THE DEBUTANTE-TURNED-TERRORIST

How Rose Dugdale, a privileged English girl, became an IRA bomber is a confounding tale-a new film tells her dramatic story

- Sean O'Hagan

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 her parents allowed her to attend the allwomen St Anne's College, Oxford, to study philosophy, politics and economics. Sixty years later she recalled 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 life perhaps most aptly condensed in her recent biography's title, Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber.

Written by Irish author and journalist Sean O'Driscoll, the book details Dugdale's unlikely journey from reluctant debutante to dedicated IRA volunteer, whose reckless escapades and commitment to the cause of violent republicanism made headlines across the world.

In January 1974, she took part in the armed hijacking of a helicopter from which milk churns filled with explosives were dropped on an RUCbase in Northern Ireland. A few months later, she organised and led an audacious art heist in County Wicklow in which 19 artworks, including paintings by Rubens, Goya and Vermeer, were stolen and held for ransom against the release of IRA prisoners.