Row erupts over ‘one-sided’ film about debutante who rejected the aristocracy for life as a Provisional IRA bomber
LOOKING back on her life, Rose Dugdale was asked to recall the happiest day. Might it have been when presented as a 17-yearold debutante to Queen Elizabeth II in 1958, at the start of the upper-class social season? Or when she won a place at Oxford University the following year? Perhaps it was the day her son, Ruairi, was born, in December 1974? Rose, 82, paused for a few seconds before telling her biographer that none of these brought her the greatest joy. ‘Oh, I think the happiest day of my life was the bombing in Strabane,’ she declared in her cut-glass
English aristocrat accent. ‘It was the first time I felt 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.’
Given the title of her biography –
Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber:
The Extraordinary Life Of Rose
Dugdale – published last year, such a response from this old lady feels less surprising.
Even in her twilight years,
Dugdale, who enjoyed every privilege of British high society, has no regrets about the part she played in the Provisional IRA’s campaign of terror, which included helping create the bombs used to kill and maim many innocent people in both
London and Armagh.
As well as hijacking a helicopter to bomb a police station and Army barracks in Strabane, Co. Tyrone, right on the border, Dugdale was also convicted of stealing from her parents and of armed robbery – all part of her work to provide the IRA with funds.
So why, one might wonder, is Dugdale the heroine of a new film, Baltimore, in which she is played by
Imogen Poots and which was screened for the first time at the recent London Film Festival.
‘As a soft-focus take on terrorism it’s a dangerous film, especially in the current political climate,’ says film critic Brian Viner.
Indeed, with the Israel-Hamas conflict, it seemed poor timing to debut a film that offers a partisan portrayal of the atrocities committed during The Troubles.
‘We aren’t shown Dugdale’s victims – the bodies her bombs maimed, the funerals and heartache for which she is directly responsible – which makes the film shamefully one-sided,’ Viner says.
‘It doesn’t exactly glamourise Dugdale but it endeavours to make her a sympathetic character.’
Tellingly, a review by Screen Daily also highlights how the movie ‘avoids underlining’ the fact that the Provisional IRA killed people. For her part, the film’s director, Christine Molloy, claims that Dugdale’s ‘radical actions’ came out of ‘something very principled’.
Indeed, the emotional manipulation starts with a scene of Dugdale as a child on a hunting trip from her parents’ 600-acre estate in Devon, one of two family homes (the other a double-fronted townhouse in Chelsea). She is shown shooting a fox and dabs its blood on her cheek as a sign of respect.
Viner says the incident sets the tone: ‘While she shows sadness for a slain fox, she fails to show any for the many innocent people she helped the IRA to kill.’
Next, she’s shown advancing equality for female students at Oxford in 1961 – the implication is that she habitually sides with the oppressed. Her apparent idealism would be admirable were it not for the dark path down which it took her.
In 1970, while an academic at the University of Manchester, Dugdale befriended a group of radical Irish students who regaled her with tales of how the Army was being used to maintain power in what was seen as a British ‘colony’.
Shortly afterwards, while using her substantial inheritance (equivalent to more than £1million today) to help the poor in North London, she met Walter ‘Wally’ Heaton.
He was a married father and former British soldier with a drink problem who told Dugdale about the ‘war crimes’ being committed in Northern Ireland, galvanising her belief that she needed to get ‘stuck in’.
In January 1972, and by this time lovers, they watched coverage of Bloody Sunday on TV, with Heaton declaring ‘It’s war now!’ and urging Dugdale to ‘throw herself at Northern Ireland’.
Six months later Heaton drove her Lotus – though philanthropic with her inheritance, she wasn’t willing to abandon all trappings of wealth – via the ferry to Northern Ireland. In Derry, they met IRA figures who accepted the couple’s financial support and offer to be gun-runners.
Dugdale duly drove around England buying weapons which she and Heaton took to Belfast for distribution to the Provisional IRA. Then, in June 1973, Dugdale and three accomplices broke into her family home and stole paintings worth £80,000 (roughly £1million today).
In the new film, her distressed parents, woken in the night, are depicted as shocked to discover their daughter bagging up the family silver. Her mother asks: ‘Rose, my love, why are you stealing from your own home?’
Cold-heartedly, she tells them: ‘We’re fundraising for the IRA and the Republican movement.’
Sometime later, Dugdale and Heaton were arrested in a pub in Tottenham. When they subsequently appeared in court, she told her father, a witness for the prosecution, that while she loved him, ‘I hate everything you stand for’.
After being found guilty, Dugdale spoke proudly about having ‘turned from an intellectual recalcitrant into a freedom fighter. I don’t know of a finer or better title’.
While she escaped with a twoyear suspended sentence, Heaton was jailed six years. But this was not enough to put Dugdale off a life of crime.
She became friends with an IRA member from Donegal, Eddie Gallagher, who was in London looking for bombing targets.
With Dugdale using a false name and pretending to be a freelance journalist, they persuaded an unwitting helicopter pilot to take them and two accomplices up in the air. Unbeknownst to him, they had planned to drop bombs made of gelignite and fertiliser explosive, sealed in milk churns, onto Strabane police and army barracks.
The pilot was forced, at gunpoint, to fly over the barracks where Gallagher lit and dropped a churn bomb. Mercifully no one was hurt. It rolled off the roof into the yard where only the inner core exploded.
The helicopter pilot, who later gave evidence against the pair in court, as well as the man whose car the gunwielding terrorists hijacked to make their escape after landing, must have been left deeply traumatised.
We don’t see her victims – the bodies, the funerals, the heartache
And yet, 50 years later, when Dugdale reminisced about the incident from her care home bed, she said it was the happiest of her life.
A year after the hijacking, still a free woman – despite a warrant for her arrest – Dugdale became obsessed with the plight of two fellow Provisional IRA terrorists, sisters Marian and Dolours Price, on hunger strike in Brixton prison.
They had been part of a group which planted four car bombs in London in 1973. Two had exploded – in Whitehall and outside the Old Bailey – injuring 250 people, one of whom died from a heart attack.
To Dugdale, the Price sisters were heroines. So, as part of a wider plan to attempt to blackmail the British government into transferring the sisters to an Irish prison, she and Gallagher, with two others, staged an armed robbery at Russborough House in Wicklow. It was the home of 70-year-old Tory politician and philanthropist Alfred Beit and his wife. They stole 19 paintings including works by Vermeer, Goya and Rubens worth €38 million today. Beit was hit on the head with a gun and called a ‘capitalist pig’ while his wife was seized at knifepoint and told her husband would be killed if she didn’t co-operate.
The couple and their servants were then tied up before the robbers escaped.
A week later, Dugdale wrote an anonymous letter demanding the transfer of the Price sisters, plus £500,000, presumably intended for the Provo coffers, in return for the artwork, which she threatened to otherwise burn.
After a bungled handover of the paintings between Dugdesign dale and Gallagher (dubbed the ‘Bonnie and Clyde of the Troubles’) at Baltimore Harbour, West Cork – giving the new film its title – they were both arrested and jailed.
Dugdale, pregnant with Gallagher’s child, was imprisoned for nine years. Her son, Ruairi, was born in Limerick prison in December 1974 and put in the care of a woman, Betty, who ran an IRA ‘safe house’ where on-the-run or injured terrorists sought medical help. Hardly the ideal home for a baby, but Betty took the boy to visit his parents. In January 1978, when Dugdale was 36, she and Gallagher married in a heavilyguarded ceremony in the Limerick prison chapel.
Dugdale was released from prison in 1980 but it was another three years before her son was able to live with her. Their home, in a rundown area of Dún Laoghaire in south Dublin, was tiny, with damp walls and the adult inhabitants suffering from drug problems.
Who knows if Dugdale felt guilty about raising a child in such conditions, a far cry from the privilege of her own beginnings where she had violin and riding lessons, expensive education and a family box at the Royal Opera House.
Her connections with the Provisional IRA also became more official after her release from prison.
She attended meetings at the terrorists’ political wing, the Sinn Fein office, worked for its newspaper, An Phoblacht, and enrolled her son in the Republican boy scout group which had long been a recruiting ground for the IRA.
Now in her early 40s, Dugdale began a relationship with another married man, Jim Monaghan, from whom she took bomb-making lessons. The couple formed part of the IRA’s research and development unit, helping drogue grenades (explosives packed into baked bean tins attached to a throwing handle) and a device called an ‘all-ways striker’ for mortar bombs, a technology that could launch explosives over blast walls and into British army bases.
The first person killed by a drogue grenade, in January 1988, was RUC officer Colin Gilmore, who was targeted while in a patrol car, and left a wife and 16-month-old son. Over the next five years, the grenades killed at least two dozen people.
Dugdale and Monaghan, according to her biographer Sean O’Driscoll, continued their work into the 1990s, developing an explosive named Ballycroy 3-4, after the remote village in Co. Mayo where it was made.
The explosive was detonated in attacks including at barracks in Armagh, where three soldiers were killed, in 1991, then outside the Baltic Exchange building in the City of London in 1992, killing a pedestrian, a doorman and a 15-year-old girl.
Then, in February 1996, a truck carrying 3,000 lb of Ballycroy 3-4 and explosive Semtex blew up in London’s Docklands, killing two men and injuring more than 100, most of whom were working in surrounding office blocks. Such atrocities, mercifully, ended with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
However, a quarter of a century on, Rose Dugdale remains unrepentant.
When interviewed by her biographer as she watched Peppa Pig cartoons on television, Dugdale was asked if she had any regrets.
‘No, I cannot say I do regret it,’ she replied, without pause for thought for the suffering she had inflicted on others. ‘There was no way, after a certain point, that I would turn back.’
Cheques still occasionally arrive at her Dublin nursing home – believed to be income from Dugdale family property and shares.
Meanwhile, the families of those killed and maimed by Provisional IRA bombs – who, unlike Rose Dugdale, didn’t have the privilege of making it into their ninth decade – will undoubtedly struggle to sit through a film commemorating her life.
I’ve turned into a freedom fighter – I don’t know a finer or a better title