Christopher Ewart-Biggs

Christopher Thomas Ewart Ewart-Biggs (5 August 1921 – 21 July 1976) was the British ambassador to Ireland, an author, and a senior Foreign Office liaison officer with MI6. He served as ambassador to Ireland from July 9, 1976 until his assassination 12 days later by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Sandyford, Dublin.

His widow, Jane Ewart-Biggs, became a life peer in the House of Lords, campaigned to improve Anglo-Irish relations and established the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize for literature.

Biography Christopher Thomas Ewart-Biggs was born in the Thanet district of Kent, England, to Captain Henry Ewart-Biggs of the Royal Engineers and his wife Mollie Brice. He was educated at Wellington College and University College, Oxford, and served in the Royal West Kent Regiment of the British Army during the Second World War. At the Second Battle of El Alamein in 1942 he lost his right eye and as a result he wore a smoked-glass monocle over an artificial eye. He spent the rest of the war and after (1943–7) as political officer in Jefren, Tripolitania, where he learned fluent Italian and some Arabic.

Ewart-Biggs joined the Foreign Service in 1949, serving in Lebanon, Qatar and Algiers, as well as Manila, Brussels and Paris.

Following study at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies near Beirut, he was posted as political officer to Qatar (1951). In 1952 he married Gabrielle Verschoyle, and gained four stepchildren. The couple wrote a number of thrillers together using the pen name ‘Charles Elliott’ including Trial by Fire (1956). In 1959 she died in childbirth. He remarried (Felicity) Jane Randall on 5 May 1960.

Death Ewart-Biggs was killed on 21 July 1976, at age 54, when his armoured Jaguar car, part of a four-vehicle convoy on its way to the British Embassy in Dublin, was thrown into the air by a land mine planted by the IRA. He had been taking precautions to avoid such an incident since coming to Dublin only two weeks before. Among the measures he employed was to vary his route many times a week but, at a vulnerable spot on the road connecting his residence to the main road, there was only a choice between left or right. He chose right, and, 317 yards down the road, the IRA remotely detonated 200 pounds of explosives hidden under a culvert. Republicans suggested Ewart-Biggs was targeted because of his intelligence connections

It later emerged that the UK's Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Merlyn Rees, had at the last minute been forced to cancel plans which would have placed him in the convoy. He was to travel to the Republic to consult with the ambassador and Irish ministers, but postponed his trip after Margaret Thatcher refused to allow Northern Ireland ministers to pair their votes with her Opposition members in House of Commons divisions. Rees wrote in his memoirs, Northern Ireland, a Personal Perspective, that it seemed likely the IRA had known of his impending visit but were unaware of its cancellation. In London, the UK Prime Minister James Callaghan condemned the assassins as a "common enemy whom we must destroy or be destroyed by". Thirteen suspected members of the IRA were arrested during raids as the British and Irish governments attempted to apprehend the assassins, but no one was ever convicted of the killings. In 2006, released Foreign and Commonwealth Office files revealed that the Gardaí had matched a partial fingerprint at the scene to Martin Taylor, an IRA member suspected of gun running from the United States.