British redcoat’s lost memoir reveals harsh realities of life as a disabled veteran

(Press-News.org) Archival discoveries including a 19th-century autobiography transform our understanding of Shadrack Byfield, an English veteran of the War of 1812 who buried his own amputated arm and designed a custom prosthesis. A recurrent character in TV documentaries, books and museum exhibits in the USA and Canada, Byfield has been celebrated as an uncomplaining British soldier. But the new evidence reveals Byfield’s tenacious pursuit of veterans’ benefits and his struggles with pain, poverty, and the police.

 

‘They came and pushed me about, and spat in my face, hoping that I should strike them, in order if possible, to take away my pension … They reported that I intended to shoot two of the deacons.’

 

This is how Shadrack Byfield, a 63-year-old disabled war veteran, describes being treated in his local chapel in 1850s Gloucestershire. Implicated in a bitter feud among village Baptists, Byfield would later be accused of slashing the face of an adversary with the iron crook of his wooden arm.

In other parts of his rediscovered autobiography, Shadrack lamented the continued impact of his wartime injuries decades later: ‘It now pleased the Lord to afflict me with a violent rheumatic pain in my right shoulder, from which the [musket] ball was cut out. I was in this condition for nearly three years: - oftentimes I was not able to lift my hand to my head, nor a tea-cup to my mouth’.

Frustrated at an employer's refusal to pay him full wages while working as a one-handed gardener, Byfield insisted: ‘I never saw the man that would compete with me with one arm’.

While a Cambridge University historian, Dr Eamonn O’Keeffe found what he believes to be the only surviving copy of Shadrack Byfield’s History and Conversion of a British Soldier. The autobiography was published in London, England, in 1851, but the only copy known to survive turned up 3,700 miles away in the Western Reserve Historical Society’s library in Cleveland, Ohio. O’Keeffe publishes his findings today in the Journal of British Studies (Cambridge University Press).

“Byfield’s account of his wartime experiences is quite well known but the man behind the memoir has remained elusive. Uncovering these new details about his life provides remarkable insight into the suffering and resilience of Britain’s homecoming soldiers,” says Dr O’Keeffe.

The War of 1812 was fought between the United States and United Kingdom in North America as the Napoleonic Wars wound down in Europe. The conflict is seen as an important nation-making episode for the US and Canada, and historians view Shadrack Byfield’s first memoir as an important source, offering the rare perspective of an ordinary British soldier fighting around the Great Lakes. Byfield’s story has featured prominently in history books and documentaries, including PBS’s ‘The War of 1812’ (2011). Byfield was the protagonist in a 1985 children’s novel, Redcoat, by Gregory Sass and has a dedicated display at the Fort Erie Visitor Centre in Ontario.

It had been assumed that Byfield died around 1850 but O’Keeffe’s discovery of the veteran’s 1851 memoir, along with additional evidence from newspapers and archives, adds new chapters to his astonishing life story.

Shadrack Byfield was born near the Wiltshire textile town of Bradford-on-Avon in 1789 and joined the Wiltshire militia in 1807, aged eighteen. According to Byfield, his mother was so distraught at his decision that she fell into a speechless fit and died within days.

Shadrack soon volunteered for the regular army and sailed to Canada in 1809 to join the 41st Regiment of Foot. When the United States declared war in June 1812, he was serving at Fort George along the Niagara River. He took part in several important battles and survived a wound to the neck, but a musket ball shattered his left forearm in 1814. Byfield’s arm was sawn off below the elbow without anaesthetic and flung onto a ‘dung-heap’ by a medical orderly. Byfield angrily retrieved his lost limb and insisted on giving it a proper burial, nailing together a few boards as a makeshift coffin.

A year later, he reported to the Royal Hospital Chelsea in London for consideration for an army pension but was ‘very much dissatisfied’ with his award of nine pence a day.

 

Two very different memoirs  

Byfield returned to Bradford-on-Avon and initially eked out a living as a farm labourer, being prevented by his disability from returning to his trade as a weaver. One night, however, as Byfield later wrote, the veteran dreamt of an “instrument" which would allow him to operate a loom despite his missing forearm. He commissioned a local blacksmith to realize the design. The veteran also supplemented his income by working as a ‘chairman’ in nearby Bath, ferrying infirm patients through the city’s steep streets in wheelchairs or sedan chairs, notwithstanding his own injuries.

Byfield launched a determined campaign to obtain a higher pension, eventually succeeding with the help of Sir William Napier, a retired army officer and celebrated military historian, in 1836. The veteran published his first book-length memoir, A Narrative of a Light Company Soldier's Service, in 1840. While Byfield is usually assumed to have been illiterate, O’Keeffe discovered a draft of this autobiography in Napier’s papers in the author’s own handwriting.

“In the 1840 narrative, Byfield sought to impress wealthy patrons by presenting himself as a dutiful soldier and deserving veteran,” O’Keeffe says. “The 1851 memoir, by contrast, was a spiritual redemption story, with Byfield tracing his progress from rebellious sinner to devout and repentant Christian.”

Looking back on his wartime service, Byfield even admitted to quitting camp without leave and joining fellow soldiers on a plundering expedition. “Such unflattering incidents are conspicuously absent from Byfield’s earlier accounts of his military service,” O’Keeffe says. “In the 1851 memoir, the veteran also dwells on periods of indebtedness, illness and unemployment after returning to England, whereas in his earlier memoir he described maintaining his family ‘comfortably’ with his weaving prosthesis for nearly twenty years.”

Byfield recalled that when his employer ordered him to operate his loom single-handed: ‘I endeavoured … as well as I could, but I found my arm very much fatigued. I scarcely knew what to do. I went into my bed-chamber, knelt before the Lord, and begged of Him to give me strength to labour … To the honour and praise of His dear name, that arm has been enabled to perform the work as well as the other.’

 

Riot in the chapel  

Byfield later moved to Hawkesbury Upton in Gloucestershire and became embroiled in a bitter contest for control of the village’s Particular Baptist chapel. The feud involved lawsuits, brawling, arson and vandalism, culminating in an unholy riot in the chapel in June 1853. O’Keeffe investigated the incident by studying newspaper reports and legal records alongside Byfield’s 1851 memoir. 

Byfield was accused of beginning the fracas “by pushing about” and slashing an adversary’s eye and face with the iron hook of his prosthetic arm. The next day the veteran was served a summons by Sidney Short, a police sergeant who had unsuccessfully prosecuted him for public drunkenness two years earlier. Short claimed that Byfield, the chapel’s minister, and another man responded with ‘torrents of abuse’, spitting on him and chasing him into the street, with Byfield accusing the policeman of false testimony in the earlier drunkenness case.

Byfield was never convicted of assault but his faction ultimately lost control over the chapel. Worse still, eighteen parishioners successfully petitioned the Duke of Beaufort to dismiss Byfield as keeper of a 100-foot monument to Lord Edward Somerset, a Waterloo general. Byfield had secured the position – which granted him residence in a cottage – after selling his military memoir to the duke while working as a tollkeeper.

In 1856, Byfield returned to Bradford-on-Avon and married his second wife. He continued to receive an annual allowance from Sir William Napier, and travelled to London for his patron’s funeral in 1860. Byfield applied for further pension increases without success and by 1867 was selling a final memoir entitled The Forlorn Hope, no copies of which appear to survive. The veteran died in January 1874, aged 84.

“Byfield’s 1851 memoir emphasises the challenges of post-war reintegration, especially for veterans with disabilities, in the decades after the Napoleonic Wars. It also demonstrates ex-soldiers' determination to secure the support they felt they were owed,” O’Keeffe says. “My work also busts the myth that Byfield always did what he was told and never complained. He was very strong-willed but also suffered a great deal of hardship and psychological strain.”

 

Eamonn O’Keeffe is the Ewart A. Pratt Fellow in Military, Naval, and Maritime History at Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada. From 2022 – September 2025, he was National Army Museum Fellow at Queens' College, Cambridge.

 

References  

E. O’Keeffe, ‘From Amputee to Author: Shadrack Byfield and the Making of a War of 1812 Veteran’, Journal of British Studies (2026). DOI: 10.1017/jbr.2025.10169

 

O’Keeffe’s full transcription of Shadrach Byfield’s History and Conversion of a British Soldier (London, 1851) can be accessed here: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/61f15583-612e-4ea5-aa89-2a57d106877c

 

Media contacts

 

Tom Almeroth-Williams, Communications Manager (Research), University of Cambridge: tom.williams@admin.cam.ac.uk / tel: +44 (0) 7540 139 444

 

Eamonn O’Keeffe: eamonnok@mun.ca

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