Rose Dugdale

Bridget Rose Dugdale (25 March 1941 – 18 March 2024) was an English debutante who rebelled against her wealthy upbringing, becoming a volunteer in the militant Irish republican organisation, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). As an IRA member, she took part in the theft of paintings worth IR£8 million, a bomb attack on a Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) station using a hijacked helicopter, and developed a rocket launcher and an explosive. Her millionaire father was a former officer and an underwriter at Lloyd's of London who owned Yarty Farm, a estate at Membury near Axminster in Devon. Her mother, Caroline Edith Sutton "Carol" Mosley (née Timmis), was firstly married to John Arthur Noel Mosley and Dugdale was educated at the nearby Miss Ironside's School for Girls in Kensington, west London. She was a popular pupil, with fellow pupil Virginia Ironside stating: "Everyone adored this generous, clever and dashing millionaire's daughter, who was life and laughter". Her debutante ball was held in 1959, with Dugdale describing it as "one of those pornographic affairs which cost about what 60 old-age pensioners receive in six months". While studying there, she began what newspapers would later describe as a "lunge to the left", when she and Jenny Grove, a fellow student, gatecrashed the Oxford Union wearing wigs and men's clothing in protest at the Union's refusal to admit women undergraduates as members, encouraged from the gallery by another student, Sarah Caudwell. After completing her studies at Oxford, she travelled to the United States attending Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, where she obtained a master's degree in philosophy, submitting a thesis on Ludwig Wittgenstein. Dugdale cashed in her share of the family syndicate at Lloyd's, estimated to be £150,000, and distributed the money to poor people in north London. Paintings and silverware valued at £82,000 were stolen, and police believe the proceeds were destined to be sent to the IRA by Heaton. Her father appeared as a witness for the prosecution and was cross-examined by Dugdale, who said to him: "I love you, but hate everything you stand for". In January 1974, Dugdale and several fellow IRA members, including Eddie Gallagher, hijacked a helicopter in County Donegal in the Republic of Ireland. Dugdale and Gallagher then used the helicopter to drop improvised bombs in milk churns on the RUC station in Strabane in Northern Ireland, the first helicopter bombing raid in the history of the British Isles.

On 26 April 1974, Dugdale took part in a raid on Russborough House in County Wicklow, the home of Sir Alfred Beit, 2nd Baronet. Dugdale and three other IRA members forced their way into the house, and pistol-whipped Beit and his wife before tying and gagging the couple.

The IRA members then stole nineteen old master paintings valued at IR£8 million, including works by Gainsborough, Rubens, Vermeer and Goya. On 3 October 1975, Gallagher and fellow IRA member Marion Coyle kidnapped industrialist Tiede Herrema near his home in Castletroy, a suburb of Limerick. They were traced to a house in Monasterevin, County Kildare, and a two-week siege began.

The siege ended on 7 November when Herrema was released, and Coyle and Gallagher were arrested. The wedding took place on 24 January 1978 inside Limerick Prison, and was the first wedding between convicted prisoners in the history of the Republic of Ireland. Dugdale was released from prison in October 1980. She was also a veteran activist in the political party Sinn Féin, which had links to the IRA.

To avoid further police attention, Dugdale turned her focus to manufacturing equipment for IRA attacks. From the mid-1980s to the early 2000s (when the IRA formally renounced violence), she and her colleague Jim Monaghan developed a variety of home-made weapons and bombs that could be cheaply fashioned from materials obtained from consumer shops or smuggled in through imports. One was called the "biscuit launcher", which was used several times by the IRA. Using readily available parts, it fired armour-piercing missiles packed with semtex explosive, using packets of digestive biscuits to absorb the recoil. Dugdale and Monaghan also developed a new type of explosive used in the Glenanne barracks bombing in May 1991, and in a large bomb that destroyed the Baltic Exchange in the City of London in 1992.

In 2007, she spoke out in support of the Shell to Sea campaign against the proposed construction of a high-pressure raw gas pipeline through Rossport by Shell, saying the Shell contract was invalid and needed "to be renegotiated on behalf of the people of Ireland".

Until her death, Dugdale lived in a care home in Dublin run by the Poor Servants of the Mother of God, most of whose residents are retired nuns.

In popular culture

In 2012, she was the subject of a TG4 documentary entitled Mná an IRA (Women of the IRA). A biography of Dugdale by Sean O'Driscoll, Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber: The Extraordinary Life of Rose Dugdale, was published in 2022. A 2023 film, Baltimore (titled Rose's War in the United States and Germany), focussing on Dugdale's role in the 1974 art raid on Russborough House, and starring Imogen Poots as Dugdale, was released in March 2024.