Ernest Craig

Sir Ernest Craig, 1st Baronet (1859 – 9 April 1933)[1] was a British Conservative Party politician.

He was elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for the Crewe division of Cheshire at a by-election in July 1912 after the death of his Liberal predecessor, Walter McLaren.[2] Craig did not stand for re-election in 1918, when the seat was won a Coalition Liberal, and his next candidacy was at the 1924 general election, when he won the seat in a straight contest with the sitting Labour Party MP Edward Hemmerde. He stepped down from the House of Commons at the 1929 general election.[3]

In the King's Birthday Honours 1927, he was made a baronet on 1 July 1927, of Alsager in Cheshire.[4][5]

Ernest Craig, before becoming a politician, along with many other Englishmen went west to the USA and to New Mexico in particular. He owned the Last Chance Mine in Mogollon, Grant County, New Mexico, and a picture survives of him in 1908 seated in a motor vehicle at Hudson Springs (now Faywood Hot Springs). He introduced innovative methods of extracting gold. He also established a horse and buggy transport for mining company property movement between Mogollon and Silver City. His only child, Ernestine, later acquired the Mimbres Hot Springs, a few miles from Faywood. Her son Craig Wheaton-Smith managed the Mimbres Hot Springs ranch, and her grandson Simon Wheaton-Smith (Ernest Craig's great grandson) also resides in Silver City, New Mexico.