Personality Profile: Flora Shaw,
Lady Lugard (the woman that coined the name Nigeria)
Flora Louise Shaw,
DBE (born 19 December 1852 – 25 January 1929) was a British journalist and
writer. She is credited with having coined the name “Nigeria”…
Shaw was close to the three men who most epitomised empire in
Africa: Cecil Rhodes, George Goldie and Frederick Lugard.
She married, on
10 June 1902, the colonial administrator, Sir Frederick Lugard, who in 1928 was
created Baron Lugard. She accompanied him when he served as Governor of Hong
Kong (1907–1912) and Governor-General of Nigeria (1914–1919). They had no
children.
In 1905 Shaw wrote what remains the definitive history of
Western Sudan and the modern settlement of Northern Nigeria, A Tropical
Dependency: An Outline of the Ancient History of the Western Soudan, With an
Account of the Modern Settlement of Northern Nigeria (London: Nisbet,
1905).
While they lived in Hong Kong she helped her husband to establish
the University of Hong Kong. During the First World War, she was prominent in
the founding of the War Refugees Committee, which dealt with the problem of the
Belgian refugees, and founded the Lady Lugard Hospitality Committee. In the 1918
New Year Honours, she was appointed as a Dame Commander of the Order of the
British Empire.
She died of
pneumonia on 25 January 1929, aged 76, in Surrey.
