The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 4

THE OBSERVER, 30 JDJJE 1974 How Dr Dugdale abandoned rhetoric for revolution From twinset and pearls to combat jacket and jeans LAURENCE MARKS on the transition of Dr Bridget Rose Dugdale. From society pages to news columns Rose Dugdale as a deb. (left) iti 1959, as a student in the United States in the mid-sixties, and as a revolutionary jailed last week for nine years. WITH a studious display of contempt for the judge and a sharp volley of revolutionary rhetoric, Dr Bridget Rose-Dugdale put the finishing touches to. a striking piece of "contemporary mythology in Dublin's special criminal court on Tuesday.

She was sentenced to nine years receiving 19 Old Master paintings, stolen from Sir Alfred Beit's mansion in April. Barely stated, the elements are strange and melodramatic. A rich and clever young heiress, 'who is an underwriting member of Lloyd's and has dedicated seven years of her working life to a recondite branch of linguistic philosophy, tries without any political experience to start, a revolt of the homeless in a London slum district; renounces her private fortune; leads a gang raid on her family's country house; allies herself with the IRA Provisionals; and is accused of (although not eventually tried for) the most valuable art in history. Play for To-day would hardly dare to combine them. There is no reason to disbelieve Dr Dugdale's own explanation that her spectacular odyssey from debutante season to jail began as a rejection of the moral basis of her father's wealth.

But it doesn't explain much, and it leaves out the more generally significant point that her behaviour, always-highly individ: ual, was an extreme symptom of the present frustration and impotence of the young revolutionary Left. Her childhood seemed to people who knew her then to be a happy one. It was passed largely in the family home in Chelsea, with weekends and holidays on the 600-acre farm at Stockland on the Devonshire-Somerset border that her father, Lieut-Col Eric Dugdale, bought shortly before World War II. She is remembered locally as a pretty, spirited girl, usually 'jolly smartly who rode with the Cotley Hunt; a bit Londony to the iess. sophisticated farmers' sons and daughters who met her at parties and point-to-points.

If she felt any distaste for her family's life-style, it was not obvious. She appeared to be enjoying one of them recalls. After a private school education, she spent a reluctant summer as a debutante. At her trial at Exeter last autumn for the raid on the Stock-land house she told the jury: The round of parties at massive expense, the immense amount of money spent on clothes, food and wines, the hiring of hotels, seemed to me to be totally alien and Oxford seems to have been a release, which she celebrated with the time-honoured attempts to shock a relatively unshock-able institution. She is remembered there as a somewhat tom-boyish figure.

After an unexpected Third in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, she spent two years at Mount Holyoke, one of thB leading East Coast women's colleges in America, doing her master's degree in philosophy', (with a thesis on Wittgenstein). She met civil rights workers and visited Cuba. Back in England, she joined the team -of non-Civil Service economists whom Mrs Barbara Castle brought into, the new Ministry of Overseas Develop-. ment. In the autumn of 1965, she returned to university life at Bedford College, London, to read for a PhD.

She spent the next five years preparing her doctoral thesis (on Proper names: their role land their objects '). During the last year she was appointed to a temporary part-time lectureship, teaching firsFyear economics in the sociology department. She was an inspired one of them recalls. 'She was genuinely interested in her students, which was pretty As in other universities, the sociology department had a climate of student disaffection, fuelled by the long-running debate about the relevance of a supposedly value-free discipline. Dr Dugdale' helped the students to organise their own series of interdisciplinary seminars outside the regular curriculum.

According to one student, this radical intellectual challenge, stimulated by a popular young temporary lecturer, was resented arian. She was impatient with landlords by doing things in a endless talmudic disputations direct way, hoping build, up iabbut the nature of the Soviet some, self-centred community Stated -v If tenants were evicted, She irled for a lectureship at workers would challenged, to College, but was-re-. respond with industrial by the permanent staff of the department. It was the period of campus riots and sit-ihs. The authorities everywhere were nervous of lecturers whoidehti-fied.

if only at' an intellectual levpl with tliA rbl. At the tused. My xeenng, lsvtnat sne in. tne year ur uugaaie iett 1 "1 i- T1 if i .11 1 1 Decamp unpupuiur in utauemi jpeifimu viiege, ner miner made her a member of Duedale sociological circles, says a end' of the year Dr Dugdale'sV lectureship was not renewed. 'She was making the transition to Marxism at this says a friend.

She had a very casual attitude to money. Her life-style was.no different from, that of others earning the same salary. She never struck me as particularly hassled over her family background. Her prob lem was her own development as a She was reading the literature of different left-wing organisations; including Black Power groups. Revolutionary politics, then as now, were highly, 'sect- Underwriting Ltd the' Lloyd's syndicate which he was then chairman, to provide her with a steady income.

From a flat in Finsbury Park she began working with community groups. She began to attract official attention in 1971 with the Siege of Leslie Street in Islington, whent she squatted two evicted families, barricaded the street, declared a 'no-go area' to the local authority, and persuaded the claimants' union to defend it: What followed was a psycho- -friend. 0 It was the period, in the claimants' unions were set up and squatting began. Unemployment was beginning to rise again. A mass switch from rented accommodation to owner-occupation was aggravating the housing' problems of the lowest-paid.

Dr Dugdale saw an opportunity in community action. Her idea was to use employed as a political base. Where there was bad housing, she would get the unemployed to do repair' work, to expose the authority, invading offices, overturning desks, demanding that families should be rehoused. Dr Dugdale would be dressed in the standard counter-culture garb of combat-jacket and jeans. Mr Heaton would be immaculately turned out in a well-cut suit, driving a beige Mer cedes bought with Dr Dugdale's money.

They continually besieged the homeless families unit. 'Rose would tell me that, when the revolution came; I would be among the first to be ground into the Miss Cusack says. Rose wouldn't just walk into the social security says one of her supporters, Mr Jim Piper. She'd kick the door open practically off its hinges, march in followed by a mother and her kids, and thump the counter. The person behind it would go white, and his chair would slide back.

She'd get what she wanted nine times out of 10. She would tend the sick, and was always ready to find beds in her own flat for a homeless family. At the time of the Exeter trial, she estimated that she had got through 15,000 to helping people in Tottenham, some of it in direct, gifts of money. She was an easy a friend says sadly. By the end of 1972, she found her rentier status repugnant.

She -resigned from the syndicate, and was said at the trial to have received 43,000 from the sale of her intert'st. In 1972, she gave Mr Heaton a cheque for 25j000 for his wif whom he had left. He paid it into a joint account for himself arid Mrs Heaton. By mid-1972, their community activities extended to civil rights in Northern Ireland. They would bring both Protestant and Catholic children back to stay in the Tottenham flat.

By last year, at least, they seem to have made some kind of contact with illegal organisations in the Province. Both were becoming increasingly reckless. Mr Heaton was sent to prison for six years (cut to four on appeal) for receiving the paintings and silver stolen in the raid on the Stockland house, and Dr Dugdale was freed on a two-year suspended sentence. She commented dryly from the dock: 'Class justice, if I may say Few people who knew them believe the court's apportionment of blame was just. Back in Tottenham alone, she became increasingly involved with the Republican cause.

She went through periods of deep personal distress. At the tail end, she was very says a friend. She was last seen in the district on Christmas Eve. She found in Ireland the uncomplicated struggle against authority, that had eluded her in the drab streets of North London, but by then, as her statement in the Dublin court last Tuesday confirmed, she had abandoned politics for war. logical battle between the.

politically experienced Labour group on Hanngey Council and the fervent but totally inexperienced Dr Dugdale. She lost, but only narrowly, according to some of those she was fighting against. 'You've got to look at what was happening in Northern says Councillor David Page. In some areas outside. Belfast, new housing was squatted as soon as it was complete.

The local authority didn't allocate it, the Provos did. She used to say: Derry today, Tottenham tomorrow." She felt that, if it happened in Ireland, why couldn't it happen here? To a large extent she was right. It's really a matter of confidence. No council in London could withstand a concerted outbreak of squatting. If the council evicts, and the squatters become homeless, there's a statutory obligation to rehouse them.

'She had the intelligence and knowledge to understand an explosive situation. What she didn't have was the common touch. It's the devil's own job to get ordinary British working-class people to be militant. I know, after years as a trade unionist. They'd listen.

Then, when she went away, they did Miss Lynn Cusack, director of the homeless families unit, agrees She hadn't the disci-pline to maintain working-class support. If she'd organised better she could have had the support of most of the families in temporary accommodation. She preferred flashpoint confrontation to political Frustration at her political failure reinforced feelings of outrage at the plight of the people she was trying to organise and drove her to increasingly violent confrontations with authority. In January 1972 she met Wally Heaton, a Yorkshireman who had begun to take part in North London claimants' union work after leading an unsuccessful work-in as a shop steward at a glass factory. He was 6-ft-3-in, former Coldstream Guardsman, who had worked as a longdistance lorry driver, and had served three short prison sentences.

He was an ex-Communist Party member with a potential for leadership flawed by deep bitterness about his own struggles. He had read widely while in prison, including Irish history, and had developed a romantic identification with the Republican cause. After she met says Mr Page, she increasingly switched from argument to violence and she was less effective because of it. They moved into a flat in Tottenham High Street, opened a claimants' union shop in South Tottenham (later renamed the Civil Rights Association), painted the front in Republican colours and began a campaign of hell raising against the local IPqfMrds tifln amity sbM air Digging methods cause Roman row by JOHN LAWLESS Underneath-full underbody seaL Full underbody seal is just partof the infinitely thorough 11-stage protection process that makes every new Vauxhall such good value, not only when you buy it, but also when you sell it. Every Magnum conveys confident, quiet quality.

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