Dame Flora Louise Shaw (1852–1929), Lady Lugard, was Colonial Editor of The Times of London — the first woman to hold a senior editorial position at the paper. In an unsigned leading article published on 8 January 1897 she proposed the name 'Nigeria' for the territories then administered by Sir George Goldie's Royal Niger Company, rejecting 'Royal Niger Company Territories' as too commercial and 'Central Sudan' as imprecise. The coinage held and became the name of the country her future husband would amalgamate. See The Name 'Nigeria'.
Later in 1897 she was herself examined by the British Parliamentary Select Committee of Inquiry into the Jameson Raid, after the 'Flora telegrams' — her coded cables to Cecil Rhodes urging him to 'hurry up' the rising into the South African Republic — were subpoenaed. She kept her post at The Times, continued to write on imperial questions, and in 1902 published A Tropical Dependency, the standard imperial-era survey of the Sokoto Caliphate and the Western Sudan.
She married Sir Frederick Lugard, then High Commissioner of Northern Nigeria, on 11 June 1902 in Madeira. When Lugard returned as Governor-General on 1 January 1914 to administer the amalgamation, Flora — already in her sixties and in poor health — became the inaugural quasi-First-Lady of the unified Colony and Protectorate. She did not reside permanently in Lagos; her ceremonial role was conducted largely from Little Parkhurst, the Lugards' home in Surrey, with visits to Government House. She founded the War Refugees Committee in London in 1914 to house Belgian refugees and was created DBE in 1916 for that work. She died on 25 January 1929 at Little Parkhurst — ten months before the outbreak of the Aba Women's War her husband's indirect-rule system had helped precipitate.