Ernest Meysey-Thompson


Ernest Claude Meysey-Thompson was a British Army officer and Liberal Unionist Party politician. He sat in the House of Commons from 1906 to 1922 as the Member of Parliament for Handsworth.

Early life

Meysey-Thompson was the sixth son of Sir Henry Meysey-Thompson and his wife Elizabeth, the daughter of Sir John Croft, Bt. He was educated at Eton College and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He joined the army, becoming an officer in the Yorkshire Hussars in 1894, and was promoted to the rank of Captain on 21 May 1902.
In 1894, he married Alice Joicey, the daughter of John Joicey, a coalmine-owner and former MP from County Durham.

Political career

At the 1900 general election, he contested the Buckrose division of the East Riding, where he lost by 91 votes to the Liberal candidate Luke White.
However, his father retired from the Commons at the Dissolution of Parliament in January 1906, was raised to the peerage as Baron Knaresborough. As a member of the House of Lords he was disqualified from the House of Commons. At the general election later that month, Ernest stood for his father's old constituency of Handsworth in Staffordshire. He held the seat with a majority of 4,771 votes over his Liberal Party opponent Herbert Leon, a former MP for Buckingham. He was re-elected at both the January and December elections in 1910.
During the First World War he commanded a brigade of the Royal Field Artillery from 1914 to 1916.
The Liberal Unionists had merged with the Conservative Party in 1912, and at the 1918 general election Meysey-Thompson was re-elected as a Coalition Conservative. He stood down from Parliament at the 1922 general election.