1. VIOLET GIBSON - The Irish Woman Who Shot Mussolini

On the 7th of April 1926, on Rome’s Campidoglio, the Honourable Violet Gibson, surrounded by chanting Fascists, shot Mussolini at point blank range and removed a piece of his nose. But for a dodgy gun and a millimetre or two, she would have killed him outright. Of all his would be assassins she came closest to changing the course of history. What brought her to this point? Violet was the daughter of the Protestant, Unionist and conservative Lord Chancellor of Ireland. Growing up in Merrion Square Dublin she had enjoyed an immensely privileged upbringing. A debutante at the court of Queen Victoria, she should have married into the aristocracy and lived the life that women of her milieu were expected to lead. But Violet was a serious minded young woman in an age when girls were meant to think as little as possible. Her independent income allowed her to travel and pursue her intellectual and spiritual cravings. To the horror of her family she converted to Catholicism. Violet was the only woman to have attempted to kill Mussolini and the only would be assassin to land a shot on him. She paid dearly for her crime. After nearly a year of interrogation, psychiatric tests and psychosexual profiling, ‘compassionate’ Mussolini, with some concerns about a public trial and sensing the chance to make the British indebted to him, set Violet free on account of her ‘insanity’. Under Italian and British Home Office diplomatic arrangements she was spirited from Italy to England, where after a 10 minute interview with a society doctor was interned in a private lunatic asylum. For the last 30 years of her life, she pleaded for her release, wrote to family, to friends, to Churchill after Italy declared war on Britain, to Princess Elizabeth. Her letters were never posted. Her death in 1956 got no mention, no friends or family attended her funeral. The Gibson family vault in Dublin’s Mount Jerome Cemetery, with a grand granite monument is a testament to the importance of Violets family.