Rosemary Sutcliff’s first book, the unpublished Wild Sunrise, was about the Roman invasion of Britain told from the British viewpoint. The hero was Cradoc, a name Rosemary Sutcliff used later  in The Eagle of the Ninth and in Sun Horse, Moon Horse.

Her father (George Ernest Sutcliff, who I knew as Uncle George) had a naval hero called Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, who went down with his flagship at the battle of Coronel in 1914.

Wild Sunrise disappeared, which “was as well”, Rosemary said in her memoir Blue Remembered Hills (1983), ‘because so much of me was in it, naked and defenceless’

• Source: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Article on Rosemary Sutcliff by Gilian Avery