluency and charm that imbues his books. He has the essence of what the Italians call disinvoltura – nonchalance with empathy and edge.
“Are you drawn to larger-than-life characters, monsters even?” I began. “How did you come to Maxwell?”
“It was completely fortuitous. I had written four novels and A Very English Scandal and was casting around. There are quite a few books on Maxwell, but I thought there was more to say. He seemed to be a more complex, nuanced character than his usual portrayal. A lot of friends had worked for him – some still speak quite fondly of him – and there were still so many stories. I was at school with his son Ian, and we are still friends. He didn’t like the book, of course.”
The book points to an open verdict on how it all ended with Maxwell falling off his super motor yacht, Lady Ghislaine, off the Canaries in November 1991.
“Of course, he could be an ogre, but he could be a very engaging ogre,” Preston says. “He was more nuanced and complex than the public image of a pantomime villain suggested. It was an awful morality tale – because nothing was ever enough for him. But no one had journeyed so far from his roots.”
Despite besting him at every turn, Rupert Murdoch – Maxwell’s great rival in newspaper tycoonery – “realised that their paths were completely intertwined.”
Preston says that the protagonists of his two biographical books, Thorpe and Maxwell, had quite a lot in common in their vanity and narcissism. “They were narcissists, and I would say that if I had to choose between dinner with Thorpe or with Maxwell, I would choose Maxwell every time. There was something rather unpleasant about Thorpe,” he says.
Jeremy Thorpe eventually stood trial in 1979 for attempting to arrange the murder of his former lover, a male model called Norman Scott, who is still with us. With him was another former Liberal MP, Peter Bessell. Thorpe was acquitted on all charges at the Old Bailey, seen by critics at the time as the British establishment rallying around. “The intriguing figure is Bessell, who was Thorpe’s bagman – then was Judas, and turned against him. Bessell died – I never met him – but he left a diary which was printed for private circulation. I have seen it. It is dynamite,” Preston says.
“But I don’t want to sound sanctimonious and I didn’t want to judge Thorpe, Bessell, Scott – or even Maxwell. I just feel it’s up to readers to do that. I was much more interested in what really happened to people when they were pulled out of shape by circumstance.”
Is there a legacy from Thorpe, and Maxwell? “In some ways, the outcome of the Thorpe trial was quite positive. It brought the subject of homosexuality out into the open – it was still being swept under innumerable carpets at that time. It had been decriminalised, but the stigma against homosexuality was still enormous. I don’t think it went away magically after the Thorpe trial, but it did change people’s attitudes quite a lot.”
“The big difference with Maxwell, with the way we live now and the way we lived then,” he says, “is the exercise of power. Then you had Maxwell and Murdoch as the great power brokers in British political life.” The new proprietors – even of Silicon Valley – do not have the same presence and charisma.
Is this part of the beginning of the end for newspapers and print journalism? “No one knows where it will end,” John replies, thinking of the uncertain fate of the Evening Standard, for which we both worked. “I still believe in newspapers and that they should have a future and bounce back, but no one knows how to monetise the papers now.
“If it doesn’t happen and they don’t survive, it will be like an 18th-century notion of pamphleteering where anybody can say anything and get away with it. And there’s no objective record of truth at all – or virtually none. Then you’re in very dangerous territory.”
The story of the Dig arrived well before the Thorpe and Maxwell books. John Preston said he knew that Peggy Piggott, also known as Margaret Guido, was his aunt and had ended her days living happily with TE Lawrence’s youngest brother, Arnold, then both in their eighties. Mentioning this in a documentary about TE Lawrence, united him with a remote second cousin. “I was suspicious at first, but we met – and she was an absolute delight. My aunt had died by then – she and my father didn’t get on – but as I was leaving my cousin’s, she too being in her eighties, she remarked, “I suppose you know that your aunt discovered the first gold at Sutton Hoo?””
Margaret or Peggy, played by Lily James in the Netflix film, divorced her husband Stuart in the nineteen fifties, though they had been married for years. The grounds were of non-consummation. “It was rather blatant, public and vindictive – though she and Stuart got on well later. But my father thought it reflected badly on the Preston family name.” The film and book have been criticised for a fictitious episode in which the young Peggy Piggott, has a rumble in the outhouses with an invented cousin of the Sutton Hoo owner, Edith Pretty.
“Of course, there’s a lot written about the 1939 Sutton Hoo finds – but the more I got into it, the more fascinating it became. It was plainly a story about class, and a poignant story about discovering the remains of a lost civilisation at a time when people thought their own civilisation was about to be blown to smithereens.”
The book and the film pivot on two characters, both outsiders; Basil Brown, the autodidact excavator and archaeologist who began the initial dig, and Edith Pretty the owner of the Sutton Hoo estate, who hired him. Brown is played brilliantly by Ralph Fiennes, who speaks in a rich, almost vowel-free, Suffolk dialect. Pretty, an altogether more elusive figure, was a young widow who had given birth to a son, Robert – an important character in the film and book – though in her mid-forties. Pretty is played with admirable restraint by Carey Mulligan, who is actually twenty years younger than Edith was at the time of the dig.
“Yes, Edith is elusive – and what you don’t get in the film, but more in the book, is that she was a keen spiritualist. Actually, Basil Brown was a spiritualist as well. There was an awful lot of that in the twenties and thirties.
“I wrote the book with three narrators, Basil Brown, Edith and my aunt, Peggy. I wanted to show all three were in a hair’s breadth of getting what they wanted most. In the case of Edith, it was to be reunited with her dead husband. For Basil Brown, it was recognition by his peers; and for Peggy, it was just love. None of them gets it.”
“You are right, there is something quite elusive about Edith. I found this fascinating and a challenge. I liked the idea of trying to write in a woman’s voice. There are loads and loads of women authors who write very well as men, but not that many male authors who write well as women. You come across these awful sentences, “and then I adjusted my bra strap”. It was interesting to try it and not fall into that particular trap,” he says.
“You get the sense of elusiveness when you walk around the house, the real house at Sutton Hoo (which sits above the river Deben in Suffolk). It’s an oddly lonely place, and you can imagine Mrs Pretty and her son Robert rattling around in this very large house. One of the things I really like about the film is the way it pushes the relationship between Basil and Robert, who is unbelievably well played by the young Archie Barnes. Edith would have shied away from anything that smacked of self-aggrandisement – the absolute opposite of Maxwell and Thorpe. In a funny sort of way Basil did want recognition from his peers, but he didn’t want anything else. He was as modest and averse to the limelight as Mrs Pretty. I think he would be rather appalled at his fame if he came back now.”
Just before shooting the film, which had been much delayed, John Preston had lunch with the two principals, Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan, who had taken the part with only weeks to go. First Kate Blanchett and then Nicole Kidman had originally been pencilled to play Edith Pretty.
“Ralph turned up speaking in this broad Suffolk accent – I couldn’t work out what the hell was going on. He stayed in character throughout the shoot,” Preston says. “I was struck that Carry Mulligan absolutely got Edith Pretty from the start. I think like Edith she is a private person, so absolutely related to Edith’s privacy – the sense that everything is falling apart inside, so she tries to keep this veneer of cheerfulness and equanimity. Which she does absolutely brilliantly. It was plain from this lunch that she had always wanted to work with Ralph. It was a fortuitous meeting of minds. Ralph knows Suffolk well and feels a great connection. By the time we met, he had read Basil’s book on astronomy, and he had bicycled all along the byways of the Deben estuary and had been to Basil’s village. He had a brilliant voice coach and they really managed to avoid yokel-speech.”
Rather oddly, there is almost no sighting of the treasure itself in the film. It was, and is, a stupendous find from a 90 feet burial ship of a Saxon or Angle monarch – the richness of the sword and weapons, a Scandinavian helmet, and gold inlaid cloisonné enamel body ornaments, buckles and clasps, is unrivalled among contemporary finds. However, the treasure story was, and still is, a slow burn. It took nearly 30 years for the helmet to be assembled, and the interpretation of the range of the goods including Christian design silver bowls and two baptismal spoons from Byzantium.
Was Basil Brown a victim of academic as well as social snobbery, I wondered? In the film, Ken Stott gives a brilliant performance as the booming Cambridge academic Charles Phillips, who takes over the dig and sees to the treasures being whisked off to the British Museum – only to spend the war in the disused deep underground tunnel outside Aldwych station. “Yes, Phillips was pretty high handed to Basil and brusquer than he might have been in more relaxed circumstances. But there was tremendous time pressure.” They all knew that war was upon them.
“Phillips had his redeeming features, as well. He used to send Basil Brown supplies of his favourite pipe tobacco for years afterwards. And the two of them, perhaps surprisingly, did stay in touch.”
John Preston’s Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell is published by Penguin this week. His novel The Dig is still available from Penguin, and A Very English Scandal is still in print.
The Dig directed by Simon Stone, starring Ralph Fiennes, Carey Mulligan and Ken Stott is available to stream now on Netflix.