{"id":7233,"date":"2024-03-23T01:51:49","date_gmt":"2024-03-23T01:51:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/03\/23\/rose-dugdale-heiress-turned-irish-independence-fighter-dies-at-82\/"},"modified":"2024-03-23T01:51:49","modified_gmt":"2024-03-23T01:51:49","slug":"rose-dugdale-heiress-turned-irish-independence-fighter-dies-at-82","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/03\/23\/rose-dugdale-heiress-turned-irish-independence-fighter-dies-at-82\/","title":{"rendered":"Rose Dugdale, Heiress Turned Irish Independence Fighter, Dies at 82"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align:center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1050\" height=\"550\" src=\"https:\/\/i3.wp.com\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2024\/03\/21\/multimedia\/21Dugdale--02-kzpw\/21Dugdale--02-kzpw-facebookJumbo.jpg?fit=1050,550&amp;ssl=1\" class=\"attachment-post-thumbnail size-post-thumbnail wp-post-image\" alt=\"Rose Dugdale, Heiress Turned Irish Independence Fighter, Dies at 82\" title=\"Rose Dugdale, Heiress Turned Irish Independence Fighter, Dies at 82\" \/><\/div><p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Rose Dugdale, an Oxford-educated Englishwoman who left a life of wealth to become a partisan activist fighting for Irish independence, in a career that included bomb making, hijacking and art theft, died on Monday in Dublin. She was 82.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Her death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by Aengus O Snodaigh, a friend and a member of the Irish Parliament. No cause was given.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Throughout the 1970s, Ms. Dugdale, whose family owned a large share of the insurance company Lloyd\u2019s of London, captivated the British and Irish news media with her exploits. Her story \u2014 like that of Patricia Hearst, another heiress-turned-revolutionary who was making news in the United States around the same time \u2014 fed a narrative about glamorous, radical youth run amok in the post-\u201960s era:<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Ms. Dugdale rejected 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 in art and silverware from her parents\u2019 home, with plans to sell it and give the proceeds to the Irish Republican Army.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Her father, Eric, appeared as a witness at her trial, and under British law she was allowed to cross-examine him herself \u2014 an opportunity she used to make political statements.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cI love you,\u201d she told her father, \u201cbut hate everything you stand for.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The judge was nevertheless lenient with her, handing down just a two-year suspended sentence because, he said, the chances that she would break the law again were \u201cextremely remote.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">He was wrong. Immediately after her trial, she traveled to Ireland, where she and another accomplice, <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1975\/10\/22\/archives\/besieged-irish-kidnappers-hold-police-at-bay-they-threaten-to-kill.html?timespastHighlight=Eddie,Gallagher,Dugdale\" title=\"\">Eddie Gallagher<\/a>, hijacked a helicopter and pilot to drop makeshift bombs on a base run by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the police force in Northern Ireland.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The bombs fell wide and failed to detonate, and Ms. Dugdale and Mr. Gallagher went into hiding to plot their next move.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In April 1974, she and three other assailants burst through the doors of Russborough House, a palatial estate southwest of Dublin owned by <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1994\/05\/16\/obituaries\/sir-alfred-beit-91-philanthropist-and-art-collector.html\" title=\"\">Alfred Beit<\/a>, a wealthy British politician and art collector.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">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 haul, valued at a total of 8 million Irish pounds (about $110 million today), was \u201cLady Writing a Letter With Her Maid,\u201d one of only two works by Vermeer in private hands. (The other was in Buckingham Palace.)<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Knowing they could not easily sell the well-known works on the black market, Ms. Dugdale and the other thieves demanded a ransom of 500,000 Irish pounds. They also demanded that Dolours and Marian Price, two I.R.A. members imprisoned for a string of car bombings in England, be transferred to a prison in Northern Ireland.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">After a nationwide hunt, police tracked down the art, and Ms. Dugdale, at a <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1974\/06\/26\/archives\/british-millionaires-daughter-sentenced-to-9-years-in-art-thefts.html\" title=\"\">rural cottage in County Cork<\/a>. This time she pleaded \u201cproudly and incorruptibly guilty\u201d and received a nine-year sentence. As she emerged from the courthouse, she saluted the crowd with a clenched fist.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">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\u2019s streets.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">She also went back to working for the I.R.A., this time as a bomb maker. She and her partner, <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2002\/04\/23\/international\/europe\/sinn-fein-says-no-to-congressional-probe-on-colombia.html\" title=\"\">Jim Monaghan<\/a>, developed a number of innovative weapons, including a projectile launcher that used two packages of McVitie\u2019s Digestive Biscuits to absorb the recoil and a novel type of explosive used in bombings in Northern Ireland and London, killing six people and injuring more than 100.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Bridget Rose Dugdale was born on March 25, 1941, at Yarty, her family\u2019s 600-acre estate in Devon, in southwest England. Both of her parents came from money: Her father was a major shareholder in Lloyd\u2019s, and her mother, Carol (Timmis) Dugdale, was an heiress.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">She grew up shuttling between the family\u2019s rural estate and a sprawling home in London, between riding lessons and society balls. She attended Miss Ironside\u2019s School, a private school for girls that also produced the model and actress <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2023\/07\/16\/arts\/music\/jane-birkin-dead.html\" title=\"\">Jane Birkin<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">When she was 17, Ms. Dugdale joined 1,400 other teenage debutantes in a coming-out ceremony before Queen Elizabeth II. It was <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2020\/11\/11\/books\/review\/the-woman-who-stole-vermeer-anthony-m-amore.html\" title=\"\">the last year that two-centuries-old tradition was performed<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Ms. Dugdale was a reluctant socialite and went along only on the condition that her parents hire a tutor to prepare her for admission to the all-female St. Anne\u2019s College at Oxford University.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">She studied politics, philosophy and economics there and counted the Irish writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch among the professors she got to know personally. Years later, when Ms. Dugdale was facing prison time, Ms. Murdoch wrote letters urging leniency.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">She was by all accounts a middling student, in part because her growing interest in left-wing politics took 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-pitched voices.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">After graduating in 1962, she studied philosophy at Mount Holyoke College, in Massachusetts, receiving a master\u2019s degree, then returned to Britain to study economics at the London School of Economics, earning a Ph.D.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Though Ms. Dugdale worked for the British government as an analyst, she was radicalizing quickly. She received a sizable income from a trust fund and gave away most of it to antipoverty programs around her apartment in Tottenham, an impoverished section of northeast London.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">She fell in with a self-declared \u201crevolutionary socialist\u201d named Walter Heaton, with whom she carried out the 1973 burglary of her parents\u2019 home. While she received a light punishment, he was sentenced to six years in prison.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Ms. Dugdale\u2019s survivors include Mr. Gallagher, whom she married in 1978 while they were both in prison, though they later became estranged, and their son, Ruairi Gallagher.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">After the Good Friday accords mostly brought the violence in Northern Ireland to an end in 1998, Ms. Dugdale stood down as a fighter. But she remained active in Sinn Fein, the pro-independence political party in Ireland and Northern Ireland.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Though she was a divisive figure in Britain, she became a sort of legend in Ireland, the recipient of awards and the subject of biographies and documentaries \u2014 most recently the feature film \u201cBaltimore\u201d (2023), starring Imogen Poots as Ms. Dugdale. (The film was released this month in the United States, with the title \u201cRose\u2019s War.\u201d)<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cI did what I wanted to do,\u201d she said in <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.anphoblacht.com\/contents\/1093\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">a 2011 interview<\/a> before the Dublin Volunteers Dinner, where she was the primary honoree. \u201cI am proud to have been part of the Republican movement, and I hope that I have played my very small part in the success of the armed struggle.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rose Dugdale, an Oxford-educated Englishwoman who left a life of wealth to become a partisan activist fighting for Irish independence, in a career that included bomb making, hijacking and art theft, died on Monday in Dublin. She was 82. Her death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by Aengus O Snodaigh, a friend and a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7234,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2024\/03\/21\/multimedia\/21Dugdale--02-kzpw\/21Dugdale--02-kzpw-facebookJumbo.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[16,11154,72,11155,9650,7975,8216,11156],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7233"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7233"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7233\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7235,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7233\/revisions\/7235"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}