‘The Woman Who Stole Vermeer’ Review: Incorruptibly Guilty

Rose Dugdale rejected her privileged English upbringing—and devoted much of her adult life to the cause of Irish republicanism. 

Walter Heaton and Rose Dugdale. 

Photo: From the author's personal collection

 

By Tom Nolan

The Wall Street Journal 

Oct. 29, 2020 6:46 pm ET 

Bridget Rose Dugdale, born into a world of English privilege in 1941, seemed an unlikely candidate to become a radical activist who would spend much of her adult life attempting to undermine the British Empire. But as security expert Anthony Amore recounts in “The Woman Who Stole Vermeer,” Rose, as she is known, gained notoriety in the 1970s by devising daring art thefts and other crimes in service to the cause of Irish republicanism. “She was media gold,” writes Mr. Amore, “having abandoned a life of wealth and leisure to take up arms.” 

Rose’s most famous action may be the 1974 theft of a collection of Old Master artwork; the haul included a painting by that favorite of connoisseurs, Vermeer. Her upper-class upbringing—her father was an underwriter at Lloyd’s of London—had instilled in her a knowledge of art. She attended St. Anne’s College at Oxford—an unusual decision for a marriageable young woman of her time and status. Mr. Amore shows that Rose was no radical at Oxford, where she spoke in defense of the class system and the House of Lords (but also lobbied for women’s inclusion in the all-male Oxford Union). After a postgrad stint at Mount Holyoke, in Massachusetts, she returned to England to earn a doctorate at the University of London. 

The more Rose saw of the world (she traveled to Castro’s Cuba in 1968), the more unfairness she perceived in its treatment of the poor and underprivileged, and the quicker she moved along the path from academic to activist. By 1972 she had taken up with Walter Heaton, a married man and a self-styled socialist. The troubles in Northern Ireland, and the plight of Irish Republican Army supporters serving time in English prisons, became of utmost interest to them both.

PHOTO: WSJ

THE WOMAN WHO STOLE VERMEER

By Anthony M. Amore
Pegasus Crime, 262 pages, $27.95

Rose and “Wally” resolved to steal artwork and offer to return it only if imprisoned IRA supporters were transferred to Irish jails. The source of the art would be Rose’s own family estate. In June 1973, on a day when the family was away, intruders made off with some £85,000 in paintings and other valuables. Rose was the immediate suspect—her old room was the only chamber left undisturbed—and she and Wally were arrested and charged. 

“She was an oddity,” writes Mr. Amore, “this heiress the press referred to as Dr. Bridget Dugdale, placing great emphasis on her Oxford degree and parents’ wealth.” In the ensuing, highly publicized trial, she harangued her father in the witness box, insulting him and his way of life. Rose and Wally were both found guilty; he was given six years, but she received only a suspended sentence and a fine. A “crestfallen” Rose railed against this “class injustice.” 

Unattached, Rose left England and moved to Ireland, where she teamed with Irish republican Eddie Gallagher. Posing as journalists, they hijacked a helicopter, loaded it with explosives packed in milk churns, and dropped their homemade bombs in the direction of the police station in the Northern Ireland border town of Strabane. “Not since World War II had bombs fallen from the sky in the United Kingdom,” Mr. Amore notes. But these bombs were off-target and failed to explode. “I think the effect generally was good for morale,” claimed a British major, “because it’s always satisfactory to see one’s enemy making a fool of himself.” Rose was again suspected. She and Eddie went on the run. 

Their next documented action, in April 1974, targeted County Wicklow’s Russborough House, “perhaps the finest home in Ireland,” where Rose, Eddie and two other men drove one night, brandished weapons and proceeded to steal 19 paintings, including masterpieces by Gainsborough, Velázquez, Goya—and a Vermeer: “Woman Writing a Letter With Her Maid,” completed circa 1671. 

The Russborough heist, valued at £8.5 million, was “the biggest property theft of its day,” writes Mr. Amore. Soon a ransom demand was issued: If four hunger-striking prisoners were not returned to preferred incarceration in Ireland, and a sum of money not paid, the paintings would be destroyed. Yet again, Rose was the immediate suspect, and she was soon found and the paintings recovered. (Eddie and the two accomplices remained at large.) 

Rose and Eddie had long been out of favor with the IRA, and this adventure only increased the group’s irritation. Rose and her mates’ amateurish activities clashed with the IRA’s own plans and brought unwanted police harassment. “People like Dugdale,” complained one high-level IRA source, “who are in revolt against their upbringing . . . should stay out of our business and leave the fighting to the people who know what they are doing.” 

In June 1974, Rose went on trial for the Russborough heist, pleading “proudly and incorruptibly guilty.” She was given a nine-year sentence. In November, she and a pair of co-defendants were put on trial for the attempted Strabane bombings. She was again found guilty and given another nine-year sentence, to be served concurrently. 

“Despite a thorough and intrusive search upon being processed into Limerick Prison,” Mr. Amore writes, nobody “noticed that she was with child.” Rose was four months’ pregnant with the son of Eddie Gallagher, whom the law soon caught up with. Though the two lovers remained behind bars in separate facilities, Rose and Eddie were allowed to marry in 1978, in Limerick Prison. 

Rose regained her freedom in late 1980. Now 79, she has spent the rest of her years serving her political ideals—but now on the conventional side of the law. Her fair-minded biographer pronounces her a “major figure in the annals of criminal history,” but she perhaps is more likely to be remembered as a footnote to the enduring legend of a 17th-century Dutch artist. Case in point, the Facebook page currently maintained by Bridget Rose Dugdale has as its profile photo an image of what was once her proudest possession: Vermeer’s “Woman Writing a Letter With Her Maid.” 

Mr. Nolan reviews crime fiction for the Journal.

Appeared in the October 30, 2020, print edition as 'Incorruptibly Guilty.'