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.
Rose Dugdale raises a defiant fist in Tottenham. Just days later, she would depart for Northern Ireland.
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.
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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.
The wanted poster issued for Rose Dugdale by the British Army in Northern Ireland. Photo by Victor Patterson.
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?
The Love Letter (oil on canvas), Johannes Vermeer (c. 1669–70). Stolen from the Brussels Fine Arts Palace in Belgium in 1971 and recovered less than a month later. From Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands / Bridgeman Images.
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.
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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.
