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.
