Rome, 7th of April, 1926, Prime Minister Benito Mussolini Ilchi was adored throughout Italy and admired by the rest of the world when he spoke, the crowds were mesmerised by him on this Wednesday morning. He was at Camp Idalia in Rome to address an international conference of Sargents. But this morning would be like no other when he appeared. The crowd roared with enthusiasm and nobody took any notice of a tiny, frail looking woman with striking grey hair.

They certainly wouldn't have suspected that in the pocket of her dress, she was clasping a small revolver and that when she'd raised her arm towards Mussolini, it wouldn't be for the fascist solution, but for a dodgy gun and a millimetre or two Irishwoman Violet Gibson might have changed the course of history.

It's early spring and I'm here under the shadow of the Sentosa Monastery, about five miles beyond the walls of Loukia in Tuscany.

A beautiful day, but it's very rainy and dry.

My sister and brother in law, Marco, are pruning the vines and preparing for next year's growth.

The people of this region suffered under Mussolini's fascist dictatorship, and especially after he joined forces with Hitler. I often think of Violet Gibson here in this now quiet countryside. Retimed is marked by the bells of Sato's monastery. How the life here would have been different if Irishwoman Vida Gibson had succeeded in her mission.

The people here in this Tuscan countryside, like the many others that I've spoken to, had never heard of this woman from Dublin who with a small revolver and a lot of gumption and in the very early days of her dictatorship, had tried to assassinate Benito Mussolini.

Nearly 140 years after Violet's birth, I meet Francis Jonah Saunders, author of the book The Woman Who Shot Mussolini, who also became fascinated with viler story when she first heard about her.

It was always something to me that she, having summoned up this enormous amount of courage to go to Rome and aim a gun at Mussolini with the intention of assassinating him, that she had been written out of history. And I was puzzled. I first heard about her when I was reading a biography of Mussolini, and she was referred to in one sentence as the woman who tried to shoot him. And I thought, well, who who is this woman?

I mean, I scuttled off to the British Library. And if she was mentioned at all, she was described as a demented Irish woman or a half mad mystic and a whole other series of rather unexamined clichés about mad women of the period and. And so I just I became intrigued, I checked online the 1981 Census Lord and Lady Ashburn and five of their children are recorded as resident in number 12, Marion Square. Some victories here, recorded as a barrister at Law and Practise.

France's Violet and Constance are recorded as peers, daughters with no occupation and the servants, butler, footmen, cook ladies, maids, kitchen maids, housemates, a nine 11 and all a resident in the house on the night.

I'm in Marion Square in fashionable George in Dublin, and I'm on my way to number 12, where Violet was born in 1876. She was one of eight children and she acquired her title, The Honourable Violet Albina Gibson, at the age of nine when her father was made, nor chancellor of Ireland's.

We're sitting in what was the ground floor dining room capable of seating 40 people really gives you a sense of the status of the family. The sons of the Gibson family were educated in Harrow, Trinity, Oxford and Cambridge. The girls at home with governesses at the age of 18, the honourable Violet was a debutante at the court of Queen Victoria. The lifestyle of the Gibson family and Marion Square, at least, is recorded in the society. Columns of the Day was one of Paul's concerts in Dublin, in London, family holidays in France and by the Italian Lakes, skiing in St.

Moritz and entertainment at Buckingham Palace.

Violet's first visit to Italy was as a 10 year old with her father. Little did she know then how important that country would be in defining her life.

She lives one of these classic privileged lives, enhanced in a material sense, but also of extreme sort of intellectual and spiritual deprivation. You're not allowed to do anything. As a woman, as a young woman, in this context, you can do a bit of needlework and a little bit of reading, but not too much because novel reading is bad for you.

The next train, I'm travelling to Suffolk to meet Fiona McAlpine, actor and theatre director and Violet's great, great grandniece.

Violet's older sister, Frances, was my great great grandmother. They were Protestants, the Gibsons, the mother, Frances became a Christian Scientist, a religion where you don't have medicine and you pray and you try and keep your thoughts. Quite a few Upper-Class people of English descent and Irish descent, quite like this new religion from Boston.

I think it was just fashionable at the centre of the Christian Science. Faith was the belief that all disease is caused by sin, fear or ignorance of his teachings. Just didn't sit well with Violet.

Violet is, from an early age, incapacitated to a great extent by illness. She's a very fragile child. She has bouts of pleurisy, peritonitis, rubella. And so hers is a life of the chaise lounge and and of having this sort of great inner existential energy, but not being able physically or because of social laws, really able to express it. Violet was a serious intellectual young woman. She wanted to explore philosophy, religion and politics. At the age of 21, she received an independent income from her father.

It was 1897, and she was determined to find her own direction in life. She travelled a lot and she explored theosophy in France, Germany and Switzerland. She seems to have developed a conscience, political conscience and a social conscience quite early on, and probably this is under the influence of her brother Willie and insofar as the father, Lord Ashbourne, was a unionist, a home ruler and an imperialist, Willy, his son, to his great, great sorrow and disdain was exactly the opposite.

Willie identified himself with the victims of British imperialism. He was intellectually very interested in social justice and politically quite animated.

Willie had converted to the Roman Catholic Church while he was in Oxford. He introduced Violet to Christian Socialism and Catholicism that was committed to the rights of the poor. Violet's political education and understanding of social justice deepened as she regularly accompanied Willie around London slums.

He's doing a lot of social work in Southwark one of the most degraded and decaying areas of London extreme levels of poverty.

In 1902, at the age of 26, Violet, like Willie, became a convert to the Catholic Church to the horror of her family.

When she makes this announcement, her family are absolutely devastated. And there's a there's a sort of mutilation a severance that happens. Violet moved to Chelsea, a very insalubrious area at the time, and she explored the bohemian life, she fell in love and she became engaged to an artist.

She begins to develop a private life away from from the entanglements of family and the expectations that her family and her class would have of her.

And I suspect this is probably the happiest period of her life.

One year later, her fiancé died suddenly. She had only recently lost a brother and a sister in law, grief stricken, she turned her life over to charity and prayer and visited holy sites in her beloved Italy. She became ill and returned to England six times in the year she was ill with the fever, the doctors diagnosed influenza or suggested a nervous disorder called hysteria. She moved to Devon and they're frequented Buckfast Abbey, where she found some peace after all this turmoil and loss.

She met Ina Dennis, a novelist, also a convert to Catholicism, who became her closest and her most faithful friend.

Irish Independent, 5th of August 1914, text of British declaration against summary rejection by the German government of the request made by state of war exists between Great Britain as from 11 p.m. on August. Violet was deeply affected by the outbreak of the war, she was an ardent pacifist. She was closest to her younger brother, Victor, when she was growing up.

Victor, who had been captured in South Africa during the Boer War, had come back from that, are severely traumatised by the absolute terror that his disappearance in South Africa inspired in the family and in her stay with her forever. She was she was extremely anti-war. Violet went to Paris and worked as a peace activist with anti-war organisations. She joined the Women's International Congress and worked alongside socialist and suffragists Sylvia Pankhurst in actively opposing the war. But sickness and illness curtailed violence activism.

Her body seems very much to be at war with itself, just as in the wider world was more.

In 1919, Violet's beloved Italy was in chaos and on the brink of civil war. Mussolini had formed the fascist party and his black shirted paramilitary squads were using brutal violence to break workers' strikes.

She is living on her own in Kensington at this point. She's really in a period of deep, deep seclusion, partly, I imagine, through physical recovery. Her mind now seems to become very embattled. You know, many, many demons start to run amok. And she comes to the point of a really serious nervous crisis, which has been induced, I would suggest, by a very specific event, which is the death, the sudden death of her beloved brother, Victor.

And Violet's reaction to this was to go really quite sort of bonkers. She goes and attacks somebody in South Kensington who she possibly thought was an intruder. It's not it's not clear, but she does draw a knife. She's kind of lost it at this point. She's she's overwhelmed with grief and shock.

And there's the sheer exhaustion of her of her long years of physical illness. And she's committed and this is Violet's first and certainly not her last encounter with the lunatic asylum. On her recovery, she was following developments in Europe and especially in Italy, where Mussolini was now in power. It seemed he would stop at nothing to build his fascist dictatorship. The succession of assaults and of brutal murders of Mussolini's opponents and critics appalled Violet. Facilely, Gibson would soon place herself in opposition to Mussolini.

Italy for her, is a place of cherished, one would have say, rather clichéd sort of light and idealised values of, you know, principally about saints and beauty and a kind of tenderness. And she decides that she's going to go. I think at this point she has already got some kind of plan or scheme or we might call it plot in mind when she gets this rather hapless nurse companion, a woman called Mary McGrath, to come and look after her from County Meath.

She comes to London and then and then is told, right, we're going to Rome. And then suitcases packed and off they go. What Mary McGrath doesn't know is that Violet has packed a small revolver in her suitcase.

I've arranged to meet my sister Eilish in Rome so that we can visit the Italian state archives where she will act as my translator. Great to see you. Good to see you, too.

Yeah, yeah, you know, the point is, if we meet Dr. Martelli, the director of the Central Archives of the state, who tells us about the extensive archive that they hold pertaining to vital Gibson mortise, we begin to collect the file boxes that we've ordered in advance.

I can't believe the amount of the number of boxes and boxes that we have and the amount of documentation that's in each of them for somebody who's so unknown in our history is incredible, isn't it? It's got to take us ages.

There are boxes and boxes of files with hundreds of documents in each. There are witness statements, police reports, reports of violence, connexions with anarchists, Irish nationalists, Catholic dissidents.

OK, let me tell you about this. Say this is the official statement they communicate officially. It says Ladar Nosotros Castañeda. This is the signature here, the statement he gave to the police. In November 1924, when Violet and Mary McGrory arrived here in Rome, they installed themselves in a pensione and then in a convent near Piazza, the Spanish revivalist had her own room and a little bit more privacy. She started going on excursions without Magrath coming here to trust every four centuries of working class district populated by immigrants and considered by the guidebooks to be the vilest, most dangerous place in Rome, I spent a lot of time here amongst Rome's poorest.

She seems to have attached herself to a group of Catholic socialists who were in opposition to Mussolini. And I'm sure this is one of Violet's motivations for going to Rome. She didn't like Mussolini at all. She felt that she was trampling on not just the idealised historical Italy that she was so enamoured of, but also on the cherished political and social freedoms and liberties that she felt liberal Italy had had promoted and safeguarded. And these were now being torn down. To be an opponent of Mussolinis was a dangerous business.

Mazziotti Mussolinis, most formidable opponent and leader of the United Socialist Party, was abducted in June 1924 by a fascist squad on his way to Parliament. He was bundled into a car, taken to the woods, beaten, sexually assaulted, stabbed with a carpenter knife, dumped in a ditch and left to rot.

This sadistic murder horrified Italians and deeply affected by this violent identification with with that particular victim and with that murder and with that assault is, I think, very much an ingredient of the slowly developing programme that she's initiated now to put herself her own self in some corporeal way in opposition to Mussolini. First of all, the way she does that is to offer herself as a sacrifice, as some kind of way of redeeming the the awful sins of fascism. In her prayer at the convent, she has started to make an altar for herself.

She's taken the gun out. And before we know it, she's shot herself through the chest. She's a bad shot. Poor Violet, at least she is at this point because she doesn't succeed and she slumps to the ground, but she's by no means dead. This bullet, by some miracle, has sort of rattled around her ribcage and come out the other side. The nuns are banging on the door. And poor Mary Megraw has no idea that Violet had a pistol.

Comes in distraught and a doctor has called the family was horrified and wanted to keep the event as quiet as possible, Violet refused to go back to England, probably knowing that she'd be locked up by her family. She went voluntarily to a private clinic and was visited every day by the faithful. Mary McGrath. Two months later, she was discharged and she took residence in the convent of Santa Brigida with Mary McGrath.

What's remarkable is that she she kind of regrouped. And at this point, I think she's she's the most lucid she's been for years. She decides that the way to get rid of Mussolini is to get rid of Mussolini and not to get rid of herself. So she recovers her health.

In spring 1926, a year and a half after Maserati's murder, a number of men were brought to trial, a show trial in effect.

Violet, should anyone doubt that she had any kind of political interest or motivation? Violet is seen at the trial and she's there at several, several days of the court proceedings, which, of course, were a complete sham, taking notes obviously closely, referencing for herself what it means to be in opposition to Mussolini. To me, the attendance at the trial is evidence that she has developed a completely different strategy. She continued to come here to trace every four people who were still resisting Mussolini's power would gather.

Maybe she did meet people here who knew of her intentions are to start to use her for their own ends if she's accomplices.

This is where she was most likely to meet them. You know, when Violet's in Rome? Nurturing this plan to kill Mussolini, she's she's once again entirely sort of at odds with everybody else because everybody else seems to think at this point that Mussolini is a great, great thing.

And Mussolini believed himself to be a modern Julius Caesar.

This desire to run an empire seduced and intoxicated the nation. He was idolised by many worldwide, including a young German called Adolf Hitler. And the British are totally enamoured of him.

Fascism was seen as a good bulwark against leftist ideas. He's seen as embodying a kind of unmitigated masculinity. The vitality, of course, Mussolini was very careful to make sure was to the fore of public consciousness because he had he struck, I think, at least two and a half thousand poses in which he was photographed.

And I think by 1924, there was an estimated 30 million photographs circulating in Italy of Mussolini swimming, fencing, riding, cutting corn for the harvest with his shirt removed, his chest glistening with sweat. And that's, you know, completely unimaginable for for his political contemporaries and the rest of the world. And he quite simply, he draws them all in. People come to make a sort of pilgrimage now to to Rome to see Mussolini. Well, Violet, to her credit, is not taken in.

And she's probably the only woman in Rome or any foreign woman in Rome at this time who doesn't want to have with Mizulina if she wants to shoot him.

Weida fired her loyal nurse companion Mary McGrath, sending her packing back to Ireland so that she could focus on her plan. She wrote in her notebook, There is no pain except in the hesitancy to accept the cross. The time had come to act. I've just attended Vespers at the Convent of Santa Brigida, and it was from here that the phrase shabbily dressed 50 year old white haired violet set out on that sunny morning of the 7th of April, 1926 to shoot Mussolini.

She was up early, it got massive, a little chapel and had breakfast before walking down to Vietnam, Anthony to begin her very long journey to Palazzo Electorial and the fascist party headquarters on the other side of Rome. Mussolini was due to appear there until the afternoon. I've been retracing the steps from the convent and it's taking me nearly an hour, walking briskly to arrive here at Campanello. Filer's was passing Capitolio and saw a crowd gathering, is the king here?

She enquired, and to her surprise, she was told Mussolini was there. Why? This wasn't exactly what she'd anticipated. She realised she must now put her plan into action. The place was dotted with the secret police, but that wasn't unusual. I'm standing here, Palazzo, the conservatory, standing at the lamppost, the exact spot where Violet took aim and shot and butcher. The 55 foot one inch is speckled, Violet has edged away way into the crowd, more anxious than any to get to a good position.

The adoring crowds roared when this lady appeared after the speech, the International Congress massages and made his way towards the black landseer, its engine running. She raised her arm, holding a steady as she had practised many times. She shot him at point blank range. But as she did, the slightly turned his head towards the students who had just burst into a chorus of Gonzi the fascist hymn. He staggered backwards, his hand, Tasmania's face, blood poured through his fingers, but he was still on his feet.

He looked up, astonished, his eyes settled down. Violet, who was also astonished. She fired again click but nothing happened. The bullet had stuck in the chamber. The crowds were desperate to avenge their hero, but the police eventually dragged her away before she was torn limb from limb in those boxes in the archives. We found a letter from Violet to her friend in it describing her near martyrdom experience. The people set on me, pulled out my hair and rained blows on me.

And the bravery of the police saved my life. My clothes were torn to pieces and my medals torn from me. But interiorly, I was transformed to another level that had nothing to do with politics. And without any great effort on my part, my heart was filled with sweetness and a great love, I just shut my eyes and made no resistance fighters. Bullets had passed through part of Mussolini's nose, leaving burn marks on both his cheeks. Mussolini, the master of propaganda and the ultimate spin doctor, appeared soon after the shooting with a bandage over his face.

The official communiqué states that he was calm and composed.

We're dividing this assassination attempt spread like wildfire. Pope Pius the 11th sent a cardinal to Mussolini that he was clearly protected by God and the tedium ceremonies were being held throughout Italy to celebrate Mussolini's miraculous escape. Blackshirts squads went on the rampage, burning the printing presses of the non fascist newspapers, communists and foreigners were attacked.

Newspapers up and down the country headlined Our Glorious Saluki Saved is Dutchie shot by a foreign woman.

A mad woman, Mussolini starts to receive cables that afternoon and that evening and the following day from King George, the United States president was relieved.

The presidents of France, Germany, the Irish Times published the message of Mr. Cosgrave, president of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State.

I send you my earnest wishes for a speedy recovery. The infamous attempt has caused much indignation.

Here I'm standing on the mantel after looking down at the vast complex of the Regina Chaillu jail, where Violet was taken to the women's section after the shooting of Mussolini. It was here that violent with prisoner identification. Number one four nine six seven was photographed, fingerprinted and strip searched and then taken to the infirmary so that her cots and swellings could be attended to.

Fiona MacAlpine by this great, great grandniece, remember seeing the police photo of Violet that was taken after her arrest?

I had this vision that she was some lovely young suffragette type woman with dark hair, because when I found out the truth that she was a little old, wizened woman, I was really shocked because I never imagined her to look like that. When I look at this picture of her face on and then profile like a prisoner and the fingerprints. She does, she looks more like 70 than 50 after initial questioning, violence was reported to be calm and showing no signs of stress.

A major investigation was already underway under Chief Inspector Pineta.

The idea that a woman alone woman would shoot Mussolini seemed inconceivable unless she was completely mad. She must have accomplices. Where did she get the gun? Was she part of an international plot to kill Mussolini?

It was nearly midnight when Panetta arrived at the S.A.G., the convent. The nuns said she'd been a quiet, discreet guest.

Thought she'd been involved in a charitable mission, but the Mother Superior said that Violet had told her that she was engaged in a mysterious undertaking and that four people had been in favour of her plan. She reported, Violet are saying, I have been called to undertake a great a very great mission upon whose outcome depends the destiny of many tortured souls.

The Mother Superior emphasised that no one could possibly imagine that Violet was capable of attacking anybody. When they questioned her, you know, you just shot Mussolini, she says, who, who? Mussolini, me, she's quite clever, you know, she's extremely lucid. So she actually what she does is she leads them quite a merry dance.

Under interrogation, Viler spun yarn after yarn. She shot Mussolini. She said, for the glory of God, she communicated with the dead and they were all her accomplices, poor Pennetta.

He keeps coming to the prison and talking to Vialet and trying to find out what her motivation was. And Vialet never, ever, ever gave it away. In a letter that I found written to her friend in it, she said, Good God knew what he was doing when he gave me an Irish tongue to get me out of tight places.

I cannot now understand how anyone minds losing their reputation. To me, it is sheer joy and I take a mischievous joy in piling it on. The reputation is getting blacker and blacker every day, just like putting on a new dress, and I thoroughly enjoy it.

The family and the British Foreign Office were making an insanity plea. She was unhinged since the death of her brother, Victor. She's completely on her own, but seems to be for the weeks and months that follow in some kind of place of of peace, violence, face dependent on whether she would stand trial or be declared insane.

The psychiatrist reports to character a chronic paranoic and recommended that she be committed to a lunatic asylum 13 months after the shooting.

A deal had been struck for foreign policy reasons.

So it's decided by Mussolini that that really the best thing is just to kind of just forget and get her out. Certainly mindful that the British Foreign Office are intervening directly on her behalf, then there's something to be gained by by acceding and maintaining a friendship with a sense of indebtedness towards Italy for perhaps to be played out later as a sort of sham trial.

Violet wasn't allowed to attend her own trial. She would compromise defence arguments by appearing normal, lucid insanity.

It was effectively the defence that was given and was accepted by the court, which was that she had been perfectly aware of what she was doing.

But Mad and her family, who are very keen to get her back and and the whole deleterious, embarrassing and expensive affair. I'll give him permission to come and retrieve her once the court case has been closed, Constance goes to Violet, who has been cleverly deceived by her jailers and her lawyers into believing that she is going to be set free. Still nursing the sense that actually there is justice and that she may be recognised for what she did when she goes back to England behaves impeccably.

The five foot, one inch violet moves through Rome's busy train station with a carton of undercover policemen, three nurses from St Andrews Hospital for Mental Diseases also in plain clothes to hide their real identity from Violet and Thomas Cook Courrier donated by this group of people, she is hassled very quietly and conspiratorially onto a train, and she's looking forward to her freedom on arrival in Victoria Station.

It took a cab. It was very dark violet probably thought that they were going to the family home in Grosvenor Crescent, but the cab continued on to Harley Street. Two doctors took a few minutes to examine her and signed the papers to say that she was insane and to have her committed. It was nearly midnight. She was whisked off to Northampton and taken to what looked like a stately home at the top of the tree lined avenue when she walked into the lunatic asylum.

She realises what's happening and she doesn't testify. But she's and she's in a dreadful state and that's it. And they're affectively she's discarded.

There was just one last job for the family to do. They wrote to Zeleny Tatanka. The family of Violet Gibson feel they cannot let the conclusion of her trial pass without writing a few lines of deep and heartfelt thanks to his excellency, Signor Mussolini. They can never be thankful enough that the attempt failed and the duty has been spared to complete the great work which he is doing.

I'm walking towards St Andrew's, which opened in 1838 on a 106 acre estate to offer humane care to the mentally ill on the principle of moral treatment. And it was here that Violet, having been freed by Mussolini, was kept under lock and key for a full 29 years until she died.

I'm now sitting here in the archive in St Andrews with Bobby Judd, the archivist. And thanks, Bob. You've laid out some notes for me. Yes, I found out everything that we had about Violet Gibson, which I thought would be of interest to you. This is a history sheet that would have been written by a member of her family. And these are the case notes from her admission, the diagnosis on admission was delusional, insanity, paranoia.

And she was admitted on the 14th of May, 1927. When I come across Violet's letters, still in their addressed envelopes on stamped and never posted, I'm filled with emotion. I found a letter that Violet wrote to her friend in it saying that she had been sent to an asylum where there is no chapel, not even for Sunday mass.

And we're obviously I cannot receive communion. I feel I have no friends. I don't know if there is still anybody who still loves me. Help me understand my situation, Ina didn't reply, she never received the letter. It's still in Violet's file. Other friends are trying to trace their letters and cards are still here in the file. Phylicia wasn't able to attend mass and spent hours alone outside in quiet, peaceful contemplation, feeding the birds. I found photos in her file showing 60 year old Vida's hands and arm extenders with little birds on the shoulder, sparrows feeding out of her hand.

She had no visitors except Constance for Constance, who never marries, looked after her parents was always the constant, in particular in the care of Violet.

Violet never gave up. Campaigning for her release, she wrote letter after letter trying to bring her case to the attention of the authorities.

Her letters were never posted.

Mussolini declared war in Britain surely should be acknowledged and vindicated for what she'd done, it is it is extraordinary to think that the family who was so apologetic to Mussolini and the Italian government for their sister shooting him when he went, all the trouble starts in the world war begins and Mussolini declares war on England. What would they have thought of it then? And what would she have thought? Because she had her little radio, didn't she? And she she must have felt so vindicated.

They must have had talks around that dinner table saying, well, our little sister did try and shoot this monster.

Violet did write a long letter to Churchill seeking her release, but it, too, was never posted.

She had been pleading for years to be allowed to move to a Catholic nursing home.

On the 18th of November 1944, Violet, now nearly 70, wrote a letter to her royal highness, the Princess Elizabeth, who had just celebrated her 18th birthday.

Your grandfather and grandmother, Their Majesties, King George the Fifth and Queen Mary visited us when they came to Ireland and we were often in Buckingham Palace at parties as well as Kautz. None of these worldly things matter. I am quite simply hoping that you have a heart.

In 1926, I shot at Mussolini and was shot up in this hospital for the cause of His Majesty's pleasure. Twenty three years and six months, I am now old, bedridden with a very bad heart disease and other illnesses and very neglected and lonely.

So I want to be sent to a Roman Catholic nursing home where I can practise my religion and also be nursed as in a convent. There's never a shortage of nursing nuns. Violet was locked up for attempting to assassinate Mussolini and remained convinced that she was right to do so. Year after year, from the time for committal, her medical notes continued in the same vein, delusional.

She remains grandiose in her outlook. She is exalted, perverted in her judgement. There is no change in her condition or delusional.

There came a point where in the early 50s, a new doctor on the rounds would write in his notes on Vialet that she's now delusional because she says she she tried to kill Mussolini. Nobody believes her. There's nobody left in the lunatic asylum after 30 years, who knows that that was her story, that that's actually what she did do on the 2nd of May 1956.

The last entry is made in the medical records of 80 year old Violet, the honourable Violet Albina Gibson patient who passed away a 12 45.

P.M. There was no public announcement of violent death. No family member or friend attended her funeral. And the last document in Violet's file where a doctor writes to her nephew, Lord Ashbourne, to say that fortunately she did not have much suffering and her passing was a peaceful one. And he concluded there were no matters outstanding with the accounting department. That's the oldest of a life. I find that a little bit sad, really.

This is the last will and testament of me, the honourable Violet Gibson spinster. I read violets. Well, she wants to be buried in the Catholic part of St. Andrews. She left money for her requiem mass and the cathedral and sums of money and gifts for the monks, the priests and the friends who had shown her great kindness in her life. So in the end, all of her desires were directed towards acknowledging discomfort, I guess that she'd received from from the religion that she'd found, it gave her something kind of form of attachment and the only form of attachment that she had.

There was no requiem mass in the cathedral. 58 years later, I'm at Kingston Cemetery with Irish historian Peter Mulligan of Northampton. We're standing in a place where memories grow out of the grass in this graveyard. There are hundreds of Irish people buried. And Violet Gibson is part of the Irish diaspora in this graveyard. I don't know if you knew she left £100 in 1956 for a headstone. Well, that is something I think she's probably being pushed to the side of history.

She's half forgotten.

We stand looking at the gravestone across Ingrey, Quarry Stone, the cheapest material. It says Violet Gibson, Cuma, 1876 to 1956, first up.

Obviously, you know, the Ashbourne family, we're not going to say Violet Gibson, the woman who shot Mussolini, but that Colmer just speaks volumes between that comma and from the day she was born and actually died seems to be kind of like this huge sort of story that's just been, you know, completely elided.

This is a woman who who history is stripped of all her dignity. She exists as a as a series of a really dreadful cliches and in a number of texts, books that refuse her any kind of humanity.

She's just a stereotype of crazy Irish spinster.

I had asked Peter if he could stop at a flower, a sort of garden centre, as we drove from Northampton to Kingston. There were no violets available. But before leaving the cemetery, we placed a red and yellow roses and violets grave.