Lieutenant-General Sir Archibald Edward Nye, GCSI, GCMG, GCIE, KCB, KBE, MC (23 April 1895 – 13 November 1967) was a senior British Army officer who served in both world wars.
After the Second World War he served as Governor of Madras, after which Nehru asked for him to stay on as High Commissioner in India.
His father was a regimental sergeant major in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, British Army.
[2][3][4] At the outset of the Great War, Nye went to France with the British Expeditionary Force in 1914, serving for just over a year as a non-commissioned officer in the Corps of Army Schoolmasters attached to the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry.
He made a reconnaissance, under heavy shell and machine-gun fire, of the forward positions along the whole battalion front adjusting a portion on his own initiative to complete the line.
[32] These rebellions were aided and abetted by the Communists who established miniature governments along the northern frontiers of the Presidency, thereby demanding military action.
[32] Nye attributed their success to the "zeal and energy of young men who conducted their own newspapers and who preached the creed of expropriating landlords and distributing their land to needy and hungry labourers".
[34] In November 1947, when Sir Frederick Gentle, the Chief Justice of the Madras High Court, resigned over the Government of India order that the Chief Minister of the particular state should be consulted along with the Union Home Minister with regard to the selection of High Court judges, Nye expressed support for Gentle against political interference in appointment of judges.
On 15 August 1947, Nye was sworn in by Chief Justice Gentle as the first governor of Madras in the Dominion of India while O.P.
[36] Following his term in Madras, Nye was appointed the UK's High Commissioner to India, in which post he served from 1948 to 1952.
[2] In 1939, Nye married divorcee Una Sheila Colleen, daughter of Sir Harry Hugh Sidney Knox.