DUGDALE, Bridget Rose 1941-2024
Richard R
Obit in the Times of 19 March 2024:
E X T R A C T
Rose Dugdale, Oxford-educated debutante who became the ‘most-wanted’ IRA terrorist
Heiress and jailbird who smuggled arms, stole old masters and hijacked a helicopter
In March 1958, when Rose Dugdale curtseyed to the Queen at Buckingham Palace, no one present could have imagined that the 17-year-old girl paying obeisance to her monarch would become a leading IRA terrorist.
Nothing in her demeanour indicated that she was anything but a stock part of the 1,400 upper-middle-class young ladies presented at Court for what the Lord Chamberlain announced that year as “the last debutantes’ season”.
It emerged after the event that Dugdale despised every moment of the arcane ceremony. She had made a deal with her parents whereby she would be allowed to sit the Oxford entrance exams in return for attending the Buckingham Palace ceremony. Of that year’s batch of debutantes, only four took up university places.
Dugdale felt she was part of the rapidly changing postwar Britain rather than part of the old privileged elite that others, especially her parents, saw as her birthright…
…Soon after going up to Saint Anne’s College, Oxford, to read PPE, Dugdale achieved a certain degree of notoriety in the varsity by having a lesbian relationship with her tutor, an economics don confusingly named Peter Ady. Dugdale was supposedly on the rebound from an affair with Iris Murdoch, according to Virginia Ironside, who was at school with her. Edwina Currie, a contemporary at Oxford, remembers her as self-confident and moving in a privileged set who cared little for what others thought of them…
…Bridget Rose Dugdale was born in 1941, in Honiton, Devon, to James Frederick Compton Dugdale and his wife (her 2nd h – see below) Caroline (née Timmis). Caroline had previously been married to John Mosley, brother of Sir Oswald Mosley. Rose’s father was a retired colonel in the British army and a name at Lloyd’s who had accumulated considerable wealth in the 1950s. He was a gentleman farmer rather than the often incorrectly reported “owner of a vast estate in Devon”…
…She was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment in Limerick jail, where she gave birth to a son, Ruairí, fathered by [Eddie] Gallagher. The couple were married in 1978 while both were in custody…
Rose Dugdale, heiress and IRA terrorist, born March 25, 1941. She died of undisclosed causes on March 18, 2024, aged 82