John Squire (1780–1812) was a British Army officer who rose to become a brevet lieutenant-colonel in the Corps of Royal Engineers during the Napoleonic Wars.
Being a writer and diarist who kept journals of his travels, these and his supporting role in some of military campaigning's great moments – Egypt in 1801, South America in 1807, Sweden in 1808, the Netherlands at various stages and Spain in 1811–12 – have made Squire a moderately well-known figure among scholars who study the era.
On leaving Athens for Malta in the brig Mentor, laden with some of the Elgin marbles, Squire's party was wrecked on the island of Cythera on 17 September 1802, and narrowly escaped death.
In April he was sent by Lord Castlereagh in a frigate on a secret mission to the Baltic Sea, to report on the island of Bornholm as a defensive naval station.
He sailed, as commanding Royal Engineer to Sir John Hope's division, with the army under the Earl of Chatham to the River Scheldt.
[2] In March 1812, Squire was one of the two directors of the attack at the third siege of Badajoz under Sir Richard Fletcher, John Fox Burgoyne being the other; they took 24 hours' duty in the trenches turn about.
But the siege of Badajoz had exhausted him; and, having repaired the bridge of Mérida, he was hastening to join Hill when he fell from his horse and was carried to Trujillo.
[2] One of his contemporaries, Lt. Col. John Fox Burgoyne CRE wrote in his diary on 23 May 1812 "We also learn that poor Squire died suddenly of a paralytic stroke at Truxillo; thus we have lost, in my mind, the best officer of the Corps, and a man who, I believe, never had an enemy"[3] During his stay in Egypt, with William Martin Leake and William Richard Hamilton, Squire deciphered the Greek inscription on Pompey's pillar at Alexandria.
On arriving back in England, early in 1803, Squire and Leake presented to the Society of Antiquaries of London a memoir on the Pillar.
It was read on 3 February by Matthew Raine of Charterhouse, who had suggested characters to replace the eighteen which were entirely obliterated (Archæologia, vol.
[5] In 1810, Squire published anonymously A Short Narrative of the late Campaign of the British Army, &c., with Preliminary Remarks on the Topography and Channels of Zeeland (2nd ed.
Previously unknown of, the journal covers the period from 12 May to 22 July 1811 and records technical aspects of the English-Portuguese army's first and second sieges of Badajoz before its fall a year later.