There are many ways to go mad

I go out to Rome

With a rock in my fist and a gun in my bag

And I shoot Mussolini in the nose

— Violet Gibson by Lisa O’Neill

Having just regaled the International Congress of Surgeons about the wonders of modern medicine, Benito Mussolini moved through the adoring crowd in the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome. The date: 7 April 1926. A woman of Anglo-Irish stock worked her way towards the fascist dictator, carrying a revolver.

Violet Gibson had spent the previous 12 months living in a convent in Rome. A suicide attempt had brought about the sabbatical — Gibson had survived because the bullet from the gun she’d fired at point-blank range ricocheted off her rib. She had passed the time doing jigsaws with her Irish maid . . . until the day she came to the Capitoline Hill.

Violet Gibson shot Mussolini, but unfortunately the bullet grazed his nose — Mussolini had luckily turned his head just as Gibson fired. The fascist crowd half-lynched the already emaciated 49-year-old before her arrest. These were her final moments as a free woman.

I fired twice I didn't fire right

And they dragged me through the town

And the fascist dictator carried on

And on and I went down

Down and down and then down more

They hurt me in and out

. . . half mad

An ignorant tourist

An old Irish hag

They called me all sorts

They threw her in prison, taking her actions to be those of a madwoman. True enough, Gibson’s behaviour had twice seen her committed, but this was a time when Mussolini was popular enough on the world stage for the King of England to award him the Order of Bath, while journalists from the same country were lauding him for sorting out those pesky Bolsheviks. They thought Mussolini was a good skin. How could Violet Gibson be anything other than insane?

Mussolini’s early supporters abroad might plead ignorance of the atrocities he would commit in the future, yet his “pacification” of Libya, which might be more accurately described as a genocide and would see the mass deaths of one quarter of the 225,000 indigenous population of Cyrenaica, had started in 1919. The English, no strangers to “pacifying” indigenous peoples in their colonies, perhaps recognised a colonial brother-in-arms. One of their own.

Mussolini's snout following Violet Gibson's attempt on his life.

In her song Violet Gibson, Lisa O’Neill gives a voice a woman tragically forgotten by history:

I didn't shoot to skim the skin of his snout

Or his teeth or the lips on his mouth

I simply saw a bad egg and I thought

I'd take the bad egg out

The Italians deported Gibson to London, where two doctors examined her and certified that she was insane. She landed in the Northamptonshire asylum where she spent the remains of her days, though this incarceration did little to improve her mental health. Violet Gibson died on 2 May 1956.

That day in Rome, Violet Gibson looked at Benito Mussolini and knew what he was.

She stood up to the fascist dictator.

We should all be more like her.