Hugh Craig, 1795 – 1858
After chairing the opening session of the First Chartist Convention, Hugh Craig found himself at odds with talk of ulterior measures and swiftly resigned his seat. To the consternation of his friends, he would soon abandon any hint of radicalism in his politics.
Hugh Craig was born at Dunlop in East Ayrshire on 6 November 1795, the younger son of John Craig, a small farmer, and Katherine McDougall. In 1811 he apprenticed himself to a Kilmarnock draper where he proved to be an adept salesman.
Craig later recalled that he received no more than two full years of schooling on the farm, but this limited education had instilled in him a love of reading, and during his apprenticeship, his employer had ‘indulged’ him with an unlimited supply of books from the library, which he would rise early to read ‘even in the coldest winter mornings’.
After four years in Kilmarnock, Craig parted company with his employer and set out to make his fortune, travelling to Edinburgh and the port of Leith, from where he boarded a ship for London.
Arriving after eight days at sea, and ‘after a week of wearisome and solitary wanderings’, he found a position at the newly established firm of Swan and Edgar’s in Piccadilly, where his customers included courtiers and nobles from George III’s court. He would never forget that, in 1817, he had personally supplied the blue and white silk in which the royal apothecary wrapped the embalmed body of Princess Charlotte following her death in childbirth.
As an anonymous newspaper obituarist would later recall (Kilmarnock Weekly Post, 1 May 1858):
‘Mr Craig used to speak frequently of the time he spent in London as the most important of his life… His employers were patronised by the highest nobility of the land, and many a racy anecdote did he relate regarding fat, puffy, and fussy dowager ladies, when they went a shopping to Swan and Edgar’s.’
Craig returned to Kilmarnock in 1818, starting a partnership with another local draper. Six years later and now firmly established in his trade, he married Isabella Porteous, the eldest daughter of an Edinburgh clergyman (Glasgow Herald, 22 October 1824), and after a short-lived foray into the wholesale trade in Glasgow, he settled permanently in Kilmarnock, where he set up the drapery business that would be the source of his livelihood for the remainder of his life.
Craig entered public life in 1831 during the agitation for the Reform Bill, chairing and addressing public meetings in the town and taking a leading part in the local Political Union. He was a prominent supporter of the Whig candidate Sir John Dunlop at the 1832 general election, and when Dunlop lost the support of his liberal constituents, switched his support to the free-trade Radical Sir John Bowring, who duly took the Kilmarnock Burghs seat in 1835.
Craig himself won a seat on Kilmarnock Town Council in November 1833. This earned him the right to the courtesy title of Baillie, and he was always known thereafter as Baillie Hugh Craig.
His next battle, however, was a religious one. In March 1834, Craig took the chair at a public meeting in Kilmarnock at which speakers advocated the disestablishment of the Church of Scotland and the separation of Church and State. As a ruling elder of the Church, Craig found himself summoned before the High Kirk to ‘explain his extraordinary conduct’.
The case was widely reported in both the Scottish and English press over a period of months as it progressed through the Church’s disciplinary processes, with Craig eventually deposed as an elder by the General Assembly when he refused to recant or apologise for his actions. Craig published a pamphlet defending himself but did not return to the Established Church.
The dispute seems to have had little impact on Craig’s political activities. He chaired a public meeting in the town when the Irish Radical Daniel O’Connell visited in 1835 amid ‘excitement and enthusiasm’ and played host to the visitor in his own home. And when radicalism turned to Chartism in 1838, Craig was a prominent supporter of the cause.
He was in the chair when George Muntz, Thomas Clutton Salt and R.K. Douglas visited the town on behalf of the Birmingham Political Union (Birmingham Journal, 2 June 1838, p4). Under his guidance, the meeting adopted a series of resolutions by acclamation backing the petition then being organised by the BPU. He also presided over a banquet in honour of Dr Bowring, raising a toast to ‘the extension of the suffrage, vote by ballot, and annual parliaments’ (Kilkenny Journal, 15 September 1838, p4).
Despite this, Craig was not the automatic choice as delegate to the General Convention of the Industrious Classes (the First Chartist Convention). Though well-known and liked in Kilmarnock, he faced competition from the more radical Dr John Taylor, who had strong support in the county town of Ayr and its surrounding villages, and from a John McCrae, a teacher from Cumnock.
According to The Scotsman (14 November 1838, p3), which lifted its report from the Dumfries Courier, when the meeting to elect Ayrshire’s delegate took place in Kilmarnock on 3 November, many of Taylor’s supporters were unable to make the journey, and members of the Kilmarnock Universalist church swamped the meeting, accounting for some two-thirds of those present and voting as a bloc to elect Craig as their voice at the Convention.
When the Convention opened at the British Coffee House in Cockspur Street, just off Trafalgar Square, on the morning of Monday, 4 February 1839, one of its first decisions was to elect a new ‘speaker’ for each session. The London radical publisher Henry Hetherington nominated Craig, and he was duly elected and took the chair. He would also serve as treasurer, jointly with the Londoner George Rogers (Morning Advertiser, 7 February 1839, p2).
Perhaps a little carried away, Craig declared from the chair that he expected universal suffrage within a month, and, when the Convention moved on to debate its remit, he was the first to propose setting up a committee to consider ‘what ulterior means the Convention shall resort to or recommend to the industrious classes, for speedily obtaining, and firmly securing, their political rights’ in the event that Parliament rejected the petition.
The question would be the rock on which the Convention broke, leading the Birmingham delegates and their supporters to resign and marking the divide between moral and physical force Chartists. When Craig himself resigned that summer, he claimed that it was because the convention had recommended ulterior measures before the petition had been submitted.
Craig was not alone among Chartist leaders to have made fiery and threatening speeches in the movement’s early days only to back-pedal when the time came to match actions to words. John Taylor, who after losing out on the Kilmarnock nomination had got himself elected to the Convention elsewhere, seemed to have the measure of the man. In a political portrait for the radical paper The Operative (24 February 1839, p1), he wrote of Craig:
‘His chief fault, and it is a great one in a leading politician, is a too great facility of mind, and a readiness to adopt the opinions of others in preference to this own. This, while it may arise as much from his consciousness of an imperfect education, as from his natural generosity of temper, gives an air of indecision to his conduct in some measure prejudicial to his fame.’
It is from this profile that we have a description of Craig. ‘About the middle size, his figure is of that active robust make, which fits a man best for the bustling scenes of life, and nothing used to delight us more than to mark him dashing into the hunting field on a December morning, glad to return to his sylvan haunts, his quick gray eye brightening with anticipated pleasure, while his ruddy complexion, smooth bald forehead and, above all, his joyous laugh resounding through the field, showed he had cast care behind him.’ Though not a good public speaker, his voice giving the hearer ‘an idea that he is labouring under a slight cold’, he was nevertheless able to make himself heard over a great distance.
Craig was soon sent back to Scotland to organise and proselytise on behalf of the convention. Arriving in early April 1839, he spoke at fifty-four open-air meetings besides a series of large gatherings in Glasgow, Paisley and Kilmarnock and proved to be an effective organiser. In the midst of all this, however, Sir John Dunlop, died, leading to a parliamentary by-election that Craig contested as the Radical candidate.
Focusing on the total repeal of the Corn Laws and making no mention of the Charter, he was victorious at the hustings, but at the subsequent poll managed just 46 votes, coming third behind the Tory Lord Kelburne (1,758) and a Mr Campbell for the Whigs (1,298).
By the time Craig returned to the Convention, it had relocated to Birmingham. With work on the petition now complete, all talk was of the turn to ‘exclusive dealing’ (boycotting the shops and businesses of those hostile to Chartism), the possibility of organising a run on the banks, and of a general strike or ‘national holiday’. Some urged the working class to arm themselves.
Unhappy with the direction the Convention had taken, Craig resigned on 1 July and went back to Scotland. The radical schoolteacher John McCrae was elected to replace him, but there was bad feeling when Craig refused to return the half month’s pay of £12 10s he had already received for July, and Craig turned away from radicalism.
His focus after this was on business. As his obituarist later noted: Some years after this, and for reasons to himself best known, he thought proper to disavow connection with the Liberal interest, and become a Conservative.’ They added optimistically: ‘He had a right to do so if he saw good cause, yet we are conscious he never altered his opinions at bottom.’
After leaving political life, Craig followed his literary interests, publishing a small volume of poetry and notes about two years before his death under the title Ayrshire Aspirations. Here, in a Farewell Address to the Year 1848, Craig declared it to have been a ‘monstrous year of revolutions’ and expressed his gratitued that his home country had stood firm against ‘traitors within and foes without’.
‘Not many of the poems in this volume are distinguished by poetical genius, but they are much beyond the mediocrity of poetry, and marked with the impress of the peculiar elements of his character. He also wrote many graphic rambles in and sketches of this neighbourhood, and than himself we know of no other who was better qualified to do so. He was intimately connected with every nook and corner of this portion of the county, and had an almost inexhaustible store of anecdotes of persons and places belonging to it.’
Hugh Craig died on 27 April 1858 at his home at Wallace Bank, Kilmarnock, after a short illness. ‘His death was sudden, and rather unexpected, for he possessed a strong constitution, unbroken health, and a vigorous frame,’ his obituarist noted, adding:
‘It is true that latterly his temper was a little soured with the world, and he was a little cynical in his remarks on persons and things. These were, however, more seeming than real. His heart was always in the right place. At bottom he was genuinely warm-hearted and humane, and had a soothing word and quiet gift for the wretched and distressed.’
Craig was buried in the Old High Kirk churchyard. His grave marker reads: ‘Erected to the memory of | Bailie Hugh Craig | Draper, Kilmarnock | Born 6th November 1795 | Died 27th April 1858 | And is here buried’.
‘Though the majority of the inhabitants did not even know the time at which the obsequies were to be performed, a large concourse of spectators had assembled to witness the last ceremonies, and many of them heaved a sigh to the memory of him who had occasioned their meeting. A hearse, followed by two funeral coaches containing the mourners, formed the short but solemn procession. After entering within the precincts of the church-yard at the west end, the gates were shut, and it moved slowly towards the other end, till it came near the grave. The coffin which had been carried shoulder-high from the house to the hearse, was then carried in the same manner from the hearse to the tomb, and lowered into it amidst the deepest silence; and the sexton’s operations soon told us that the “dust was mingling with its kindred dust”.’
Notes and sources
Newspaper reports are taken from the British Newspaper Archive. Details of births, marriages and deaths are from Ancestry UK.
A lengthy but unsigned obituary in the Kilmarnock Post provides a great deal of information about Craig’s life and views. ‘Death of Hugh Craig, Esquire’ Kilmarnock Post, 1 May 1858, p4
Ayrshire Aspirations in Verse and Prose, by Hugh Craig (James McKie, 1856) is primarily a collection of poetry written by Craig throughout his adult life. Its introductory passages also include a few autobiographical notes written towards the end of his life. Accessed here via Google Books (13 December 2025).
The Spirit of Persecution Displayed, Against Hugh Craig, Esquire, Magistrate, for Presiding at a Meeting of the People of Kilmarnock, published by Craig in 1834 reproduces the evidence against him and the defence he intended to give when he was dismissed as an elder of the Church of Scotland. Accessed here via Google Books (13 December 2025).
Voting figures for the 1839 byelection can be found in the Ayrshire Directory 1851-52 (Ayr Advertiser, 1851). Accessed here via National Library of Scotland (12 December 2025).
Hugh Craig’s grave marker is pictured on Findagrave website. Accessed here (10 January 2026).
There are three book-length accounts of the Chartist movement in Scotland, all of which discuss Hugh Craig. They are: Scottish Chartism, by Leslie C. Wright (Oliver and Boyd, 1953); The Chartist Movement in Scotland, by Alexander Wilson (Manchester University Press, 1970); and Chartism in Scotland, by W. Hamish Fraser (Merlin Press, 2010).