He walked through the cheering crowd in the grand square designed by Michelangelo, acknowledging the adulation of the people, occasionally touching the brim of his bowler in salute. A choir of students broke into a political anthem and just as he turned to view them a small and dishevelled woman stepped out of the crowd, pointed a small pistol at his head and, from point-blank range pulled the trigger.

That movement of the head may have changed history. Had the bullet hit the target square between the eyes, and not just clipped Benito Mussolini’s nose as he turned away, then he might never have been an inspiration to Hitler and what followed would have been different, although no doubt just as evil.

The woman with the long, greying hair who fired the shot, and pulled the trigger again, although the gun jammed, was a 50-year-old Irish woman called Violet Gibson. She was saved from being lynched by police officers who pulled her away to safety.

It was a planned suicide mission. A small bottle of poison was found in her pocket when she was examined in custody.

It happened 95 years ago last week, on April 7 in Piazza del Campidoglio, the magnificent square completed centuries after Michelangelo’s death, but to his exact design and specification. Mussolini had just spoken to an international conference of surgeons and was on his way back to his car when Gibson shot him.

Italy, by then under Il Duce’s iron fist, was a police state. Mussolini’s armies had invaded Libya and were conducting a genocidal war against its tribes. The list of their war crimes includes the deliberate bombing of civilians, killing of children, women and the elderly, rape, throwing prisoners out of

aircraft, running tanks over others and, later, bombing tribal villages with mustard gas.

The dictator then was, however, a hugely popular figure among global leaders, including some of those who would later go to war against him. The Pope sent a message saying he was relieved Mussolini was spared by God, the US President Calvin Coolidge sent a good wishes telegram, as did the presidents of France and Germany as well as Britain’s King George V.

Even the then-president of the Irish Free State, WT Cosgrave, wrote to the injured Mussolini congratulating him on his survival.

An unlikely assassin

VIOLET was the most unlikely assassin. She had been born into a life of privilege at a time when Ireland was still ruled by Britain. She was a debutante in Queen Victoria’s court, the daughter of Lord Ashbourne, Lord Chancellor of Ireland, the most senior judicial figure in the country.

Her conversion to Catholicism at the age of 26 alienated her from her father. Prior to that life in Ireland had been that of lady of the Protestant ruling class, frequent appearances at balls and in the society pages, with lavish descriptions about what she was wearing. “The Hon Violet Gibson wore a most striking toilette of deep-rose crepe de chine, the skirt very gracefully accordioned, and the same colour adorned her black tulle hat,” reported the Fashionable Intelligence column in The Irish Times in 1904.

But by the outbreak of the First World War, she had become involved in the anti-war movement led by Sylvia Pankhurst and travelled to Paris to work for organisations promoting peace (Scotland Yard opened a file on her

anti-war activities).

She also had a history of mental breakdowns. Twenty years after that first Irish Times report, in March 1925, the coverage changed markedly.

“The Hon Violet Gibson (sister of [now] Lord Ashbourne), who was staying in a pension in Rome, is lying in the hospital of San Giacomo, suffering from a serious wound.

“On Friday, a shot was heard in her room, and when people entered she was found in bed wounded.’

A note added in square brackets. “[Miss Gibson, who is 49, arrived in Rome last December for the Holy Year celebrations. She spent most of her time in private prayer and attendance at church Services.]”

Box of bullets

VIOLET recovered and spent the next months planning her assassination attempt. In her room at the convent where she was staying, she had amassed a collection of newspaper cuttings critical of Mussolini, and others outlining his movements. She also had a box of bullets. The origin of the revolver, her second, was never determined.

The attack on him embarrassed Il Duce. His dignity had also been wounded because the macho and misogynistic dictator had been shot by a woman. He didn’t want her put on trial in Italy, with all the publicity that would garner, so a show trial was held in secret at which Gibson was not present. She was quickly and conveniently declared insane.

Constance, Violet’s sister, supported the madness explanation for the attempt on Mussolini, saying that the death of her beloved brother Victor led to “paroxysms of grief, which in the end unhinged her mind … The dominating influence of her life was her love of Victor. His death was to her the last straw.”

Victor had died in January 1922, probably by his own hand, but certainly in suspicious circumstances which were glossed over. He had checked into the The Black Horse Hotel in Horsham.

“He declared at the hotel,” his inquest report read, “that he was an Irish rebel, known under six names in Ireland, and had lived with his father at the vice-regal lodge in Dublin.”

Natural causes

VICTOR had threepence in his pocket when he died, and there was broken glass and spilled liquid of the floor, which Violet certainly believed was poison, but which was never analysed. The coroner returned a verdict of death from natural causes. Victor had turned 47 just days before.

Violet’s verdict was deportation back to Britain, to the care of sister Constance. She was taken to two doctors in Harley Street who, no doubt as part of the deal, rubber-stamped the court’s verdict of insanity and, with the approval of the family, sent her to a mental hospital, St Andrew’s, in Northampton.

As history proceeded, Violet receded, locked up behind walls, her name fading and forgotten. There were other attempts on Il Duce’s life but none came as close as she did. All those responsible were released after the dictator was killed in 1945. One of his would-be killers, Anteo Zamboni, has a street named after him in Bologna.

For years, while she remained detained in the asylum, she wrote letters pleading for her release to Prime Minister Winston Churchill and to the then-Princess Elizabeth among others. The authorities never posted them.

Violet’s will ignored

AFTER twenty-nine years of trying and failing to have her situation reviewed, Violet Gibson died on May 2, 1956 aged 79. Her death was not announced in the press and no family or friends attended her funeral. The various requests in her will were largely ignored. Instead of being buried in a Catholic plot, her body was consigned to the nearby non-denominational Kingsthorpe cemetery in Northampton, with just a stone cross bearing her name and the years of her birth and death.

Dublin city councillor Mannix Flynn has been campaigning to have Gibson posthumously honoured as a political prisoner. His motion was unanimously endorsed by the council. “Given what’s known about the Second World War,” he said, and what Mussolini did, “surely it’s time that the establishment that so condemned this individual should bring Violet Gibson into the open.”

The British property company which now owns Gibson’s childhood home, 12 Merrion Square, agreed last week that a commemorative plaque could be installed on the front of the building.