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

[erronis]

https://phys.org/news/2026-01-british-redcoat-lost-memoir-reveals.html
Tom Almeroth-Williams, University of Cambridge

Archival discoveries including a 19th-century autobiography transform our understanding of Shadrach 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 U.S. 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 Shadrach 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.

. . .

While a Cambridge University historian, Dr. Eamonn O'Keeffe found what he believes to be the only surviving copy of Shadrach 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.

. . .