Richard Dawson, Lieutenant-Governor and Chancellor of the Isle of Man through the 1770s and 1780s.

He ran the Island in fact. Edward Smith was Governor in Chief but lived in London and came over only occasionally, so the resident authority was Dawson's, and the correspondence of the period is addressed to him. He was still Lieutenant-Governor in October 1791, when the Duke of Atholl wrote to the Commissioners of Inquiry from Douglas.

The record shows him in the ordinary business of the office. In 1780 the report on a Bill to amend the Act touching the Duke of Atholl's courts and powers was addressed to him as His Majesty's Lieutenant-Governor and signed by John Quayle, Thomas Moore and Wadsworth Busk on 27 April, with further remarks the following February. He sat as Chancellor in the Exchequer Court, and the information laid by the Attorney-General Sir Wadsworth Busk against Deemster Peter John Heywood in June 1786 was heard before him. When a ship was wrecked and the port officers judged that they could not keep the goods from being plundered, it was to Dawson that they went, asking for a corporal's guard of Fencibles. When the Keys wanted to counter what they called a factious petition, their memorial of loyalty was addressed to him. The Lords of the Treasury directed him to report on the old harbour-debt memorials, and the memorialists afterwards said that he had done it in a fair and impartial way.

He got on with the men he dealt with. When George Moore resigned the Speakership of the Keys, Dawson wrote to him with warm expressions of friendship and esteem, telling him that his resignation went to his heart, and that it gave him inconceivable sorrow to lose him as Speaker.

He complained, like everyone else, about the money. The arrears in paying the civil officers were a constant refrain after the Revestment, and his own salary was among those unpaid.