Rose Dugdale, an Oxford-educated Englishwoman who left a lifetime of wealth to turn into a partisan activist combating for Irish independence, in a profession that included bomb making, hijacking and artwork theft, died on Monday in Dublin. She was 82.
Her dying, in a nursing house, was confirmed by Aengus O Snodaigh, a good friend and a member of the Irish Parliament. No trigger was given.
All through the Seventies, Ms. Dugdale, whose household owned a big share of the insurance coverage firm Lloyd’s of London, captivated the British and Irish information media together with her exploits. Her story — like that of Patricia Hearst, one other heiress-turned-revolutionary who was making information in the US across the similar time — fed a story about glamorous, radical youth run amok within the post-’60s period:
Ms. Dugdale rejected her inheritance and liquidated her belief fund to help quite a lot of social and political causes. She and an confederate have been arrested in 1973 for stealing 1000’s of {dollars} in artwork and silverware from her dad and mom’ house, with plans to promote it and provides the proceeds to the Irish Republican Military.
Her father, Eric, appeared as a witness at her trial, and underneath British regulation she was allowed to cross-examine him herself — a possibility she used to make political statements.
“I like you,” she instructed her father, “however hate every little thing you stand for.”
The decide was nonetheless lenient together with her, handing down only a two-year suspended sentence as a result of, he stated, the possibilities that she would break the regulation once more have been “extraordinarily distant.”
He was unsuitable. Instantly after her trial, she traveled to Eire, the place she and one other confederate, Eddie Gallagher, hijacked a helicopter and pilot to drop makeshift bombs on a base run by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the police pressure in Northern Eire.
The bombs fell broad and didn’t detonate, and Ms. Dugdale and Mr. Gallagher went into hiding to plot their subsequent transfer.
In April 1974, she and three different assailants burst by the doorways of Russborough Home, a palatial property southwest of Dublin owned by Alfred Beit, a rich British politician and artwork collector.
They pistol-whipped Mr. Beit, tied him and his spouse up and made off with 19 work by Gainsborough, Goya, Vermeer and different artists. Among the many haul, valued at a complete of 8 million Irish kilos (about $110 million at this time), was “Woman Writing a Letter With Her Maid,” certainly one of solely two works by Vermeer in personal fingers. (The opposite was in Buckingham Palace.)
Understanding they may not simply promote the well-known works on the black market, Ms. Dugdale and the opposite thieves demanded a ransom of 500,000 Irish kilos. In addition they demanded that Dolours and Marian Worth, two I.R.A. members imprisoned for a string of automotive bombings in England, be transferred to a jail in Northern Eire.
After a nationwide hunt, police tracked down the artwork, and Ms. Dugdale, at a rural cottage in County Cork. This time she pleaded “proudly and incorruptibly responsible” and obtained a nine-year sentence. As she emerged from the courthouse, she saluted the gang with a clenched fist.
After being launched from jail in 1980, she returned to Dublin, the place she labored as a neighborhood organizer to stem the rising variety of heroin sellers on town’s streets.
She additionally went again to working for the I.R.A., this time as a bomb maker. She and her accomplice, Jim Monaghan, developed quite a lot of progressive weapons, together with a projectile launcher that used two packages of McVitie’s Digestive Biscuits to soak up the recoil and a novel sort of explosive utilized in bombings in Northern Eire and London, killing six folks and injuring greater than 100.
Bridget Rose Dugdale was born on March 25, 1941, at Yarty, her household’s 600-acre property in Devon, in southwest England. Each of her dad and mom got here from cash: Her father was a serious shareholder in Lloyd’s, and her mom, Carol (Timmis) Dugdale, was an heiress.
She grew up shuttling between the household’s rural property and a sprawling house in London, between driving classes and society balls. She attended Miss Ironside’s Faculty, a personal college for ladies that additionally produced the mannequin and actress Jane Birkin.
When she was 17, Ms. Dugdale joined 1,400 different teenage debutantes in a coming-out ceremony earlier than Queen Elizabeth II. It was the last year that two-centuries-old tradition was performed.
Ms. Dugdale was a reluctant socialite and went alongside solely on the situation that her dad and mom rent a tutor to arrange her for admission to the all-female St. Anne’s School at Oxford College.
She studied politics, philosophy and economics there and counted the Irish author and thinker Iris Murdoch among the many professors she bought to know personally. Years later, when Ms. Dugdale was going through jail time, Ms. Murdoch wrote letters urging leniency.
She was by all accounts a middling scholar, partly as a result of her rising curiosity in left-wing politics took most of her time and vitality. Amongst her many exploits, Ms. Dugdale and a good friend dressed up as male college students and sneaked right into a session of the all-male Oxford Union debating society, the place they jeered and heckled in low-pitched voices.
After graduating in 1962, she studied philosophy at Mount Holyoke School, in Massachusetts, receiving a grasp’s diploma, then returned to Britain to review economics on the London Faculty of Economics, incomes a Ph.D.
Although Ms. Dugdale labored for the British authorities as an analyst, she was radicalizing rapidly. She obtained a large revenue from a belief fund and gave away most of it to antipoverty applications round her condominium in Tottenham, an impoverished part of northeast London.
She fell in with a self-declared “revolutionary socialist” named Walter Heaton, with whom she carried out the 1973 housebreaking of her dad and mom’ house. Whereas she obtained a light-weight punishment, he was sentenced to 6 years in jail.
Ms. Dugdale’s survivors embody Mr. Gallagher, whom she married in 1978 whereas they have been each in jail, although they later grew to become estranged, and their son, Ruairi Gallagher.
After the Good Friday accords largely introduced the violence in Northern Eire to an finish in 1998, Ms. Dugdale stood down as a fighter. However she remained lively in Sinn Fein, the pro-independence political celebration in Eire and Northern Eire.
Although she was a divisive determine in Britain, she grew to become a form of legend in Eire, the recipient of awards and the topic of biographies and documentaries — most lately the characteristic movie “Baltimore” (2023), starring Imogen Poots as Ms. Dugdale. (The movie was launched this month in the US, with the title “Rose’s Conflict.”)
“I did what I needed to do,” she stated in a 2011 interview earlier than the Dublin Volunteers Dinner, the place she was the first honoree. “I’m proud to have been a part of the Republican motion, and I hope that I’ve performed my very small half within the success of the armed battle.”
