BOOKS OF THE DAY
A Friend of Cecil Rhodes
Flora Shaw. By E. Moberley Bell. (Constable. , 15s.)
THE name of Flora Shaw, whose life covered the years from 1852 to 1929, is probably remembered today by few but the oldest. Some of them will recall it in connection with the reform movement in Johannesburg which preceded the Jameson Raid of 1896 and with the House of Commons Committee enquiry which followed that unhappy adventure. Some will remember her as the wife, from 1902 till her death, of the great African administrator, the late Sir Frederick (afterwards Lord) Lugard. But her name has never been a household word ; for she was a great lady of the later Victorian 'period when the arts of publicity, especially among ladies, were not practised, and a great journalist in days when journalism was strictly anony- mous. It is well then that we should now be given this vivid account of a very remarkable character.
In early youth she was brought into contact with such men as Ruskin, Meredith and Robert Louis Stevenson, worked bard among the very poor in the East End of London and projected a history of England. Her studies for this purpose inspired her with enthusi- asm for the possibilities of the British Empire ; and she became convinced that in emigration to the Colonies lay the key to the problems alike of their development ind of poverty and overcrowding in the English cities. Thus she was remembered among the Imperialists of the last two decades of the nineteenth century, a period when the term " Imperialism " had not become vulgarised and degraded as it is today, and ardent young spirits could believe in the Empire's great civilising mission. It is at this point that the real interest of Flora Shaw's career begins with a trip to Gibraltar in 1886, whence she was commissioned to write letters to The Pall Mall Gazette, then under Rhodes's friend, W. T. Stead. At Gibraltar she met Zebehr Pasha, an exile from Egypt, and her letters on his case to The Pall Mall Gazette and to The Contemporary Review in 1887 may well have influenced his release and return to his native land.
This was to lead to her visiting Egypt in December, 1888, as the accredited correspondent both of The Pall Mall Gazette and of The Manchester Guardian under C. P. Scott, and to her meeting in Cairo and making friends with Moberley Bell of The Times, a most important event in the life of Flora Shaw. That friendship was to be lasting. Through him, after he had become assistant manager of The Times in 189o, she was to become a regular writer for The Times, and in due course to be in effect its colonial editor. For The Times in 1892 she visited South Africa, where Rhodes, nearing the zenith of his fame, inspired her with his belief in the fqderation of the South African states ; in 1893 Australia and Canada. Her letters from all these sources won even more golden opinions for her in Printing House Square ; and so it befell that when the 1895-6 crisis in South African affairs occurred she was at the centre of things, in intimate confidential communication with Rhodes at Cape Town, with the Reformers in Johannesburg and with the Colonial Office under Mr. Chamberlain.
The account given of her evidence before the Raid Enquiry Com- mittee in 1897 is perhaps the most striking thing in the book. ,Flor,a Shaw's position was that; like Rhodes, she knew all about the projected insurrection in Johannesburg, and hoped for its early outbreak and success (though she did not know how far Rhodes had gone in fostering it and in smuggling arms across the frontier for the purpose of it), but that she had known nothing in advance about the Raid which she altogether condemned. (She did indeed con- demn it with a severity which might have been somewhat mitigated if she had had more intimate knowledge of Jameson's mind and motives than she seems to have had.) The attitude of the Colonial Office she believed to have been much the same as hers ; and she explained a private telegram of her own to Rhodes telling him that she had " special reason to believe " that Mr. Chamberlain " wishes you should do if" (i.e., that the insurrection should take place) "immediately" as having been based on her own judgement rein- forced by the casual remark of an Under Secretary who had said to her: " If they are going to rise, it is to be hoped they will do it soon." Thus there was nothing in her evidence to gratify the desires of some members of the committee who were anxious to implicate Mr. Chamberlain himself in these "old unhappy, far-off things " ; and from the position which she took up "neither the
thunder of Harcourt nor the sneering implications of Labouchere could move her."
After this, the remainder of Flora Shaw's journalistic career is something of an anti-climax ; though we are given an arresting account of a visit of hers to the Klondyke in 1898, which suggests something from Bret Harte and something from Hollywood, and leaves us wondering at her powers.of physical endurance not less than at her capacity as a writer. Thence the time moves swiftly on to her marriage with Sir F. Lugard in 1902. After that her life becomes subordinated to that of her famous husband, whom she tended with the same devotion as, for all the calls on her time and energies, she never failed to give to all who had need of it. from her own sisters to the hapless Belgian refugees of 1914.
It is very fitting that this most interesting biography should be from the pen of Miss Moberley Bell. It is written in a pleasant and easy style. Certainly it is heroine-worship ; and a doubt may occasionally arise whether any human character can ever have been quite so perfect as Flora Shaw's is throughout represented as having been. But if that be a defect, it is one which can be very easily forgiven to a daughter writing of one who owed to her father so
much that was so abundantly repaid. DOUGAL 0. MALCOLM.
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