St Albans by-election, 1904

The St Albans by-election of 1904 was a parliamentary by-election held in England in February 1904 for the House of Commons. It elected a new Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of St Albans, a county division of Hertfordshire.

It was the first contested parliamentary election in St Albans since 1892. The two-way contest was dominated by the contemporary debate between free trade and tariff reform, and fought with the assistance of the major national organisations on both sides of that divide. It also reflected the wider national divide between high church Conservatism and nonconformist Liberalism. After a campaign marred by several incidents of unrest, the Liberal Party candidate narrowly won the seat from the Conservatives, who had held the seat since its creation in 1885.

The vacancy was caused by the disqualification from the Commons of the sitting Conservative MP Vicary Gibbs, who had held the seat since 1892. He had been returned unopposed in 1895 and 1900, but was disqualified in February 1904.

He and his brother Alban (an MP for the City of London) were partners in the firm Antony Gibbs & Sons, which had organised the sale to the Admiralty of two pre-dreadnought battleships built in England for the Chilean Navy, in order to avoid them being sold to a rival power when Chile did not complete the purchase. He told his constituents that if the ships had passed into the hands of a rival nation, such as Russia (which had made a cash offer for them), the balance of power would have been significantly altered, and that Britain would have fallen behind in naval power relative to their rivals. The two warships, Triumph and Swiftsure, were purchased by the Royal Navy on 12 March 1903, and served through the First World War.

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