The enigma of Rose Dugdale: what drove a former debutante to become Britain and Ireland’s most wanted terrorist?

The case of the English heiress who became an IRA bomber and art thief, even burgling her own family estate, was one of the most confounding stories of the late 20th century. Now it’s dramatised in a new film

In 1958, 17-year-old Rose Dugdale was one of 1,400 young women who curtseyed before Queen Elizabeth II in the most prestigious event of the summer’s debutante season. It was the last time that the well-bred daughters of the most aristocratic and affluent families in the country would be presented to the monarch in a ritual that dated back 200 years. Princess Margaret, with characteristic hauteur, would later say: “We had to put a stop to it. Every tart in London was getting in.”

For the fiercely independent Dugdale, being presented to the queen was a means to an end. She had agreed on the condition that her parents allowed her to attend the all-women St Anne’s College, Oxford, to study philosophy, politics and economics. Sixty years later she would recall the debutante season as “a horrible marriage market in which you were being sold as a commodity”. By then, she had travelled a lunar distance from her elite upbringing in rural Devon and London, the extraordinary arc of her volatile life perhaps most aptly condensed in the title of a recent biography of her, Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber.

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