Rose Dugdale, heiress turned Irish independence fighter, dies at 82
Rose Dugdale, an Oxford-educated English woman who left a life of wealth to become a partisan activist fighting for Irish independence, in a career that included bomb-making, hijackings and art theft, died Monday in Dublin. She was 82.
Her death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by Aengus O Snodaigh, a friend and member of the Irish parliament. No reason was given.
Throughout the 1970s, Ms. Dugdale, whose family owned much of the London insurance company Lloyd’s, captivated the British and Irish news media with her exploits. Her story – like that of Patricia Hearst, another heiress who became a revolutionary and made news in the United States around the same time – fueled a narrative about glamorous, radical youth running wild in the post-1960s era:
Mrs. Dugdale repudiated her inheritance and liquidated her trust fund to support a variety of social and political causes. She and an accomplice were arrested in 1973 for stealing thousands of dollars worth of art and silverware from her parents’ home, with plans to sell it and give the proceeds to the Irish Republican Army.
Her father, Eric, appeared as a witness at her trial, and under British law she was allowed to cross-examine him herself – an opportunity she used to make political statements.
“I love you,” she told her father, “but hate everything you stand for.”
Nevertheless, the judge was lenient with her and imposed only a two-year suspended sentence because, he said, the likelihood of her breaking the law again was “extremely small.”
He was wrong. Immediately after her trial, she traveled to Ireland, where she and another accomplice, Eddie Gallagher, hijacked a helicopter and pilot to drop improvised bombs on a base of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the police force in Northern Ireland.
The bombs fell wide and failed to explode, and Ms Dugdale and Mr Gallagher went into hiding to plot their next move.
In April 1974, she and three other assailants burst through the doors of Russborough House, a palatial estate southwest of Dublin owned by Alfred Beit, a wealthy British politician and art collector.
They pistol-whipped Mr. Beit, tied him and his wife up and made off with 19 paintings by Gainsborough, Goya, Vermeer and other artists. Among the loot, worth a total of 8 million Irish pounds (about $110 million today), was ‘Lady Writing a Letter With Her Maid’, one of only two works by Vermeer in private hands. (The other was at Buckingham Palace.)
Knowing they could not easily sell the famous works on the black market, Mrs. Dugdale and the other thieves demanded a ransom of 500,000 Irish pounds. They also demanded that Dolours and Marian Price, two IRA members jailed over a series of car bombings in England, be transferred to a prison in Northern Ireland.
After a nationwide hunt, police tracked down the art, and Mrs Dugdale, to a rural cottage in County Cork. This time she pleaded “proudly and incorruptibly guilty” and received a nine-year prison sentence. As she left the courthouse, she greeted the crowd with a clenched fist.
After being released from prison in 1980, she returned to Dublin where she worked as a community organizer to stem the rising number of heroin dealers on the city’s streets.
She also went back to work for the IRA, this time as a bomb maker. She and her partner, Jim Monaghan, developed a number of innovative weapons, including a projectile launcher that used two packets of McVitie’s Digestive Biscuits to absorb recoil, and a new type of explosive that was used in bombings in Northern Ireland and London, killing six people died and more than a hundred were injured.
Bridget Rose Dugdale was born on March 25, 1941 in Yarty, her family’s 600-acre estate in Devon, south-west England. Both her parents came from money: her father was a major shareholder in Lloyd’s and her mother, Carol (Timmis) Dugdale, was an heiress.
She grew up shuttling between the family estate and a sprawling house in London, between riding lessons and society balls. She attended Miss Ironside’s School, a private school for girls that also produced the model and actress Jane Birkin.
When she was 17, Ms. Dugdale joined 1,400 other teenage debutantes at a coming-out ceremony for Queen Elizabeth II. It was the last year that a two-century-old tradition was performed.
Mrs. Dugdale was a reluctant socialite and only went along on the condition that her parents hire a tutor to prepare her for admission to the all-female St. Anne’s College at the University of Oxford.
She studied politics, philosophy and economics there and counted the Irish writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch among the professors she met personally. Years later, as Ms. Dugdale faced a prison sentence, Ms. Murdoch wrote letters urging leniency.
She was by all accounts a mediocre student, partly because her growing interest in left-wing politics took up most of her time and energy. Among her many exploits, Ms Dugdale and a friend dressed up as male students and sneaked into a session of the all-male Oxford Union debating society, where they jeered and heckled in low voices.
After graduating in 1962, she studied philosophy at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, earning a master’s degree, then returned to Britain to study economics at the London School of Economics, where she earned a Ph.D.
Although Ms Dugdale worked as an analyst for the British government, she quickly became radicalized. She received a significant income from a trust fund and gave most of it away to anti-poverty programs around her apartment in Tottenham, an impoverished part of north-east London.
She came into contact with a self-proclaimed “revolutionary socialist” named Walter Heaton, with whom she committed the burglary of her parents’ home in 1973. While she received a light sentence, he was sentenced to six years in prison.
Ms Dugdale’s survivors include Mr Gallagher, whom she married in 1978 while they were both in prison, although they later became estranged, and their son, Ruairi Gallagher.
After the Good Friday Agreements largely ended violence in Northern Ireland in 1998, Ms Dugdale retired as a fighter. But she remained active in Sinn Fein, the political party for independence in Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Although she was a divisive figure in Britain, in Ireland she became something of a legend, the recipient of awards and the subject of biographies and documentaries – most recently the feature film ‘Baltimore’ (2023), starring Imogen Poots as Mrs Dugdale. (The film was released this month in the United States, titled “Rose’s War.”)
“I did what I wanted to do,” she said an interview from 2011 before the Dublin Volunteers Dinner, where she was the first honour. “I am proud to have been part of the Republican movement, and I hope I have played my very small role in the success of the armed struggle.”