Il Duce’s Irish nemesis QUESTION What became of the Irish woman who tried to assassinate Mussolini?
VIOLET Gibson, the Dublin woman of aristocratic descent, who tried to kill Mussolini in Rome in April 1926, spent the following 30 years in a mental hospital in England, where she died in 1956.
She was the daughter of the first Baron Ashbourne, who had been Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and grew up in a well-to-do household on Merrion Square, Dublin.
At the age of 18, she had even been presented as a debutante to Queen Victoria. At that stage, she was known as the Honourable Violet Gibson.
Ironically, her brother, who eventually succeeded to the title, held by his father, became a keen supporter of the Gaelic revival movement and was a fluent Irish speaker.
But Violet’s medical problems had started at home when she was a young child. She was frequently sick with pleurisy and scarlet fever and she often suffered from poorly diagnosed bouts of hysteria. She also had a violent temper.
As a young woman, she was also very interested in religion, first Christian Science and then theosophy, before converting to Catholicism at the age of 26. In her mid30s, she was briefly married to an artist, but he died not long after, leaving Violet a widow.
After she was widowed, she moved to Paris, where she worked for various pacifist organisations. Just before the start of the First World War, she developed even more medical problems. She contracted Paget’s disease, which is an abnormal breakdown of bone tissue and she also had a mastectomy to remove a breast, which left a nine-inch scar.
From Paris, she moved to England, where she had yet more surgery, for appendicitis, which left her with severe abdominal pain. As she grew older, she became more and more obsessed with religion and the idea of martyrdom. By the time she was 46, in 1922, she had had a nervous breakdown and having been declared insane, was committed to a mental asylum. Then in 1924, she moved to Rome, together with a nurse, and lived in a convent.
In February, 1925, she managed to acquire a gun and shot herself in the chest, although she survived. In March the following year, her mother, Frances, died. Violet then refocused her intention of killing someone and settled on Mussolini, the Italian fascist leader, who had seized power in Italy in 1922.
On the day she tried to kill Mussolini, she went to the centre of Rome with her gun wrapped in a black veil and a rock, in case she need to break the windscreen of the Italian leader’s car.
On April 7, 1926, Mussolini had just delivered a speech on modern medicine to a meeting of the International Congress of Surgeons in Rome. As he walked through the adoring crowd, Gibson stepped forward and shot him; the bullet went through both his nostrils and his nose started to bleed profusely. When she tried to fire a second shot, her gun misfired.
It was often said that if Mussolini hadn’t turned at the moment he was shot, he would have been killed. That would have been the end of his strongman era in Italy and his subsequent fascist successes wouldn’t have emboldened Hitler to create a Nazi regime in Germany.
So Violet Gibson came very close to changing the course of 20th century history. The only effect of her attempt to kill Mussolini was to make the Italian dictator even more popular.
Violet Gibson was taken into custody and her family apologised to the Italian government, with a similar apology coming from W T Cosgrave, the leader of the government in the Irish Free State. As for Gibson, she was soon released by the Italian authorities on compassionate grounds and sent to England, having been diagnosed as a chronic paranoiac.
There, she was incarcerated in St Andrew’s Hospital in Northampton, an asylum for the mentally ill. She spent the rest of her life there, 30 years in all, and never returned to Dublin. When she died in 1956, she was buried in Kingsthorne Cemetery in Northampton, with the tombstone on her grave bearing just her name and her dates, 1876-1956.
Just after the shooting, she said she had tried to kill Mussolini to glorify God and God had sent an angel to keep her steady. The nurses at the hospital where she spent the last part of her life found it hard to believe her stories that she had almost killed Mussolini.
Violet also had a coincidental link with James Joyce. Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, who also suffered from mental illness, was incarcerated in the same hospital in Northampton as Violet, from 1951 until her death in 1982.
Violet and Lucia would have known each other in the five years after 1951. Eventually, Lucia was buried in the same cemetery in Northampton as Violet.
As for Mussolini, he managed to survive until the end of the Second World War. He and his mistress were eventually killed on April 28, 1945, in Milan, where their bodies were left hanging upside down from a metal girder.
Ben Maher, Co. Offaly.