The 1881 Preston by-election took place on 20 May 1881 after the death of the incumbent Conservative MP Edward Hermon. The Conservative candidate William Farrer Ecroyd campaigned on a fair trade platform and won the seat.A. C. Howe, ‘Ecroyd, William Farrer (1827–1915)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008, accessed 16 Jan 2014.
Notes
Further reading B. H. Brown, The Tariff Reform Movement in Great Britain, 1881–1895 (1943). S. Zebel, ‘Fair Trade: An English Reaction to the Breakdown of the Cobden Treaty System’, Journal of Modern History, 12 (1940), pp. 161–185.