the School of Signals at Catterick, where he authored a booklet on wireless communication, attempted to reorganise the Northern Command's signals system, and travelled around Yorkshire by motorcycle, laying cable. From 1943 to 1945, he led parties from the School of Signals to archaeological and other sites across Northern England, including Richmond Castle, Jervaulx Abbey, Easby Parish Church, Stanwick St John, Middleham Castle, and the Georgian Theatre Royal, taking notes and commentaries when there. British Museum again Bruce-Mitford spent the war awaiting his return to the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities. As early as 1940, T. D. Kendrick—then Keeper of the department, and later director of the museum—wrote to Bruce-Mitford at his army camp, telling him he would be responsible for the collection of Anglo-Saxon antiquities, the Germanic collections of Europe, and the Late Celtic collections of the British Isles. The letter closed with a warning: "You will also be responsible for Sutton Hoo. Brace yourself for this task." Bruce-Mitford's responsibility for the Anglo-Saxon Sutton Hoo ship-burial, wrote the Oxford scholar Martin Biddle, would become "the defining moment of Rupert's life, his greatest challenge, the source of almost insuperable difficulties, and his greatest achievement". Discharged from the army as an honorary captain in early 1946, Bruce-Mitford immediately returned to the museum. Bruce-Mitford returned to a museum that had suffered during the war. Understaffed and with inadequate facilities, the museum had much of its collection still in storage. The Sutton Hoo finds, excavated in 1939 and nearly immediately taken to the safety of the tunnel connecting the Aldwych and Holborn tube stations, had been returned to the museum only a year or two before. Herbert Maryon, a Technical Attaché recruited for the task, set to work restoring what Bruce-Mitford later termed "the real headaches – notably the crushed shield, helmet and drinking horns". "When I began work", he continued, "I sat with Maryon while he took me through the material and with infectious enthusiasm, demonstrated what he was doing". "There followed great days for Sutton Hoo when new, often dramatic, discoveries were being made in the workshops all the time. Built from fragments, astonishing artefacts – helmet, shield, drinking horns, and so on – were recreated." Early in 1946, Kendrick and Bruce-Mitford placed restored artefacts from Sutton Hoo on display in the museum's King Edward VII Gallery. In January 1947, Bruce-Mitford was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries