Born: 19 December 1852, United Kingdom
Died: 25 January 1929
Country most active: International
Also known as: Lady Lugard
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Bridget Hourican. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Shaw, Flora (1852–1929), Lady Lugard , journalist, was born in December 1852 in Kimmage, Co. Dublin, third among fourteen children of Gen. George Shaw and his wife, Marie de la Fontaine, daughter of the governor of Mauritius. Gen. Shaw was stationed at Woolwich, England, but the family spent every summer in Kimmage at the estate of their grandfather, the former tory MP Sir Frederick Shaw. Flora was educated at home and helped in running the household, as her mother was an invalid who died in 1870. Gen. Shaw remarried two years later; his second wife was unsympathetic and Flora spent much time visiting her aunt in France and acting as housekeeper to friends. Her income from her father was limited, and in 1877 she wrote a children’s novel, Castle Blair. Set in an Anglo-Irish estate (Kimmage), it has a juvenile hero, aiding a plot to free tenants from the English agent, but finally regretting his actions and looking forward to a future as a paternal landlord. This set the tone of all future writings; her sense of the responsibilities due from the ruling classes was extremely developed. Castle Blair was action-packed and went into numerous editions, but the publishers made all the money. She was, however, asked to write for a children’s magazine, Aunt Judy’s, which serialised two more novels, Hector (1882) and A sea change (1885). These continued the theme of rebellious boys being converted by virtuous girls.
While writing, she lived with friends in London and carried out charity work in the East End slums. This awakened her strong social conscience; she was serious-minded and wanted a wider stage than that offered by children’s books. Her solution for overcrowding and poverty was emigration to Britain’s colonies, which she believed should be expanded as much as possible. From 1883 she rented a cottage in Abinger, Surrey, which was to become her permanent home when in England; there she met the novelist George Meredith, who introduced her to W. T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, who promised to publish her letters from Gibraltar and Morocco, where she was to holiday in the winter of 1886–7. In Gibraltar she got her scoop: an interview with Zebehr Pasha, a notorious former ruler of Sudan and a slave-trader who was being kept as a political prisoner by the British. Shaw’s articles in the Pall Mall Gazette (June 1887) and her fuller treatment in the Contemporary Review (September–November 1887) presented Zebehr in a sympathetic light. It is possible that they contributed to his release. They revealed Shaw as a natural journalist with a trenchant style, an eye for detail, and – what was to become her hallmark – impeccable research. She had found her calling. The following winter she was in Egypt as the accredited correspondent for the Pall Mall Gazette and the Manchester Guardian. Her articles were incisive, with an excellent grasp of politics and finance. Back in England she continued to write on mainly colonial subjects, and in May 1889 was sent to Brussels to cover the international anti-slavery conference for the Manchester Guardian. The following year she was taken on by The Times to write a fortnightly article. Her first assignment was to South Africa, where she wrote back vivid descriptions of mining and agriculture and argued that Dutch land interests should be reconciled with English commercial enterprise. Her articles were highly successful and she was next sent to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
Her father died in 1893, leaving her stepmother and sisters poorly provided for. Shaw therefore took on the support of three younger sisters, with whom she lived in Cambridge St., Warwick Square, London, for the next eight years. She also gave financial aid to two more sisters and their children, and was able to do this as from 1894 she was made colonial editor of The Times with an annual salary of £800, higher than any other woman journalist of her day. Shaw was a frequent visitor at the colonial office, where she carried out research, and she also benefited from well placed contacts around the world. One of these was Cecil Rhodes, for whom she had abiding admiration. Her influence on public opinion was high: in January 1897 she coined the term ‘Nigeria’ to designate the territories under the jurisdiction of the Royal Niger Company. The extent of her involvement in imperial politics was dramatically exposed in summer 1897 when she was called before a parliamentary committee of inquiry into the ‘Jameson raid’, a military incursion into the Transvaal in 1895, led by Dr Leander Starr Jameson, a friend of Rhodes and a British administrator in Rhodesia. Shaw was believed to be the go-between of Rhodes and the colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, in a plot to bring about full-scale British intervention. The credibility of The Times was also called into question, but Shaw acquitted herself with great dexterity and refused to implicate either her paper or the colonial office. A slight, elegant figure, who always dressed fashionably in black and was very good-looking, she used her charm against the committee, which feared to interrogate a woman. Emerging with her reputation intact, she immediately set off for Canada, where her uncovering of official corruption in the Klondyke led to a full-scale investigation by the Canadian government.
However, The Times editor, G. E. Buckle, distrusted her after the Jameson affair, and she seems to have suffered in 1898 from unrequited love for Sir George Goldie (1846–1925), head of the Royal Niger Company. This contributed to a breakdown in health and in 1900 she resigned from The Times. Two years later in Madeira she married (11 June 1902) Sir Frederick Lugard (1858–1945), high commissioner of Northern Nigeria, and found an outlet for her imperialism in helping promote his career. She proved unable to cope with the climate in Nigeria so returned to England, where she wrote the 500-page A tropical dependency (1905), which outlined her view that autocracy was more suitable for tropical Africa than self-government. Lugard was appointed governor of Hong Kong in 1907 and his wife proved a valuable asset. Despite serious illness she travelled widely in Japan and China, gaining support to establish the university of Hong Kong. Lugard returned to Nigeria in 1912 with the mandate to amalgamate the north and south protectorates, and Lady Lugard remained in England, where she turned her attention to the Home Rule crisis. Didactic as ever, she wrote to Edward Carson that the king should refuse to sign the home rule bill without an appeal to the country, and that the unionist petition should then be printed in every newspaper in the empire. In July 1914 she attended an Orange demonstration in Belfast and then began preparing for civil war by organising with the Ulster Unionist Council to evacuate women and children from danger areas. With the outbreak of war she smoothly transferred her evacuation plans to Belgium. As a member of the War Refugees Committee, she arranged Belgian children’s transport to London, and in 1916 was awarded the DBE. After her husband’s return from Nigeria in 1919, they retired to Abinger, where she died on 25 January 1929.
Shaw was exceptional among women of her time in the successful career she made in a profession dominated by men, and in her influence on the public. As colonial editor of The Times she played a leading role in legitimising Britain’s imperialist agenda. Her articles were well researched, well written, and passionate; however, she was not above propaganda and her judgement was not always acute – she believed in the authenticity of the Pigott letters and after a visit to South Africa in 1901 she concluded that rumours of concentration camps were unfounded. In person she was energetic, generous, charming, and good at making friends, although Mary Kingsley noted that ‘she has got imperialism in place of ordinary human feelings or religion or sympathy or chivalry’ (Callaway & Helly, 79).
This biography, written by Penny Wang, has been republished with permission from the Dangerous Women Project, created by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
It is easy to dismiss things when they are not obvious and such is the case of Flora Shaw, later Lady Lugard. Previous biographers first dismissed the importance of her whole life, and later the early part of it before she took up journalism. Although the most recent biography demonstrates her prominent contribution to the imperial project, her anti-suffragist role is only mentioned in fleeting. This continued despite the many studies on connections between imperialism and the suffragist movement: she is often much less discussed than her anti-suffragist peers due to the comparative ‘muteness’ of her stance.
But was her role really that insignificant?
In fact, her eminence in other fields allowed her to endanger the suffrage movement in subtle ways. The reason why Flora Shaw did not feature as visibly in the suffrage debate was that women’s vote was not her priority: her major devotion was rather to the British imperial enterprise. Note here that the traditional gender difference was one of the crucial props of the Empire: it laid the foundation for a hierarchical society. Such rank and order guaranteed both the stability of the metropolis and that of the colonies, as well as justifying the analogous inequality between the centre and the province.
For the anti-suffragists, women’s suffrage was incompatible with the imperial ideology: it symbolised a gender transgression where women divert themselves from their ‘natural’ station as domestic mothers and intervene in men’s parliamentary politics. If effected, such a move would definitely ‘emasculate’ England. It was also seen as threatening women’s social purity, a fundamental female quality in the Christian belief system – another mainstay buttressing the imperial project.
Interestingly, this discourse of the ‘domestic mother’ was also deployed by some suffragists: women’s indispensable role in the expansion and consolidation of the British Empire – hostesses of the ‘home’ and helpmeets of men – would validate their share of citizenship. However, this rhetoric of women’s distinctive role was first employed by the anti-suffragist side. The ominous suggestion is, therefore, the ubiquity and wide acceptance of the anti-suffragist ideology – so much so that it was not only justifiable but also elemental in the argument of their opponents.
Shaw’s familial background and childhood experience in Ireland were crucial to her induction into the imperial project, the one great cause she saw as the only solution to all poverty in Britain. Unsurprisingly, during the early stage of her writing career in the last decades of the nineteenth century, she incorporated the imperial values into her stories for children. Among the many dogmas including fixed class distinctions and justifications for the British rule over Ireland, the duty of the ‘gentleman’ and the idealistic ‘Victorian gentlewoman’ featured heavily. As prints were cheap and new developments were mushrooming in women’s and children’s education, such literature served the exact purpose of imprinting on the younger generation the implicit gender roles in the imperial ideology.
By the time the suffragists won their battle in 1918, the little girls who once read Shaw’s popular Castle Blair and Hector would then be middle-aged. It is therefore not hard to make the link between the influence of her stories on them from their youthful days and the apathy of many women, even those of working class backgrounds, to this new right to vote in the post-war era.
Shaw later moved into writing journalism, first for Pall Mall Gazette and the Manchester Guardian and finally The Times, where she travelled around the globe as a colonial correspondent. She could then reach out to a wider audience, achieving a more significant political impact. Her words and deeds seemed contradictory: it looked as if she was actively opposing the gender standard she advocated. Nonetheless, a closer inspection reveals her consistency.
In a speech to the Scottish Geographical Society during her career as the Special Correspondent of The Times in Australia, she solicited that young and educated people of Britain be sent to farm the lands of Australia. Their laudable work in this ‘store house of raw material’ would substantiate her vision of the mutual benefits between Britain and her province. Deploring the small number of British women in Australia, she strongly encouraged them to go there, asserting, as can be expected, that ‘[d]airy, poultry-rearing, and fruit-growing would fall naturally into their department’. To her, the issue of women travelling to colonies was not problematic so long as they remained true to their ‘God-given’ position as the helpmeets of men and contented themselves with performing domestic duties.
What these women would achieve individually was not an expedition of the colony, but a duplication of the domestic sphere, and their role in this ‘new’ land was still that of housewives’. Collectively, they became the maternal hostess of the British Empire – the larger and greater ‘home’. Shaw justified this concept of ‘home’ by asserting that Australians had in ‘their veins […] the British blood’ and were thereby of the same ‘race’ as the British people. In the long run, this settlement of British women proved to be harmful to local feminisms: it necessitated an ‘othering’ of the native women to establish the white superiority and supremacy to suit the imperial ideology, questioning colonial women’s deservedness to rights as advocated back in England.
Shaw reconciled her unusual experiences by claiming membership among these women harbingers of the British Empire: her travels and interventions to the colonial policy were no more than tending to the domestic affairs of the imperial home. As for Shaw’s political involvements, she was always conscious of her gender role and adeptly cast herself as a figure of modesty after her late marriage, lobbying around for her husband’s colonial enterprise as Lady Lugard, living entirely up to the standard of the virtuous Victorian wife.
The printed media was not her only channel to exert influences. During the First World War, Lady Lugard’s relief work for the Belgian refugees was so noteworthy that it gained her the title of ‘Dame of the British Empire’. The War Refugees Committee she set up was one of the most important charity organisations, and was imbued with her ideology. This was manifest in its constitution (where men held most of the leading positions while women were assigned to clothing and accommodation departments) and its treatment of refugees dependent upon class and gender.
Lugard virtually encompassed all the three major types of distinguished women anti-suffragists in Julia Bush’s work: the maternal reformer, the woman writer, and the imperial lady. The title of DBE was more than an acknowledgment of her contribution: it erected her as an exemplar to be admired. Thus, her resplendent achievements made her anti-suffragist ideology likely to be accepted. Since those anti-suffragist women brandishing their attitude often incurred charges of hypocrisy in that their implication in politics was against their own principles, the road Lady Lugard took seems to be a more secure choice.
This dangerous imperialist-cum-anti-suffragist Flora Shaw/Lady Lugard imperiled women’s suffrage not by flaunting her viewpoint – in fact, the anti-suffragist campaign might never have occurred to her as a worthy diversion. However, her unwavering dedication to bolster the British Empire was so successful that the inherent anti-suffragist aspect of her ideology was approved of by many along with her other codes of conduct. In other words, this female imperialist readily put the suffrage cause into danger in an almost sidelining manner. This reminds us again of the difficulties faced by the fighters for women’s suffrage and the fragility of feminism in its early stage as well as nowadays. Above all, it warns us against the insidious nature of the imperial ideology which jeopardises equalities of all kinds.