Lady Violet Grace Bourdillon (née Billinghurst) was wife of Sir Bernard Henry Bourdillon, Governor 1935–43. She ran Government House through the Second World War, when Lagos was a forward staging base for the West African Frontier Force contingents fighting in East Africa and Burma.
Her organising work included the Nigerian Women's War Effort (a women's volunteer programme that knitted comforts for African soldiers and ran field canteens at Apapa), the Lady Bourdillon Maternity Block at the Massey Street Children's Hospital, and the wartime fundraising campaign that purchased two Spitfires presented to the RAF as 'Nigeria' and 'Lagos' in 1941.