Sergeant William Lawrence - Dorset Soldier

William Lawrence was a Dorset soldier who fought the French from 1808-1813 and again at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815. Yet, despite this, he married a French girl, Clotilde Clairet from St Germain-en-Laye some ten miles from the centre of Paris. Returning to civilian life at the age of 28, he ran an inn with his wife at Studland.

Born in 1791, and from a large impoverished Briantspuddle family, he was compelled to seek out his own livelihood at an early age. Initially, he was paid just two old pennies (1p) per day to frighten birds off corn fields and then he worked as a ploughboy earning just six old pence per day. At the age of 14, he was apprenticed to Henry Bush, a Studland builder. Running away from a harsh master, William Lawrence joined the British Army.

William Lawrence served in the war in South America in 1805 and through the whole of the Spanish Peninsular War. He was awarded a silver medal with no less than ten clasps representing the battles in which he fought and survived. These were Roleia, Vimiera, Talavera, Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz, Vittoria, Pyrenees, Nivelles, Orthes & Toulouse. He was severely wounded at Badajoz but later recovered. It was while injured at Badajoz, that he met the British Commander-in-Chief, the Duke of Wellington. 

‘After proceeding for some way, I fell in with Lord Wellington and his staff who, seeing me wounded, asked me which regiment I belonged to. One of his staff then bound up my leg with a silk handkerchief and told me to go behind a hill where I would find a doctor to dress my wounds.’

Among his other experiences was being sentenced to 400 lashes for being absent without leave and receiving 175 of them.

Sergeant William Lawrence died on the 11^th November 1869 and is buried in Studland Churchyard. His wife, Clotilde had died 16 years earlier.

He was illiterate yet before he died he was able to dictate his memoirs and in 1886 they were published. They represent one of the most important sources of information on the life in the ordinary ranks of the British Army during Napoleonic times. They sit alongside the memoirs of another ordinary Dorset soldier of the time, Benjamin Harris from Stalbridge. Unfortunately, a little less is known about another fellow Napoleonic Dorset soldier, Henry Maidment from Pimperne.

(Source: Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence, a Hero of the Peninsular & Waterloo Campaigns – edited by Eileen Hathaway.)

(Image: Gravestone of Sergeant William Lawrence.)