Benjamin Randell Harris (1781 - 1858)

Benjamin Randell Harris was a British infantryman who served in the British army during the Napoleonic Wars. He is most widely remembered today as the author of a memoir of his time in the army entitled The Recollections of Rifleman Harris, which affords us a rare insight into the world of the enlisted man in Wellington's army. Most memoirs published after the war came from serving officers, and the experiences of ordinary soldiers were overlooked due to the illiteracy of so many people at that time. Harris himself was illiterate, his recollections were recorded for him at some stage in the middle of the 1830s by an officer who knew him, Captain Henry Curling. Curling then kept the manuscript until 1848, when he succeeded in getting it published.