After giving up her life of luxury to join the IRA, the heiress daughter of a Chelsea wealthy masterminded explosives that killed British citizens in four different incidents, according to a book.
It is claimed that Rose Dugdale, an Oxford graduate and debutante, 80, assisted in the development of bombs that killed three people in a 1992 attack on the Baltic Exchange and two more people in a 1996 explosion at the London Docklands.
The book, which is based in part on conversations with Dugdale, also claims that she was responsible for the heaviest bomb detonated during the Troubles, when 2,500 pounds of explosives were used in an attack on a barracks in Armagh in 1991, killing three troops.
Dugdale and famous IRA member Jim Monaghan are alleged to have designed the bomb from icing sugar and nitrate fertilizer, eventually dubbing it the Ballycroy 3-4 after the village where it was manufactured.
According to writer Seán O’Driscoll’s book Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber, Dugdale played a key role in the IRA’s’research and development’ department with Monaghan.
Her ties to the IRA are well known, as she was sentenced to nine years in prison for stealing paintings in order to earn funds for the group and win the release of two IRA detainees, according to The Sunday Times.
However, this is the first time she has been accused of being a bombmaker.
Dugdale was born in 1941 to multi-millionaire Lloyd’s underwriter Eric and his wife Carol, who owned a home in Chelsea and a 600-acre estate in Devon.
She went to a finishing school overseas and then came out as a debutante in 1958, despite the fact that she was already rebelling and only agreed to participate in ‘the season’ under duress.
She enrolled in St Anne’s College, Oxford, in 1959 to study philosophy, politics, and economics.
She became famous for dressing up as a guy and storming the Oxford Union debating society to protest the ban on women members.
Dugdale went on to get two more degrees and work as a government economist after graduating.
The student uprisings of the late 1960s, a trip to Cuba, and the events of Bloody Sunday in 1972, however, were radicalizing her.
She quit her work, sold her Chelsea home, and relocated to Tottenham with her married revolutionary socialist lover Walter Heaton, a former Guardsman who had served time for minor offenses.
The pair was caught and charged with stealing paintings and silverware worth £82,000 from the Dugdale family house in Devon, purportedly to deliver the earnings to the IRA, a year later, in 1973.
During the trial, which made national news, she pled not guilty, claimed to have been coerced by others, criticized her family and upbringing, and cross-examined her father, who was a prosecution witness, telling him: ‘I love you, but despise all you stand for.’
‘By finding me guilty, you have changed me from an intellectual recalcitrant into a freedom warrior,’ she said the jurors after they were convicted guilty. I can’t think of a better title.
She received a two-year suspended sentence because she was unlikely to perform any additional criminal acts, whereas Wally received a six-year sentence.
Dugdale condemned the excessive punishments as clear capitalist injustice and then vanished to join an IRA active service unit.
The Guitar Player, a famous oil painting, was taken from Kenwood House in north London in 1974 with a ransom note requesting that IRA bombers Dolours and Marian Price be transferred to a Northern Irish prison.
Dugdale also posed as a French woman to steal further priceless artwork, until three paintings were discovered at a cottage she was renting in Cork and the rest in the boot of a hired car outside.
She was sentenced to nine years in prison after pleading “proudly and incorruptibly guilty” to her role in the robbery and attack on the RUC station.
She returned to Ireland after her release in 1980 and met Monaghan in Dublin.
According to the book, Dugdale became a significant member of the IRA as a result of their friendship.
When the supply of Nitrobenzene became depleted, she was instrumental in discovering a new technique of making explosives using icing sugar and nitrate fertilizer.
In a rare interview with RTÉ in 2018, Dugdale said she had no regrets: ‘You mustn’t forget it was extremely exciting times…the world seemed as if it could change and was likely to be transformed and, whomever you were, you could play a part in that.’
‘It was military action that had a chance to succeed,’ she added of the RUC bombing.