A few year ago, a film, The Eagle of the Ninth, about a lost Roman legion in what is now Scotland, was released. The book upon which the film was based, was written by an author who spent a significant part of her life in the Bideford area.
Rosemary Sutcliff was born in West Clandon, Surrey, in 1920. In her autobiography, Blue Remembered Hills, which deals with her earlier years, she apologises for being born in Surrey, and grew up with the feeling ‘that the West Country is the only right and proper place to have made one’s beginnings.’
Her father was indeed a naval officer from the West Country, working at the Admiralty when she was born. Unfortunately, at the age of three, she was diagnosed with Still’s disease, a rare form of juvenile arthritis, so her father was posted to Malta, in the hope that this would have a positive effect on the child’s health. This lasted for three years, after which the family returned to England, where she lived a peripatetic existence, following her father’s various career moves, eventually ending up in Netherne, an isolated house about two miles from Yarnscombe, the nearest village, and six miles from Bideford, the nearest large town.
She seems to have had a happy childhood, in spite of her disability, though she had to make numerous visits to the Princess Elizabeth Orthopaedic Hospital in Exeter, and spent much of her life in a wheelchair. She didn’t learn to read until she was nine, but said that this was deliberate on her part, because her mother would read to her stories which would have been well in advance of her own abilities at the time, so reading herself would have been a backward step, or so she thought. She did complain of occasional loneliness. It never seems to have occurred to her parents that she might like company of her own age.
She finished her general education at 14, but then went to Bideford Art School, where she developed a talent as a miniaturist, and, at a later date, had some of her miniatures shown at the Royal Academy. After leaving college, she was busy painting miniatures for a living, especially of young men who had died in the war, but found the medium somewhat limiting, needing, as it were, a broader canvass for her talents, and started writing for pleasure. Eventually, she decided to submit her work for publication, and, after the war, two of her manuscripts were accepted by the Oxford University Press.
After twenty years in North Devon, she moved on to live in Walberton, near Arundel, in Sussex, where she became a prolific writer of children’s stories, and other works. She specialised in writing historical novels, and won many literary awards, including the Carnegie Medal (1959), the Horn Book Award (1972), and the Phoenix Award twice, in 1985, and posthumously in 2010. She was awarded an OBE for services to children’s literature in 1975, and promoted to a CBE in 1992, shortly before she died, later that year, aged 71. She was still writing on the day she died.
Her work was of a high literary standard. The Eagle of the Ninth series remains her best-known literary achievement.
Her life was not without romance, but she died unmarried and without children.
She appeared on Desert Island Discs with Roy Plomley in October 1983, and you can hear the recording from the archives on BBC iPlayer.
Chris Trigger
Chris Trigger's Blog 