The English heiress who stole art for the IRA |
'They ripped the best paintings out of their frames': The wealthy English heiress who stole art for the IRA
Rose Dugdale rejected her privileged background and joined the IRA. In April 1974, reported the BBC, she took part in "one of the largest art heists in history".
Born into privilege in 1941, Bridget Rose Dugdale looked destined for a life of comfort and convention. Taught by a French governess, educated at elite European finishing schools and ushered into high society as a debutante presented to the Queen, she was groomed for a life of country houses and social duty with a suitable husband of impeccable breeding.
Instead, by her mid-30s, Dugdale had burned every bridge to the world that made her. She gave away her inheritance, stole money from her own family, hijacked a helicopter to attack a police station, and played a central role in one of the largest art heists in history. It was a journey that would end with Dugdale helping to develop bombs for the IRA.
Dugdale's rejection of her establishment upbringing began when, as a debutante, she recoiled from its social ritual and extravagance. She was pushed reluctantly into taking part in the Season, a six-month whirl of parties and engagements designed to usher 17- and 18-year-old girls of the right wealth or background onto the marriage market. She later described her coming-out ball – her formal introduction into upper-class society – as "one of those pornographic affairs, which cost about what 60 old-age pensioners receive in six months".
Contrary to her parents' plans for her, she went to the University of Oxford in 1959 to study philosophy, politics and economics. While she was there, she and a friend dressed in men's clothes to sneak into a debate at the male-only Oxford Union as a protest against the restriction. After a spell at a US university, she returned to London in 1964 to teach and to work as an economist in the Ministry of Aid and Overseas Development. The radical student riots of 1968 drew her towards the revolutionary left, and then came a pilgrimage to Cuba. Back in Britain, she immersed herself in radical politics, working quietly among deprived communities in Tottenham, north London, while concealing her own wealth. By 1973 she had given most of it away.
Newly fixated on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, she helped organise a raid on her parents' home at their 800-acre estate in Devon, stealing about £82,000 worth of art and silver, equivalent to around £1.3m ($1.75m) today. Arrested and defiant in court, she told her father, who was in the witness box: "I love you, [but] at the same time, I hate everything you stand for." Addressing the judge, she said: "You have turned me from an intellectual recalcitrant into a freedom fighter." Rather than being made a political martyr, she walked away with a two-year suspended sentence.
Within months she had begun to foster links with the IRA. However, the militant Irish republicans were naturally suspicious of this upper-class English outsider and distanced themselves from her. In a bizarre escapade, she took part in an unsanctioned mission in January 1974 with some IRA-adjacent figures to hijack a helicopter in County Donegal.
They forced a civilian pilot to take off, with the aim of dropping milk churns filled with explosives on a police station just across the border in Northern Ireland, in Strabane, County Tyrone. But the helicopter was dangerously overloaded, and two churns had to be dumped into the sea after warnings that the aircraft might crash. The fuse was lit prematurely on another bomb and had........