Flora Shaw - Career

Career

Flora Louisa Shaw was born in Woolwich where her father was stationed. She began her career in journalism in 1886 and was sent by the Manchester Guardian newspaper as the only woman reporter to cover the Anti-Slavery Conference in Brussels.

She became Colonial Editor for The Times, and in this connection the paper sent her as a special correspondent to Southern Africa in 1892 and in 1901, and to Australia and New Zealand in 1892, partly in order to study the question of Kanaka labour in the sugar plantations of Queensland. She also made two journeys to Canada, in 1893 and 1898, the second of which included a journey to the gold diggings of Klondike.

Her belief in the positive benefits of the British Empire infused her writing. As a correspondent for The Times, Shaw sent back 'Letters' during 1892–93 from her travels in South Africa and Australia. Writing for the educated governing circles, she focused on the prospects of economic growth and political consolidation of these self-governing colonies within an increasingly united British Empire, a vision largely blinkered to the force of colonial nationalisms and local self-identities.

These lengthy articles in a leading daily newspaper reveal a late-Victorian era metropolitan imagery of colonial space and time. Shaw projected vast empty spaces awaiting energetic English settlers and economic enterprise. Observing new landscapes from a rail carriage, for example, she selected images which served as powerful metaphors of time and motion in the construction of racial identities. Her appointment as Colonial Editor for The Times allowed her to travel throughout the British Empire.

A little known aspect of her prominent career was that when she first started writing for The Times, she wrote under the name of F. Shaw, trying to disguise the fact that she was a woman. Later she was so highly regarded, it didn't matter and she wrote openly as Flora Shaw, and she was regarded as one of the greatest journalists of her time, specialising in politics and economics.

Between 1878 and 1886 she wrote five novels, four for children and one for young adults. The first, Castle Blair, was extremely popular in the UK and US well into the 20th century. It was based on her own Anglo-Irish childhood experiences. The critic John Ruskin called Castle Blair "'good and lovely, and true'". Shaw also wrote a history of Australia for children.

Flora Shaw was close to the three men who most epitomised empire in Africa: Cecil Rhodes, George Goldie and Frederick Lugard. In 1902 she married the colonial administrator, Sir Frederick Lugard, who was Governor of Hong Kong (1907–1912) and Governor-General of Nigeria (1914–1919); they had no children. While they lived in Hong Kong she helped her husband to establish the University of Hong Kong. A dominant figure in imperialism, she is thought to have encouraged events that led to the South African war (1899–1902) and certainly told untruths about her husband's career and ideas – see I. F. Nicolson "The Administration of Nigeria 1900 to 1960" (OUP 1969) – which lasted for decades.

During the First World War, Lady Lugard was prominent in the founding of the War Refugees Committee, which dealt with the problem of the Belgian refugees, and also founded the Lady Lugard Hospitality Committee. In 1918, she was created D.B.E.