Rose Dugdale : From an Upper-Class Debutante to Art Thief and Bomber

 

A thief​ and her three accomplices forced their way into the library of a country house, where a rich, elderly couple were listening to music on the gramophone. Waving their assault rifles, they screamed at Lord and Lady Beit to lie face down on the floor. The leader, who spoke with a strong French accent, instructed her accomplices to start with the Goya above the mantelpiece, a portrait of a beautiful young actress looking out from beneath slightly worried brows. Then Frans Hals’s The Lute Player was lifted off the wall, and on through the house, the woman with the conspicuous French accent pointing out the paintings she wanted: zis one and zat one and zis one.
 
Lady Beit tried to draw attention away from the most valuable painting in the house, Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid, by screaming ‘They are taking the Vermeer’ as the gang stopped briefly in front of a picture by Paulus Morelse. The trick didn’t work: the leader knew what she was looking for. The gang moved quickly, pausing only to shout what Lady Beit later described as ‘communistic insults’ at the couple, calling them capitalist pigs, exploiters of the workers of the world, and generally leaving Lady Beit with the impression that she would shortly be taken to the cellar and shot ‘like the unfortunate Romanovs’. They took nineteen works in total, including two Gainsboroughs, three Rubenses, four Guardis and Velázquez’s earliest known work, Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus. The whole thing was over in less than fifteen minutes. As was widely reported at the time, the group’s leader struck both of the Beits as enormously composed and in control, with an unfaltering eye for the most valuable paintings.
 
Art heists make good copy, and the 1974 robbery at Russborough House in Co. Wicklow was an all-timer. The Goya, the Velázquez, the Hals, the Vermeer: the jewels of one of the greatest private collections in the world, and certainly the greatest in Ireland, torn out of their frames and piled up in the boot of a dilapidated getaway car. As always happens, the press competed to make spectacular, largely hypothetical claims about the market value of stolen masterpieces that could never be sold on the open market. Eight million pounds, fifteen million. As also always happens, these figures were accompanied by a reminder that the paintings were, of course, priceless. At the time, the Russborough art heist was generally believed to be the largest on record.
 
A week after the theft, the director of the National Gallery of Ireland, where the Beit collection usually spent part of the year on display, received a letter demanding that four IRA bombers be moved from Brixton Prison, where they were on hunger strike, to an Irish prison. Once that was done, five of the paintings would be returned. A ransom of £500,000 would secure the return of the remaining fourteen. They had ten days to send the money, otherwise the paintings would be burned. Just as the press coverage was becoming hysterical, the gang leader was captured: she had been hiding out in a cottage in West Cork. The paintings were found unharmed in the boot of her car.
 
Rose Dugdale wasn’t what anybody was expecting. For one thing, she was an English heiress, the daughter of a member of Lloyd’s of London who owned an estate in Devon. Born in 1941, she had lived a life of privilege: educated at Miss Ironside’s School for Girls in Kensington, followed by finishing school in France, followed by St Anne’s College, Oxford. But at some point in her early thirties she had put all this behind her to dedicate herself to the cause of a united Ireland. At the time of her arrest, she was wanted along with her boyfriend, an IRA-affiliated ‘hellraiser’ called Eddie Gallagher, for hijacking a helicopter and attempting to drop milk churns full of explosives over an RUC station in Strabane. A couple of years before the Russborough theft, she had been given a two-year suspended sentence for stealing art and silver worth £82,000 from her parents’ house, intending to use the proceeds to fund the IRA. She’d been tried along with her boyfriend at the time, who was sentenced to five years, apparently because the judge believed the whole thing had been his idea – yet another well-meaning young rich girl led astray.
 
With few exceptions, the press agreed with the judge at the earlier trial, framing Dugdale as a reluctant debutante whose radicalism was intended to annoy her long-suffering parents. During the Russborough trial her background received far more attention than her stated motive. There were just too many irresistible photographs of her at her coming out ball, or skiing, or standing around with horses. The trial was brief. Dugdale was given nine years for the robbery, a sentence which ran concurrently with the one for the attempted bombing in Strabane. A few weeks later, she had a baby – somehow, nobody had noticed that she was pregnant with Gallagher’s child. She served six and a half years, moving to Dublin after her release and working for An Phoblacht, Sinn Féin’s weekly newspaper. Afterwards, she more or less disappeared from view, apart from giving the occasional interview that made it clear her political convictions hadn’t changed.
 
Dugdale’s relative obscurity today seems like an oversight, not least because we enjoy the idea of the brilliant, charismatic art thief, even if it’s usually the product of wishful thinking. We want art thieves to be special because we want art to be special, belonging to some higher category of possession. The person who steals a Vermeer should be doing it for a better reason than to sell it on the black market, or use it as collateral in a drug deal, or ransom it back to its owners. Usually, however, that’s exactly what happens. The people behind spectacular art thefts turn out to be run of the mill criminals stealing for run of the mill reasons.
 
When the Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911, it was widely supposed that the theft could only have been pulled off by devilishly clever operatives, working on behalf of an evil millionaire. In fact, it was stolen by a handyman who had once been employed by the Louvre and who kept the painting under his bed for two years before being caught trying to sell it. In 1985, a masked gang held security guards and forty members of the public at gunpoint in the Musée Marmottan Monet. They stole nine Impressionist paintings, including Monet’s Impression, Sunrise. When the works were recovered five years later in a warehouse in Corsica, it was assumed that the theft was tied to the Corsican nationalist movement. But detectives quickly clarified that the thieves were just thieves, with no motive other than profit. The men who stole The Scream from the Munch Museum in Oslo in 2004 had to have the painting pointed out to them: they knew nothing about it other than that it was valuable.
 
Received wisdom holds that it’s pointless to steal famous (and famously expensive) artworks because there is no way to sell them on. As a look at some of the 52,000 items on Interpol’s Stolen Works of Art database will attest, however, masterpieces keep getting stolen all the same. There are four Matisses out there, if they haven’t been destroyed: Reading Girl in White and Yellow, stolen from the Kunsthal in Rotterdam in 2012; Pastorale, from the City Museum of Modern Art in Paris, 2010; Le Jardin du Luxembourg, from the Museu da Chácara do Céu in Rio, 2006; and, still unrecovered after half a century, Vue de Saint-Tropez, which was taken in 1972 from the Musée Albert-André, Bagnols-sur-Cèze. Sometimes the thefts are mystifying: in 2016, seven of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup prints were lifted from a museum in Springfield, Missouri: the thieves took beef, vegetable, tomato, onion, green pea, chicken noodle and black bean – but left behind pepper pot, cream of mushroom and consommé (beef). Interpol has a smartphone app called Id-Art: if you see anything that looks like one of the treasures on the list, upload a picture and you could be in for a reward.
 
Dugdale’s story seems to belong to a different world. An art thief who was in it for more than personal gain, who shouted ‘capitalist pig’ at representatives of the ruling class. A millionaire’s daughter who directed all of her considerable personal and financial resources towards the anti-colonial, anti-capitalist struggle. A pioneer in a field that usually confines women to driving the getaway car or holding the ladder steady while the chaps climb out of the window. An exact contemporary of Ulrike Meinhof and Patty Hearst, still alive, and resolutely unapologetic for her actions. A hero.

 
Two books ​ about Dugdale’s life have been published in the past eighteen months, both generous and well-researched, seeking to revise the lurid portrait the press gave in the 1970s of the dotty rich girl who woke up one day and said to herself that it might be terrific fun to give the Troubles a spin. Sean O’Driscoll’s Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber, based largely on interviews with Dugdale and the people close to her, contains new material on her activities after her release and her role in developing weapons for the IRA in the 1980s. Anthony Amore’s The Woman Who Stole Vermeer, written without her participation, focuses mainly on the Russborough heist and the period leading up to it. Both books are responses to the feeling I imagine a lot of people must have when encountering Dugdale’s story for the first time: surely this woman deserves to be taken far more seriously than she has been.
 
O’Driscoll, an investigative journalist, explains that he was ‘drawn to the story of Rose Dugdale for many reasons: a fascination with 1960s radicalism and 1970s urban guerrilla groups, and interest in the story of Northern Ireland, and, most of all, a wish to break through the silence that surrounds the Provisional IRA more than twenty years after it ended its armed campaign’. Amore, who is in charge of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, has good reason to be more interested in the theft itself. In 1990, his museum was the target of a famous heist, when the two perpetrators disguised themselves as police officers before handcuffing the guards to pipes in the basement and carrying off Vermeer’s Concert, probably the most valuable unrecovered painting in the world, along with works by Rembrandt, Degas, Manet and Govert Flinck. (The FBI has valued the stolen pictures at $500 million, which isn’t bad going, given that the thieves left behind paintings by Raphael, Titian, Botticelli and Michelangelo.) Amore describes Dugdale as ‘a groundbreaker in ... her genres of criminality. Her involvement in an aerial assault on a police station marked the first attack of its kind.’ More than that, she is ‘the great outlier – history’s first and only female mastermind and thief of high-value, highly recognisable masterpieces’. Both writers take it for granted that hers is a story worth telling.
 
And of course it is. The vision of her bursting into the library at Russborough has stayed clear in my mind. But, to my disappointment, this isn’t that sort of movie. To begin with, anyone attempting to retell Dugdale’s story must contend with the unmistakeable air of fiasco that hovers over everything she did. Stalking into the Beits’ library holding a gun, heading unerringly for the most important paintings in the collection, advancing ideas about capitalism and exploitation that any sane person would agree with. This, it’s true, is Hollywood material, but things kept not quite going according to plan. Dugdale threatened to burn the stolen paintings unless Dolours and Marian Price were transferred to an Irish prison – but then their father begged the thieves to return the paintings to the National Gallery to give the public a chance to enjoy them. Dugdale and her accomplices zipped through the Irish countryside in their silver getaway car, but it broke down, so Dugdale had to take it to a mechanic, who was struck by the fact that this agitated woman was speaking in an obviously fake French accent.
 
A high-level IRA source was quoted as saying that the organisation knew the British government would never trade members of a designated terrorist organisation for paintings, particularly paintings that were not owned by the British state. Another source pointed out that no IRA operation would involve renting a cottage in an isolated location where any stranger would be instantly conspicuous, let alone a stranger who was pretending to be French. Informants were almost uniformly pissed off about the fact that the heist detracted attention from the hunger strike itself. Dugdale later described the Strabane bombing as ‘operationally very important and exciting’, but an explosives expert testified at her trial that the homemade devices were ‘shockingly amateurish’. On and on like this, one unforced error after another.
 
Both Amore and O’Driscoll tell Dugdale’s story with a straight face, but O’Driscoll introduces the word ‘debacle’ quite early on, and Amore has a gentle way of stressing that for all the seeming romance of her actions, they did have an uncanny habit of going wrong. O’Driscoll in particular has a good line in deflating quotes. He interviewed Eddie Gallagher, Dugdale’s boyfriend and accomplice, and asked how the relationship between the two of them developed. Gallagher: ‘You know the way when you are thrown together and there is a shower of hounds chasing you to try and put you in prison and you end up in the one bed. So what are you going to do, like? You can only talk for so long.’
 
The element of farce isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker. Dugdale ought still to be a compelling character. She really did steal all those paintings, in addition to making a bombing run over a police station, and according to interviews she gave to O’Driscoll, developing bomb-making techniques that were used in several IRA attacks in the 1980s. The real problem, for anyone who wants to take her seriously, is her own overpowering sense of herself as a heroic and rosy-cheeked footsoldier of the struggle, brave and true, scourge of the running dog and the capitalist pig, friend to the working man, thorn in the side of the establishment. Long before any journalist looked at her life and thought it might make a fantastic book, Dugdale herself was busily writing up the opening paragraphs: a thrillerish, minute-by-minute account of the robbery, so perfectly reimagined for maximum drama that it calls into question the authenticity of the entire scene.
 
At her trial for the theft from her parents’ house, Dugdale, for some reason, spoke like a person who had learned English from 19th-century rebel songs. She called the judge a ‘yeoman’, and predicted that he would give her the longest sentence he could out of fear of ‘the united strength of people of no property, brave men and true ... You are afraid of this because one day – and I believe it will be very shortly – these men will brush you aside and deprive you of the power and privilege you abrogate and abuse.’ This lecture was delivered in a Cockney accent. At her trial for the Russborough theft, Dugdale gave another speech evidently intended for posterity, announcing that the ‘whole people of Ireland’ were ‘solely entitled to the wealth of this land which they laboured to produce. The wealth of this land may not be appropriated from them. It neither belongs to the Englishman nor his Orangeman Carsonite lackey, nor his Green Tory lapdog in Dublin.’ For this occasion, she had adopted a brogue, which she kept up while speaking about her role as an ‘Irish freedom fighter’, a soldier of ‘our army’. Unsurprisingly, the IRA leadership denied any connection to the robbery, the bombing, or indeed to Dugdale herself.
 
Dugdale’s commitment to the role of the gallant revolutionary has been unwavering, but oddly shallow. Even now, when given the opportunity to explain her actions in a way that might communicate the depth of her ideological and political commitments, Dugdale reaches straight for the script marked ‘Things a Marxist Heroine Might Say’. When asked whether she would really have burned the paintings, O’Driscoll reports, she spoke ‘not of the role they might have played in achieving the IRA’s aims’, but of the ‘beatings in South Africa, men forced out of their villages to go and work for the Beits in the dangerous mines. Is a painting worth their lives?’ When he asks her about the Strabane bombing, which she calls ‘the happiest day of my life’, she thinks of herself: ‘It was the first time I felt like I was really at the centre of things, that I was really doing as I said I would do. It was what you might call an electric feeling.’
 
Russborough House has been robbed three times since then. In 1986, a gang led by Martin Cahill, a notorious Dublin crime boss, took off with eighteen paintings, including the Vermeer, the Goya and two of the Guardis. Cahill couldn’t find a buyer, so eventually he made a deal with a Belgian diamond dealer, who was to keep the paintings as collateral in return for a loan. Cahill planned to use the loan to buy drugs, sell them, pay the diamond dealer back, reclaim the paintings and start all over again. But he was caught in a sting operation, and most of the paintings were returned. In 2001 and 2002, thieves thought to be affiliated with Cahill drove a Volkswagen through the front door of the house, stealing two paintings the first time and five the second. All except the Guardis were recovered. Everything about these later cases is standard issue. Something squalid to do with drugs and collateral, straightforwardly venal motives, and a series of mugshots of men who are, in the end, just some guy.

Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber: The Extraordinary Life of Rose Dugdale. By
by Sean O’Driscoll. Sandycove, 368 pp., £18.99, June, 978 1 84488 555 8.

The Woman Who Stole Vermeer: The True Story of Rose Dugdale and the Russborough House Art Heist. By Anthony M. Amore. Pegasus, 272 pp., £12.99, February, 978 1 64313 529 8

You can only talk for so long. By Rosa Lyster. London Review of Books, October 20, 2022. 

The man in charge of security at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—which, 15 years before he got the job, was the site of what is considered to be the world’s largest property theft, with works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas and others still missing—is running to be the state auditor of Massachusetts. Anthony Amore hopes his heist-free tenure at the Gardner will bolster his candidacy to be in charge of auditing state agencies to rectify excesses, waste, redundancies and non-compliance.
Amore is running as a Republican, though he is a relatively moderate one rather than a far-right, Trump-affiliated candidate. He has been endorsed by the state’s Republican governor, Charlie Baker, ahead of the 8 November election, in which he faces Democratic candidate Diana DiZoglio, who currently serves as a state senator representing an area north of Boston along the Massachusetts border with New Hampshire.

“As an independent and experienced watchdog, Anthony will be able to keep the checks and balances on Beacon Hill,” governor Baker said in his endorsement of Amore, referring to the Boston neighbourhood where the state capitol is located.
 
In Amore’s view, the auditor role would make him the state’s “chief accountability officer”, he told Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi. “You make government accountable to the people,” he added. “You do these investigations and make them public.”

The investigation into the Gardner heist, a brazen theft carried out by two men in the early morning hours after St. Patrick’s Day 1990, has notably lacked public transparency. Even now, years after the statute of limitations for prosecuting the theft expired, and with a $10m reward on the table, the 13 stolen artefacts’ whereabouts remain a mystery. In 2013 investigators from the FBI said they had identified the thieves, but the information was never made public.

“We believe we know who stole the paintings,” Amore told Vennochi, but hewed to the party line, refusing to say more about the thieves. “If we put out the names of people we think did it, it would lead to bad leads. [...] There are enormous amounts of people who have spoken to us in confidence. We can’t put names out there. We can’t betray people’s trust in that matter.”

Investigations into the Gardner heist for years revolved around figures in the Boston organised crime world. Some evidence suggested the artworks—collectively valued at around $500m—may have been stolen to serve as bargaining chips to negotiate the release of imprisoned mobsters. FBI investigators for years pursued one mob-affiliated figure in particular, Robert “The Cook” Gentile, who they believed knew the artworks’ whereabouts and had at one point been in possession of some or all of them. But Gentile maintained he knew nothing about the Gardner works up until his death last year.

Amore, meanwhile, in addition to his work at the Gardner has also as a senior agent in the Department of Homeland Security and is a licensed private investigator. He is also a published author, having written or co-written three books about art crime. His most recent, The Woman Who Stole Vermeer (2020, Pegasus Crime), tells the story of Rose Dugdale, a leader of the 1974 heist of works by Goya, Vermeer, Gainsborough and others from Russborough House in Ireland. Amore said the story of that heist, and the recovery of the stolen works shortly after Dugale’s caper, gave him hope that—more than 30 years later—the Gardner works might still be returned.

“Masterpieces, these highly recognizable sorts of works, are just like the paintings that were stolen from the Gardner there. Those types of paintings have a much higher recovery rate than others,” Amore told WBUR last year. “So these are the types of things that we use to motivate us, myself and the FBI in our continued hunt for the Gardner art.”

If Amore prevails on 8 November, a new head of security will have to take up the task of hunting for the Gardner Museum’s stolen art.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s head of security is running for statewide office in Massachusetts. By  Benjamin Sutton. The Art Newspaper, October 7. 2022. 

Rose Dugdale’s life certainly has been, as the subtitle of a superb new biography suggests, "extraordinary". In fact, extraordinary seems like an understatement – if you were unwise enough to present her story as fiction, it would be dismissed as unbelievable. But thanks to author Sean O’Driscoll’s painstaking research, we know that the tale is indeed true.

It portrays a woman of contradictions: a debutant presented to the Queen, who became a Marxist radical devoted to the violent overthrow of capitalism; the daughter of a British Army officer, who helped design weapons which killed British troops; a person capable of great personal kindness, but also capable of throwing boiling water over a Garda, and of threatening her own son.
 
Extraordinary, for sure.

Rose Dugdale was born into a wealthy but extremely strict family, where she and her sister had to curtsey to guests, where friends described the house as "regimented" and "like being in the army".
Was it this rather odd background which turned her into a rebel? Perhaps, though as the author points out, her sister Caroline had the same upbringing, and ended up marrying a Tory MP and remained a Conservative all her life.

In any event, Rose Dugdale was reluctant to conform from an early age, only agreeing to be "presented" to the Queen as a debutant if she was also allowed to sit the Oxford entrance exam.
She had a colourful time at Oxford, having an affair with a woman lecturer, and disguising herself as a man to take part in a debate in the male-only Oxford Union (hastening the end of that ludicrous gender bar).

She worked on development economics for the UN and for the British government, but was increasingly drawn to radicalism. In 1971, aged 30, she had a considerable fortune thanks to the family trust, worth well over £1 million today. She decided to give it away, opening an office in Tottenham where she disbursed money to the needy.

She also became interested in the unfolding situation in Northern Ireland, becoming more militant after Bloody Sunday. She and her boyfriend, a former British soldier, used her Lotus sports car to ferry weapons for the IRA across the Irish Sea.

To raise funds for the IRA, she led a burglary of her family estate in Devon, robbing art works worth around £1 million today (it was all later recovered; her boyfriend was jailed for six years, she was given a two-year suspended sentence).

She then hooked up with maverick Republican Eddie Gallagher, and together they embarked on a number of high-profile operations.

When the author asked Dugdale what was the happiest day of her life, she nominated the day she bombed Strabane. "Yes. It was the first time I felt like I was really at the centre of things, that I was really doing as I said I would do. It was what you might call an electric feeling". This in reference to an escapade in which Dugdale helped kidnap a helicopter pilot at gunpoint, before dropping milk churn bombs on the British Army barracks in Strabane. The operation was a fiasco – the bombers nearly blew themselves up, failed to cause any damage to the barracks, and endangered the lives of the many civilians who gathered to watch the show. But what does that matter compared to making Dugdale feel that she was at the centre of things?

She also played a key role in the robbery of Russborough House. Sir Alfred Beit, the owner, noted that she had a good eye for art, as she identified which paintings they should take. As she was posing as a French woman, she did this in a fake French action: "Zis one, and zis one. Non! Not zat one". This adds a surreal comic touch, but the robbery involved the threat of violence against the Beits and their staff, and Dugdale appeared to be serious about burning the paintings if their demands were not met (her partner in crime, Eddie Gallagher, claims that he was against it).
 
Jailed for her part in the robbery, Dugdale concealed the fact that she was pregnant, which was only discovered when she went into labour. Prison officers decided there was no time to properly secure the maternity hospital, so she gave birth in her cell. She later married Gallagher, mainly to avoid being deported to Britain, where she was still wanted for the Strabane bombing.

By this time, of course, Gallagher was also in prison, having been jailed for the kidnap of Dutch industrialist Dr Tiede Herrema. Dugdale’s release was one of the kidnappers’ demands; if she wasn’t freed, they threatened to kill Herrema. Dugdale was asked to intervene to save the innocent Herrema’s life; she declined. "I didn’t think it was my place to tell them to stop the kidnapping."

This demonstrates Dugdale’s ruthless streak, which was much in evidence while she was in prison. At one point she threw a basin of boiling order over a female garda sergeant, causing severe burns.
On her release from prison, she became involved in agitation against drug dealers in Dublin’s inner city, through Concerned Parents Against Drugs. She advocated using extreme measures, such as punishment shootings, but the IRA declined to introduce such methods to the south.

When she discovered her son was dealing ecstasy, she (wrongly) blamed his then girlfriend; her solution was to drive her car at the girlfriend, almost hitting her. She later told him a story about an Italian woman, who disapproved of her own son dealing drugs – and murdered him. Eddie Gallagher, who heard this story – or threat – was sufficiently concerned to warn her against harming their son.
She later became involved with IRA bomb-maker Jim Monahan, and some of the most interesting passages in this book concern their joint efforts at weapons development, including the so-called 'biscuit launcher’, a shoulder fired missile launcher which used two packets of digestive biscuits to absorb the recoil.

The IRA faced a crisis in 1991 when a bunker flooded, destroying their stores of Libyan detonating cord, threatening to bring their bombing campaign to a halt. It was Dugdale who came up with the solution, extracting the explosive material in Semtex to use in detonating cord. The idea worked, allowing the spectacular attack on the Baltic Exchange in the City of London. This was a great success for the IRA; not so much for the three innocent people killed in the bomb – Paul Butt, 29, Thomas Casey, 49, and Danielle Carter, 15. The author repeatedly names the victims of such violence, putting a human face on the consequences of the IRA’s actions, and of Dugdale’s contribution to their campaign.
Rose and Jim were valued within the IRA for their bomb-making skills; but their leftist politics were not welcome in Sinn Féin, which pushed them out of the party’s education department. "The message was clear: keep developing weapons, not political thought." They were eventually readmitted, but the Marxism was not.

This is an absorbing, well-researched and extremely well-written account of a life that almost defies belief. Perhaps the last word should be left to the author, Sean O’Driscoll: "The two sides of Rose, the extraordinarily generous and the disturbingly brutal, were evident in my conversations with her. She exuded the energy of someone who was very kind to children, to animals and to the poor, but she showed little empathy for anyone she regarded as being on the wrong side of class politics... In prison, she offered shelter to the most painfully marginalised, yet she had no compunction in disfiguring a police officer by flinging a basin of boiling water into her face. This book presents no prescription or diagnosis, but I hope it offers insights into a complex personality."

David McCullagh on the extraordinary life of Rose Dugdale. By  David McCullagh.  RTE, October 1, 2022. 

'Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber: The Extraordinary Life of Rose Dugdale' by Sean O'Driscoll. Discussion about a new biography of Rose Dugdale, who was very active within the Provisional IRA campaigns in the 1970’s.  With author Sean O'Driscoll.

RTE, June 21, 2022

Rick Perlstein once described the end of the 1960s counterculture as “a blaze of numbskull adventurism and Maoist masquerade” that flickered out by 1970. It seems no one told Rose Dugdale, the star of Anthony M. Amore’s “The Woman Who Stole Vermeer,” who in 1974 elevated numbskull Maoist adventurism to an art form — literally — by making off with the Dutch master’s painting “Lady Writing a Letter With Her Maid” from Russborough House, the Palladian showcase of Sir Alfred and Lady Beit just south of Dublin.

 Before her political awakening, notoriety and subsequent imprisonment, Dugdale was an upper-class London debutante. Born in March 1941, she was “tucked safely away” at her father’s country estate during the German air raids, “a Blitz baby only by date, not by experience.” Her childhood in East Devon was spent, according to friends and family, in “a farmhouse smartened up to the extent of being ‘ludicrously overdone,’” riding horses, being “jolly smartly dressed” and giggling. Rose was devoted to her “smart, handsome, lean and athletic” father, Colonel Dugdale. Amore — the head of security at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum — relates the likely apocryphal tale of the colonel having his teeth knocked out while playing polo, dismounting, shoving them back into place — where they “stayed put for several more years” — and carrying on.

 Rose was educated at Miss Ironside’s in South Kensington — Jane Birkin would be its most famous alumna — with, in her words, “the daughters of aristocracy … learning to curtsy, and worrying not about exams, ‘for Mr. Right was bound to come along eventually.’” Headmistress Virginia Ironside remembered, “Everyone adored this generous, clever and dashing millionaire’s daughter, who was life and laughter.” As Amore notes, “It was high praise from a woman who taught countless young women gifted with Dugdale-like stock.” After graduation, she did the society lady’s grand tour.

 She came out in the 1958 season, the last year girls were presented to the queen, owing to the diminishing “class” of participants. (Princess Margaret put it less delicately: “We had to put a stop to it. Every tart in London was getting in.”) Rose found the spectacle “a torture” but submitted so that her parents would allow her to study politics, philosophy and economics at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. “It was the last time,” Amore observes, “she would do anything at her parents’ command for the rest of her life.”

 At Oxford, Dugdale was at first “extremely right-wing,” defending the House of Lords and the class system and collecting student clubs. Her rebellions were unimaginative — she wore men’s clothes, smoked incessantly and seldom cleaned her room. Rose’s own recollection is characteristically disarming: “I turned into the most disagreeable kind of intellectual, badly dressed and extremely arrogant.” She took an “unimpressive” third-class degree and went on to Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts for graduate work in philosophy. The novelist Iris Murdoch, who taught her at Oxford, predicted moderate establishment success for Rose, as perhaps “an able administrator or a good university teacher.” Rose had different ideas.

 An aborted lectureship at Bedford College, two years in the Ministry of Overseas Development and the revolutionary atmosphere of 1968 combined to transform Rose “from academic to activist.” She railed against the Vietnam War, the iniquities of capitalism and, above all, the English yoke in Ireland. Bloody Sunday — the massacre of 13 Irish Republican protesters in January 1972 — drew Rose to domestic terrorism.

 As Amore illustrates with an irresistible blend of wryness and affection, her adopted proletarian role was not always convincing or particularly noble. Rose continued to attend operas and horse races, supported by an allowance from her father. Her conversation was peppered with “old left-wing jargon like something out of an old pamphlet from the Fabians.” And her affair with the socialist Wally Heaton was carried out in plain view of his beleaguered wife and daughters. Whether out of “guilt, restitution or both,” Rose gave Mrs. Heaton 25,000 British pounds during the relationship.

 The road to Russborough was paved with misadventure. Amore’s winning detachment is unchanged as Rose evolves from debutante to desperado. She tried to enlist Wally’s cousin-in-law, an associate of East London’s infamous Kray brothers, to orchestrate criminal activities in aid of the I.R.A., but he balked at the prospect of committing treason and turned police informant. In June 1973, Rose and Wally burglarized her family’s estate while they were out at the Epsom Derby, depositing the valuables at the flat of a former tutor. At the open-and-shut trial, she made feeble denials while proclaiming herself “a freedom fighter”; frequently kissed Wally in the dock; and disparaged her put-upon parents as “gangsters, thieves and oppressors of the poor.” Wally was sentenced to six years in prison, while Rose’s two-year suspended sentence was delivered with sexist condescension and what Amore calls “a legendary display of poor character evaluation.” The judge was, to be sure, wildly off the mark: “I think the risk that you will ever again commit burglary or any dishonesty is extremely remote.”

 Within the year, Dugdale was dropping bombs on the police station at the Irish town of Strabane. In keeping with the element of farce, the explosives failed to detonate, but still she declared the fiasco “operationally very important and exciting.” A local official enjoyed witnessing his “enemy making a fool of himself.” Undaunted, Dugdale shifted her sights to Russborough House and its famous — and poorly guarded — collection of pictures assembled by the South African diamond magnate Sir Alfred Beit and his brother, Otto.

 Alfred’s nephew (and namesake) and his wife were at home on the night of April 26, 1974. Dugdale, her new boyfriend and two accomplices bound, gagged and insulted the Beits (“capitalist pig” was the disappointing extent of it) and swiped 19 important paintings by Gainsborough, Goya, Rubens, Velázquez, Vermeer — to whom fewer than 40 works are fully attributed today — and others from their frames. The estimated £8 million haul was recovered upon Rose’s capture 10 days later.

 For her first three days in captivity, Rose refused to confirm her identity or remove her brunette wig. The I.R.A. disavowed the robbery. The ensuing trial concluded with Rose’s solemn, semi-coherent peroration and the jury’s near-immediate verdict. This time, she got nine years in prison.

 Amore’s publisher has falsely advertised his droll, engaging book as an “unbelievable” heist story. “Ocean’s 8” (or 11, 12, 13) it’s not, Dugdale is more Fawlty than Ocean. Yet this in no way diminishes the pleasures of “The Woman Who Stole Vermeer.” Rose is terrific company: clever, forthright and flamboyant. (During her incarceration, she wed, gave birth and petitioned for the construction of squash facilities.) She is still alive today — though she did not grant Amore an interview — and is now praised by the former Irish republicans. Her Facebook profile photo is the Russborough Vermeer.

 And Rose’s legacy? The historian David Farber has suggested that “the ’60s generation of activists saw themselves as acting in history. ‘The Whole World Is Watching’ — they were literally chanting it in the streets. And that’s the irony that’s heated up this debate so much. Because in the end, well, maybe they weren’t the historical agents of change quite as much as they hoped.” One imagines Rose’s unprintable reply.

 How Rose Dugdale Went From British Debutante to I.R.A. ‘Freedom Fighter’. By Max Carter. The New York Times, November 11, 2020.

When Rose Dugdale became international news in the mid-1970s, she emerged as an emblem of the times. Fiery, bold, and brash, she defied the conventions of her birth and of her gender in everything from action to attire. At the same time, she was generous, articulate, and unquestionably bright. Her criminality, combined with her lineage, her degree from Oxford, and her doctorate in economics, made her a curiosity to journalists not only in Ireland and Britain but in North America as well. She was media gold, having abandoned a life of wealth and leisure to take up arms in operations that would almost certainly, if not intentionally, lead her to prison.'

Dugdale was also a radical, not just politically but criminally. No woman before her or since has ever committed anything resembling the art thefts for which she served as mastermind, leader, and perpetrator. For these and other crimes, she carries no regrets or remorse and offers no alibis. The ethical decisions she made during her life were her own, formed after years of intense study in universities and on the ground, from Cuba to Belfast.

Hers was an age of conflict. The antiwar movement, assassinations and riots in the United States, massive student protests in major cities in Europe, civil wars from Guatemala to Ethiopia, a recent revolution in Cuba, a coup in Portugal, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland— these were the fires burning around the world, and she studied all of them.

Hers was also an era of liberation, in its many manifestations. Liberation theology was emerging in Latin America, a symbiosis of Marxist socioeconomics and Christian thought meant to combat greed and thus, liberate the impoverished from their oppressors. Similarly, the Black Power movement was on the rise, and Kwame Ture (the former Stokely Carmichael) and Charles V. Hamilton had recently published Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, examining systemic racism in the United States and proposing a liberation from the preexisting order in the country. The Black Power movement would capture Dugdale’s attention throughout her life. There was sexual liberation, with free love and changes in age-old gender roles. Dugdale would test these waters, especially in her open relationship with a married man to whom she provided financial support and engaged in a sort of domestic ménage à trois. There was the women’s liberation movement, which had started at around the time of Rose’s own ideological awakening in the late 1960s, and from the rejection of societal expectations as a young aristocrat to challenging dress codes at Oxford to taking the lead in militant operations in a way few women of her day dared, Rose reflected that movement in the most radical ways. And, of course, there was the struggle for the liberation of Northern Ireland from British colonial rule—the struggle that would become more important to Rose Dugdale than any other cause, or person, in her life.
Dugdale was unusually earnest in her revolutionary activism. She had no thirst for power, no visions of grandeur for herself; her visions were only for the audacious goals of a free Ireland and the end of capitalism. She found fulfillment in joining the fight and in participating in a grand fashion. While much of what she did and what she tried to accomplish was ill-advised and unquestionably criminal, her motives were no secret and her justifications clear. They were also formed wholly on her own and were not the result of her having fallen under the spell of some charismatic man, despite such claims from lazy onlookers.

Her unbridled zeal for her causes was the topic of countless contemporaneous journalistic opinions, and they typically lay somewhere on a continuum, with “Reluctant Debutante Rebelling against Her Parents” at one end and “Poor Little Rich Girl Radicalized by Her Boyfriend” at the other. In fact, neither of these is completely accurate. Yes, there are elements of rebellion against her parents’ wealth, and it is indeed correct that her militancy intensified while she was with boyfriend Walter Heaton, but the truth is that her convictions were the result of her own studies, her own mind, and her own soul. Rose Dugdale was her own person—not her parents’, not Heaton’s, and not the IRA’s.

***

A major flaw in prior examinations of Dugdale is that, generally speaking, they have focused on the superficial—on frivolous matters such as her looks, her hair color, her choice in attire, her onetime wealth, the age difference between her and her love interests, her pedigree, and her résumé. A closer examination of the woman reveals that none of these were the things about which she chose to speak. Ask her about her youth hunting on the family estate, and she’d tell you about the utility of learning to use a rifle. Ask her about her being presented before the Queen, and she’d tell you about the money wasted that could have gone elsewhere. Ask her about her role in university sit-ins, and she’d smile and talk of student uprisings around the world at the time. And while you were certainly entitled to disagree, she had no time for argument. In short order, Rose Dugdale had decided that she had studied enough about economics at university, learned enough in Cuba, read enough about the behavior of the British Army on Bloody Sunday, and seen enough during her trips to Derry and Belfast to have any interest in winning you over with reason or debate. She was fighting a war, and she had made the deliberate decision that she was willing to take many risks, and, if necessary, many lives, to bring change to the world she saw around her.

Dugdale was not the only woman to fight on the side of the Irish Republican movement. An entire division, the Cumann na mBan (the Irishwomen’s Council), consisted of women eager to lend paramilitary efforts in support of the men. While most of their work was behind the scenes, there were women fighting on the front lines. In addition to the famous exploits of IRA members Dolours and Marian Price, whose bombings of famous London landmarks and subsequent hunger strikes will be described in detail in these pages, women participated in a number of operations involving extreme violence. In the very same month the Price sisters bombed London, two girls lured three young British soldiers into a house by inviting them to a party. Once inside, the soldiers were killed. Four days later, two other teenage girls were arrested with a 150-pound bomb in a baby carriage. Before the end of 1973 alone, additional women were arrested for attempted bombings, shootings, possession of weapons, and even a rocket attack on a British Army post.

Even beyond these female militants, Rose Dugdale was a groundbreaker in terms of her genres of criminality. Her involvement in an aerial assault on a police station marked the first attack of its kind. Not since World War II had bombs fallen from the sky in the United Kingdom. Yet as daring as that was, it is not the venture from which her notoriety sprang. Instead, it was her theft of nineteen paintings from the Beit Collection in 1974 that left the greatest impression. That it was thought to be the largest such heist in history was remarkable; that the mastermind was a woman was unprecedented.
Many millions in fine art are estimated stolen every year, but it’s almost exclusively the work of men. There have been some women who have been accomplices in art heists, the most recent being Rita Alter, who in 1985 appears to have served as a decoy while her husband, Jerry, took what is now estimated to be a $100 million painting by Willem de Kooning, Woman-Ochre, from the University of Arizona Museum of Art. Some others have taken works from their employers or pilfered lesser works. But no woman has ever set their sights on art on par with that stolen by Dugdale nor played such a major role in its taking.

The first Russborough House heist (as of 2020, there have now been, incredibly, four) established Rose Dugdale as the great outlier—history’s first and only female mastermind and thief of high-value, highly recognizable masterpieces. It must be emphasized that she wasn’t just a hired gun or a lookout—she was the force behind the planning and execution of the crime, the leader of, and key to, the whole sordid and fantastic affair. The men who accompanied her were merely muscle. None of them had the knowledge of Russborough House’s holdings to target it and wouldn’t have known what to select from the walls even if they had. But Rose knew, and she chose very well. In fact, even if she had left behind the Vermeer during the Russborough House job (an oversight she would never have made), most of the other eighteen works would still qualify her take as among the greatest in art theft history. Yet more incredibly, this was likely not Dugdale’s only foray into stealing masterpieces.

This makes Rose a pioneer in yet another sense. Stealing high-value art, unlike most other forms of theft, is nearly always a one-off. Thieves find that once they have successfully pilfered masterpieces, unloading them is even harder than the heist. Only Myles Connor, perhaps the world’s greatest art thief, stole Rembrandts on separate occasions (as well as many other masterworks in his storied career). Stéphane Breitwieser was the culprit behind numerous thefts of fine art in Europe. But, at least in the twentieth century and beyond, this club is very exclusive. Rose Dugdale’s name belongs right alongside those two men in that notorious league.
 
 
Dugdale remains a somewhat enigmatic figure, forsaking a life of creature comforts few can realize for a certain rendezvous with prison. Perhaps there was an element of rebellion against her mother’s rigid parenting, but it hardly justified the extreme mutiny from a happy, peaceful middle-class British life. And she held great affection for her father, if not for his station in life. She was no one’s mere accomplice, no one’s errand girl. She was the architect of her own activism, the composer of her own political credo.

Parallels with Patty Hearst’s foray into the world of militantism seem, at first blush, natural. Hearst’s childhood was close in style and substance to Dugdale’s, with both having attended the finest private schools and living with the sort of wealth that they would later rail against. They fought alongside people whose backgrounds were strikingly different from their own. And both Rose and Patty were repeated subjects of the “poor little rich girl” cliché in the popular media, with nary a story written about either that didn’t include the word “heiress.” However, that’s where the parallels end.

Though Hearst and Dugdale were, incredibly, grabbing front-page headlines within just two weeks of each other in April 1974, there exist strong distinctions between the two women. First, Hearst was just twenty and still in college when she was kidnapped. Dugdale was well into her thirties and had already earned her PhD when her criminal conduct began. Second, as Jeffrey Toobin has described in his book American Heiress, after being kidnapped and held in a closet, Hearst was seduced by at least one male member of the so-called Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), and this was a major factor in her transformation. While there’s no disputing Rose’s love of, if not infatuation with, the activist Walter Heaton early on in her own personal awakening, Heaton was quick to note that anyone who thought it was his influencing her— rather than the other way around—was guilty of a serious misjudgment. Third, Dugdale took a leadership role in her revolutionary activities, while Hearst was a prop for the SLA. When Rose was released from Limerick Prison, she was left in the trunk of a car to avoid the media. Hearst, meanwhile, was positioned with her machine gun and beret exactly where bank cameras would capture her, making her an effective propaganda tool. Fourth, when facing serious criminal charges in court, Dugdale defended herself, using the courtroom as a political bully pulpit. Hearst, on the other hand, was represented by the famed defense attorney F. Lee Bailey. Fifth and finally, while Hearst would later seek commutation and pardon for her crimes, Rose Dugdale would never seek such accommodations. Instead, she wears her convictions like hardearned battle scars, proud of each and confident in their righteousness.

There is yet another way that Rose Dugdale’s art thefts are somewhat unusual, and that is her motive. Typically, thieves steal masterpieces because they believe—wrongly—that they will be able to monetize the works. Art is usually less secure than, say, money in a bank vault or precious stones. The reason for this is obvious: the whole point of a masterpiece is to display it. Whether in a home, a gallery, or a museum, fine art is meant to be appreciated and, therefore, on view. In turn, displaying art means making it that much more accessible than most other things of very high value. The more accessible something of value appears, the more attractive it is to thieves. The problem for thieves, however, is that once they’ve stolen a masterpiece, it’s nearly impossible to find a buyer. The evil billionaires of Hollywood simply do not exist in the real world and are, for all intents and purposes, unprecedented, especially in the Western Hemisphere.
 
Highly valuable art is also stolen in order to use it as collateral in illicit trafficking, especially in the drug trade. Having a multimillion-dollar painting in your possession instantly proves to the supplier that you’re not only a serious player but that you have something of value to offer—or take—if your cash doesn’t make it through.

A third motivation for art thieves is the acquisition of a bargaining chip to use with prosecutors if they are caught committing other crimes down the line. People who steal paintings aren’t specialists. They steal anything of value they can get their hands on, along with a host of other sorts of criminality. A highly sought-after work of art can make for an effective “get out of jail free” card. And in some cases, the masterpiece that cannot be fenced is nevertheless held for this reason. Why give it back when you can easily hide it and bargain with it later?

While Dugdale’s motive for her biggest heist most closely matches this last scenario, it differs from most major heists—except, incredibly, two other Vermeer thefts in the 1970s—in an important sense: she put her own freedom on the line to obtain a chit with which to aid people who, though she had once committed. She wasn’t stealing to help herself in any way. There was no personal financial gain to be had for Dugdale through art theft. There was no plot to hide a portion of her take to negotiate a lighter sentence for herself should she be caught. Her reward was in the effort itself. There could be no doubt: Rose Dugdale was a true believer in her cause.

Unlike most, Rose hasn’t written a tell-all autobiography. She has given just a handful of short interviews, usually covering unchallenging questions and only with enough time to provide general overviews instead of in-depth responses. A recent interview attempt by a reporter was met with an angry response. “Clear off, right. I’m not answering questions,” she snapped while watching a football match in Dublin, speaking in what was described as a “posh accent.”

Perhaps due to her reticence, Rose’s story has been mischaracterized in recent years. One widely published art crime scholar has incorrectly described her as an “American socialite” (she was neither); who stole “12 paintings” (she stole more than twenty); “on behalf of the IRA” (the IRA disavowed her crimes); “for the release of IRA prisoners” (it was for the transfer of prisoners, not release); “including her boyfriend” (her boyfriend was not in jail at the time and participated in the biggest of the thefts). He has also incorrectly described her as an “art historian” under whose “leadership” the IRA launched a series of violent art thefts. Such mischaracterizations don’t do justice to the legacy of Rose Dugdale. Though she can be coy about whether she was actually an official member of the Provisional IRA, the fact is that she was not. Multiple Provo sources made this quite clear when she was dominating the headlines from the mid-seventies until the very early eighties. Rather, she was an ardent sympathizer who fell in with a rogue unit. Similarly, her role in the history of art theft and activism is one that has been mischaracterized, the true story untold. Regardless of what one makes of her tactics, Rose Dugdale was at the forefront of female activism in a period defined by social and political upheaval.

Despite her recalcitrance and the relative scarcity of her own words about her life, Rose’s true story should be told. Whether she was a freedom fighter or a terrorist is for the reader to decide. But as to whether she was a pawn in someone else’s game, the answer is clear: she was moving her own chess pieces. She remains unrepentant and proud of her past. Even in her seventies, she proudly established a social media presence, and rather than posting her own face for her profile photo on Facebook and Twitter, she opted for the most famous painting she stole, Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid, as her public image. This book examines what led her to that Vermeer, and perhaps another, and the remarkable life story that has remained untold for decades.

The True Story of Rose Dugdale, The Woman Who Stole Vermeer. By Anthony Amore. CrimeReads, November 10, 2020.