Arthur Samuels
British politician

Arthur Warren Samuels (19 May 1852 – 11 May 1925) was an Irish Unionist Member of Parliament (MP) in the United Kingdom parliament and subsequently a judge. The Irish Unionists were the Irish wing of the Conservative Party.
Biography
He was born in Kingstown, County Dublin, second son of Arthur Samuels, a solicitor, and Katherine Daly, daughter of Owen Daly of Mornington, County Meath. He was educated at the Royal School Dungannon, County Tyrone. He attended Trinity College Dublin, before being called to the Irish Bar in 1877. He became a Queen's Counsel (QC) in 1894 and was called to the English bar in 1896.
Samuels was a member of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, serving as president between 1906 and 1908. He was particularly interested in Irish Finance, and opposed Home Rule for Ireland on financial grounds.
Samuels was Solicitor-General for Ireland from 1917 to 1918, and Attorney-General for Ireland from 1918 to 1919. He was also made a member of the Privy Council of Ireland in 1918.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Arthur Samuels” is british politician. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Arthur, Samuels and British, not as a finished interpretation.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4800616. VIAF identifies the subject as 210183676. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1852, 1925, 1877 and 1894.
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This entry incorporates text from “Arthur Samuels” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.