Matthew Nathan (3 January 1862 – 18 April 1939) was a British colonial administrator who served as Under-Secretary for Ireland from 1914 to 1916, succeeding James Brown Dougherty and preceding Robert Chalmers.
Biography[]
Matthew Nathan was born in Paddington, London, England in 1862 to a Sephardic Jewish family, and he attended the Royal Military Academy, Woodwich during the 1880s before serving in an 1884-85 military expedition to Sudan and an 1889-94 expedition to Lushai, India. He became a British Army major in 1898, and he went on to serve as Governor of Sierra Leone from 1899 to 1900, Governor of the Gold Coast from 1900 to 1904, Governor of Hong Kong from 1904 to 1907, and Governor of Natal from 1907 to 1909. That year, he was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel and returned to Britain. In 1914, he was appointed Under-Secretary for Ireland, effectively heading the administration in Ireland on behalf of Secretary Augustine Birrell, who spent much of his time in London as a cabinet secretary. He liaised with the Irish Parliamentary Party to prepare them for self-government, suppressed seditious newspapers, transferred treacherous civil service members to England, and ordered a crackdown on the IRB after it was discovered that the German Empire had sent them a shipment of weapons in 1916. On Easter Monday, as Nathan awaited Birrell's response to the proposed crackdown, the Easter Rising broke out, and he remained in Dublin Castle until the IRB rebels were crushed. On 30 April, following the uprising's defeat, Birrell offered his resignation, and he convinced Nathan to do the same on 3 May. He then served as secretary to the Ministry of Pensions from 1916 to 1919 and as Governor of Queensland from 1920 to 1925, and he died in West Coker, Somerset in 1939 at the age of 77.