Edith Pretty

Edith May Pretty (1883–1942) was an English landowner on whose land the Sutton Hoo ship burial was discovered. She paid for the help of a local archaeologist to find out what, if anything, lay underneath the mounds on her property.

Pretty was born at Elland, Yorkshire on 1 August 1883, the younger of two daughters of Robert and Elizabeth Dempster. The Dempsters were very wealthy industrialists who amassed their fortune from the manufacture of equipment related to the gas industry. Robert Dempster's father, Robert Dempster, had founded the company at Elland in Yorkshire in 1855, and this became R & J Dempster and Sons in 1883, which Robert founded with his brother, John. On their deaths the Dempster brothers between them left over a million pounds, an enormous sum in the first quarter of the 20th century. Edith's family embarked on many foreign tours, including one 'round the world', and Robert Dempster took a lease on the huge country house of Vale Royal Abbey, near Whitegate, Cheshire, the family seat of Lord Delamere, from 1907-1925. Here Edith grew up in palatial style with an indoor staff of twenty-five and eighteen gardeners.

Edith was educated at Roedean School, finishing her education with a six-month spell in Paris. After school, she became involved in good works, including the Red Cross, with whom she served during the First World War in the United Kingdom and France.

In 1926, Edith married her long-term suitor, Frank Pretty, an Ipswich man who had been a Major in the Territorial Army's Suffolk Regiment during the First World War and who continued to serve the Suffolk Regiment after the war, also working in the family business of clothing manufacture. After their marriage, the Prettys looked for a home near Ipswich. Edith gave up the lease on Vale Royal and bought Sutton Hoo House near Woodbridge, Suffolk. Also in 1926 she donated the Dempster Challenge Cup to Winsford UDC, Cheshire, which has been awarded annually to a plot-holder on the town's allotments.

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