Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Merriman, Nathaniel James
MERRIMAN, NATHANIEL JAMES (1810–1882), bishop of Grahamstown, South Africa, born in 1810, was third son of Thomas Merriman of Marlborough, Wiltshire. His family was of Lancashire origin. Educated at Winchester and Brasenose College, Oxford, where he was Hulme exhibitioner, and graduating B.A. with second-class honours in literis humanioribus in 1831 (M.A. 1834), he was ordained deacon in 1832, priest 1833, and became perpetual curate of Over Darwen in Lancashire. In 1841 he moved to the vicarage of Street in Somerset.
In 1848 Merriman accepted an offer of the archdeaconry of Grahamstown made him by Robert Gray [q. v.], bishop of Capetown. At the end of the year he was in Africa; at the beginning of 1849 he had started on his first visitation, often walking long distances on foot. ‘He is a very remarkable man,’ wrote the bishop in this year; ‘his self-denial and energy both of body and mind are greater than in any other man I have ever met with … the record of his life for the past year would astonish any one.’ In 1850 he offered to undertake a mission to the Kaffirs, in whom he took great interest; and the success of mission work among the natives was largely due to his exertions.
In 1863, at the trial of Bishop Colenso [q. v.], Merriman, as proxy for his clergy, was one of the accusers. When the see of Grahamstown was established out of Capetown (1853), he had declined the bishopric, but on 5 Dec. 1871 he was consecrated the third bishop of the diocese. He was also dean of Capetown. In 1880 he excommunicated Dean Williams of Grahamstown on account of views in sympathy with those of Colenso; yet in the same year he highly praised the latter for his championship of the Zulus (Letter to Aborigines' Protection Society).
His death, on 16 Aug. 1882, was the result of a carriage accident. He married in 1836 Miss Potter, and left a large family; three of his sons were in the service of the Cape government at the time of his death.
He was the author of some lectures on Shakespeare (Grahamstown, 1857–8) and of ‘The Kafir, the Hottentot, and the Frontier Farmer,’ London, 1854, and ‘The Bishop's Ride through Independent Kaffraria to Natal and back,’ 1872.
[Cape Argus, 18 Aug. 1882; Crockford's Clerical Directory; Gray's Life of Bishop Gray, passim; Times, 18 Aug. 1882.]