ABSTRACT
John Mercier McMullen was born in Ireland in 1820. He was a junior partner in a mercantile firm in Dublin that failed. Consequently, much to the dismay of his family, he joined the 13th Light Infantry as a private in the spring of 1843, in order to be able to afford to travel. His regiment was sent to India, and he with it, where he rose to the rank of staff sergeant. McMullen purchased his release from the army in October 1845, and returned to Ireland. His book, Camp and Barrack-room, appeared the next year and was well received in the press. The book is more than a description of McMullen’s time in the army; it also offers sharp criticisms of the “vicious condition of our troops” as one paper put it, as well as sharp denunciations of the army’s neglect of the physical and moral well-being of soldiers and of the frauds perpetrated against the men in the provision of shoddy equipment. During this time McMullen married, and in 1848 he emigrated to Canada. He lived in Brockville, Ontario, and after the death of his wife, remarried, fathering in all, twelve children. In 1855, McMullen published one of the first histories of the colony, titled History of Canada. McMullen died in Brockville in 1907.
