In 1958, 17-year-old Rose Dugdale was one of 1,400 young women who curtseyed before Queen Elizabeth II in the most prestigious event of the summer’s debutante season. It was the last time that the well-bred daughters of the most aristocratic and affluent families in the country would be presented to the monarch in a ritual that dated back 200 years. Princess Margaret, with characteristic hauteur, would later say: “We had to put a stop to it. Every tart in London was getting in.”
For the fiercely independent Dugdale, being presented to the queen was a means to an end. She had agreed on the condition that her parents allowed her to attend the all-women St Anne’s College, Oxford, to study philosophy, politics and economics. Sixty years later she would recall the debutante season as “a horrible marriage market in which you were being sold as a commodity”. By then, she had travelled a lunar distance from her elite upbringing in rural Devon and London, the extraordinary arc of her volatile life perhaps most aptly condensed in the title of a recent biography of her, Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber.
Written by Irish author and journalist Sean O’Driscoll, the book details Dugdale’s unlikely journey from reluctant debutante to dedicated IRA volunteer, whose reckless escapades and commitment to the cause of violent republicanism made headlines across the world. In January 1974, she took part in the armed hijacking of a helicopter from which milk churns filled with explosives were dropped on an RUC base in Northern Ireland. A few months later, she organised and led an audacious art heist in County Wicklow in which 19 artworks, including paintings by Rubens, Goya and Vermeer, were stolen and held for ransom against the release of IRA prisoners.
For a time, Dugdale was Britain and Ireland’s most wanted terrorist and a source of horrified fascination to the tabloids. After her arrest, she was tried and sentenced to nine years in prison, having declared herself “proudly and incorruptibly guilty” of offences against the state. In the dock, she called Britain “the filthy enemy”, and gave a clenched fist salute to the public gallery.
Unlike other accounts of her exploits that have surfaced over the years, O’Driscoll’s book breaks new ground by uncovering in some detail Dugdale’s post-prison role as an expert bomb-maker for the IRA. It reveals how, from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, alongside her partner and accomplice, Jim Monaghan, she developed several lethal homemade devices, including the infamous “biscuit launcher”. Constructed from household implements and bits of farm machinery, it used packets of digestive biscuits to absorb the recoil when an armour-piercing missile packed with semtex explosive was fired. The device was used by the IRA in rural South Armagh and on the streets of west Belfast.
The pair also created a powerful new explosive that was detonated outside the fortified Glenanne barracks in May 1991, killing three soldiers and seriously injuring 11. The next year, it was used in a bomb that destroyed the Baltic Exchange and surrounding buildings in the City of London, killing three people and causing damage estimated at £800m. As O’Driscoll believes: “Rose Dugdale did not kill anyone directly, but she was indirectly responsible for the deaths of a lot of people.”
In his research, O’Driscoll conducted several interviews with the ageing Dugdale in the care home in Dublin where she now resides. It is run by the Poor Servants of the Mother of God and she is one of the few residents who is not a retired nun. The book reconstructs her life in some detail, O’Driscoll having spoken to several of her accomplices and her son, Ruairi, whom she gave birth to while serving time in Limerick prison. What the book does not do is fully explain why someone so English, privileged, charismatic and fiercely intelligent – she wrote her master’s thesis on Wittgenstein – embraced Irish republican violence with such fervour.
“I think it was partly to do with the times she came of age in,” says O’Driscoll. “It’s hard to separate her politics from the actions of other revolutionary groups that were active in the late 1960s and early 70s – the Baader-Meinhof in Germany or the Red Brigades in Italy. But there is also the bigger question of why she felt she had to go to the lengths that she did to prove her radicalism. That answer probably lies in her personal psychology, which is much more difficult territory to explore.”
A new feature film titled Baltimore – a reference to a village in County Cork rather than the American city – is an intriguing attempt at a psychological portrait of Dugdale. It centres mainly on her role in the IRA raid on Russborough House in County Wicklow in 1974, during which the elderly Sir Alfred Beit and his wife were bound and gagged along with their servants, while the 19 old masters were removed from their elaborate frames and transported to an IRA safe house in west Cork. Imogen Poots plays Dugdale as a ruthlessly committed but haunted individual, prone to paranoia and nightmares, but the film’s slow pace fails to capture her wild energy and impetuousness, while also elevating atmosphere and suggestion over any deeper insight into her political motivations.
“We have always been interested in the interior world of our characters, more than anything else,” says Christine Molloy, who co-directed the film with her partner, Joe Lawlor. “We were attracted to Rose Dugdale because we firmly believed that she must have been a thinker, and a considered thinker at that. She was also someone who was looking to change her identity. To become a different version of herself.”
The latter part of the film concentrates on the 10 days Dugdale spent with the stolen paintings in a cottage in a remote part of west Cork before her arrest. Alone, pregnant and perhaps vulnerable, the film-makers suggest this must have been a rare moment of reflection for a woman whose life was defined by recklessness and risk.
“For an intense period of time, she must have been alone with her thoughts,” suggests Molloy. “What she had embarked on – on a personal level, as opposed to the facts of the art theft itself and the ransom demands – were the steps that ultimately cut her off from her previous life: from her family, her home, the country of her birth.”
There is no evidence, though, in either her subsequent interviews or continued commitment to the cause, that suggests Dugdale was in any way regretful, never mind repentant. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the film has already drawn flak from those who feel that any portrait of a terrorist, particularly one from such esteemed English stock, is beyond the pale. A recent Mail on Sunday article asked: “Why is a new film lionising the upper-class deb from Devon who hijacked a helicopter to drop IRA bombs on an army base?” In the piece, the Daily Mail’s film critic described Baltimore as “a dangerous film… that doesn’t exactly glamorise Dugdale but it endeavours to make her a sympathetic character.”
For me, the problem was more that, in trying to portray her complexity, the film’s highly imaginative narrative confuses more than it enlightens, while the bigger moral questions about the human cost of her unwavering embrace of violence are left hanging.
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Bridget Rose Dugdale was born in March 1941 at Yarty, her father’s 600-acre estate in Devon, her distinctly Irish forename abandoned by everyone early on in favour of the more emblematic English one. The family lived between Devon and London, where they also owned a large townhouse in Chelsea. Her father, Col Eric Dugdale, was an underwriter at Lloyd’s of London and her mother, Carol, attended the Slade School of Art and was close friends with the novelist Rebecca West.
Intriguingly, Carol Dugdale’s first marriage had been to John Mosley, a stockbroker and the younger brother of Oswald Mosley, the infamous British fascist leader. When asked about her young life during an interview for an Irish television series, Mná an IRA (Women of the IRA), Dugdale described her parents as “very attentive” and her childhood as “wonderful… with horses and sport and fishing and shooting and all that stuff”.
In a recent article in the Oldie, though, the journalist Virginia Ironside, who attended the same school as Dugdale in Kensington – where they were taught, she recalled, by “oddballs with no formal training” – paints a different picture. Describing her former friend’s upbringing as one of “stultifying conventionality”. She recalls how, at their mother’s insistence, Rose and her older sister, Caroline, were forced to wear formal clothes and long white gloves for dinner every night and “had to curtsey to every visitor to their home”.
Ironside remembers the young Dugdale as “a bit gawky and masculine-looking – a big girl with a deep voice”, who was “not conventionally pretty, but exuded such energy, positivity, intelligence, generosity and, yes, even kindness that she was instantly attractive”. She even admits to having had “a secret crush” on her, as did many other pupils, and of sensing, even at this early age, that she was bisexual.
At Oxford, Dugdale had a passionate affair with a female tutor called Peter Ady, who had previously been in a relationship with Iris Murdoch, a tutor in politics at the college. Years later, as Dugdale languished in Limerick prison, Murdoch, by then a revered philosopher and novelist, would write to the Irish ambassador requesting that her former pupil be allowed “to receive serious and learned matter” because “she wishes to study but cannot, a terrible extra punishment to an intellectual person”.
It was at Oxford that Dugdale embraced leftist politics and first made headlines. In 1961, she and another student, Jenny Grove, disguised themselves as men to attend the male-only Oxford Union debate, where they heckled and cat-called the speakers in deep, masculine voices. The intervention made headlines, not least because the pair had alerted a local journalist and photographer to their plan, even inviting them to document their transformation at an Oxford hairdresser’s. The Daily Express ran with the story under the headline “Disguised Girl Students Break into a Men-only Fortress”.
Having graduated, Dugdale went on to obtain a master’s in philosophy in the US and a PhD in economics at the University of London, before becoming politically active during the turbulent international protests of 1968. By 1971, aged 30, she had made the decision to sell her house in Chelsea and give away her inherited wealth, which O’Driscoll values at “well over £1m today”, to London’s poor and needy. In order to do so, she rented a building in Tottenham and set up a Claimants Union, offering advice and financial handouts. “There were many immigrant families coming into the area,” she told O’Driscoll. “I couldn’t exaggerate how many people were looking for help.”
Throughout her life, Dugdale was drawn to maverick male would-be revolutionaries such as Eddie Gallagher, a renegade IRA member who took part in the helicopter hijacking and the art theft, and later, Jim Monaghan, her fellow bomb-maker. The first of these was Wally Heaton, a self-styled “revolutionary socialist” with a drinking problem, who had been traumatised by the brutality he witnessed while serving with the Coldstream guards in Malaya. When he turned up at the Tottenham Claimants Union office, preaching violent revolution, the pair began dating. Not long afterwards, at his urging, her attention turned to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In January 1972, the television news broadcast disturbing scenes from Derry on what soon came to be known as Bloody Sunday, in which members of the Parachute regiment killed 13 unarmed protesters. Something shifted in Dugdale’s political consciousness.
Both O’Driscoll and the directors of Baltimore identify Bloody Sunday as the pivotal moment in Dugdale’s progression from leftwing activist to violent revolutionary. Lawlor describes it as “a tipping point – a defining moment of her militancy, a moment that crystallised many of her thoughts”. Everything that subsequently happened in Dugdale’s wild and ruthless journey seems to have flowed from her anger and outrage at that single terrible event.
In June 1973, at Heaton’s suggestion, Dugdale and three others entered her family home in Devon, while her parents were away, and stole valuable paintings, art objects, antiques and silver. For some reason, Dugdale thought it a good idea to stash the stolen goods in the Oxford home of her former lover Peter Ady, who promptly informed Dugdale’s parents. In the subsequent trial, Dugdale dramatically expressed her love for her father, but told him: “I hate everything you stand for.” She received a two-year suspended sentence, while Heaton, who had not taken part in the robbery directly, received a six-year prison sentence.
Later that same year, she crossed paths with, and fell for, Eddie Gallagher, the wildly impulsive IRA volunteer who somehow had licence to operate independently of the organisation’s central command. Her commitment to the cause of Irish republicanism deepened dramatically and, in January 1974, with another IRA member, they carried out the audacious helicopter hijacking in County Donegal, forcing the civilian pilot to transport their deadly cargo across the border to Strabane. The aerial bombing mission ended in chaos: one churn of explosives was dropped into a nearby river and the other failed to explode in the grounds of the barracks. In the wake of the attack, a wanted poster of a grinning Dugdale appeared across Northern Ireland, in which her description read: “Usually wears slacks and suede jackets of dirty and untidy appearance.”
In April 1974, the emboldened pair led the successful art raid on Russborough House, but after a nationwide manhunt, Dugdale was captured in a cottage in west Cork and all 19 paintings were found in the back of her car. She had, at one point, threatened to burn them if the gang’s demands for the release of IRA prisoners, specifically the Price sisters, were not met. At that time, Dolours and Marian Price, who had been convicted of IRA bombings in England, were on hunger strike in Brixton prison. Dugdale’s extravagant gesture of support was somewhat undercut by a public statement from the sisters’ father, Albert, urging her not to destroy the paintings as it would be a sin.
Even in jail and pregnant with Gallagher’s child, Dugdale proved an irritant to the security forces in Ireland. On 3 October 1975, she made headlines again when Gallagher and another IRA volunteer, Marion Coyle, kidnapped a Dutch industrialist, Tiede Herrema, from his home in Limerick, and issued a statement demanding her own release in return for Herrema’s safety. This kidnapping led to spontaneous public protests and was roundly condemned even by the IRA, who dissociated themselves from it. The kidnappers and their victim were soon traced to a house in a village in County Kildare and a three-week siege ensued. As trained negotiators conversed with Gallagher and Coyle through an upstairs window, snipers lay on the surrounding rooftops, while villagers rented their spare bedrooms and couches to the hordes of domestic and foreign media that had descended on the village.
Herrema was eventually released unharmed and Gallagher was sentenced to 20 years in Portlaoise prison, while Coyle served her sentence in Limerick prison, where she befriended Dugdale. “Marion had proved herself. She was a fantastic volunteer,” Dugdale told O’Driscoll decades later. “I was looking forward to seeing her, after so many months of just seeing her on the TV.”
On her release from prison, Dugdale threw herself into a campaign by a controversial organisation called Concerned Parents Against Drugs, which aimed to directly combat inner-city Dublin’s burgeoning heroin problem in the early 80s. Often using IRA members as enforcers, they marched on known drug dealers’ houses and forced them to leave. In O’Driscoll’s book, a woman who babysat Dugdale’s son recalls witnessing Dugdale speak at an anti-drugs rally and thinking: “Thank God I’m not a drug dealer or user, having to deal with that woman. She would put the fear of God in you the way she talked about drug dealers and how they all had to be pushed out.”
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There is the distinct sense, in all of this, that Rose Dugdale saw her renegade life as a series of reckless, revolutionary episodes, all of which were designed to prove her credibility and commitment to a cause she embraced with a kind of born-again fanaticism. She had, in short, to become even more fanatical than the most hardened Irish paramilitary foot soldiers that she so admired, but who often viewed her Englishness and privileged upbringing with deep suspicion.
“If you come from England, you are always a Brit,” she said in an interview for Irish TV in 2012, “and if you come from my background, it wasn’t surprising that they had difficulty taking me as a part of the republican movement.”
To be accepted, she had to wage a long war on her own country, her class and her lineage. “I had to wrestle with the idea of killing people but, at the end of the day, it’s the only way to deal with them,” she later said of the decision that would dramatically redefine her. “Essentially, it was military action that had a chance to succeed. In my mind, there was no doubt about that.”
As Sean O’Driscoll points out, that commitment cost her her family, friends and a life of privilege and security. It also cost the lives of countless others. For all that, Rose Dugdale seems, even in old age, to be as committed as ever to the cause that she pursued with singular, all-consuming dedication. Once, O’Driscoll tells me, he asked her what had been the best day of her life, assuming she would choose the day her son was born. Instead, she replied that it was the day of the Strabane bomb attack. “For her, I guess, that was the moment from which there was no turning back.”
He also recalls an illuminating moment when, as part of his research, he visited the National Army Museum in Chelsea, where, to his surprise, a section devoted to the Troubles features one of the biscuit launchers that Dugdale helped develop. “From the window, I realised I could see her family home, this beautiful house with a park in front and the Duke of York military base next door. It made me wonder again why anyone would reject that kind of upbringing for a life of such extreme radicalism. Her commitment definitely took her to another level.” That, as with almost everything about the enigma that is Rose Dugdale, is an understatement.
Baltimore is in cinemas in the UK and Ireland from 22 March
Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber: The Extraordinary Life of Rose Dugdale by Sean O’Driscoll is published by Penguin (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
