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Christopher Ewart-Biggs 1942.
Christopher Thomas Ewart-Biggs was born in Kent on 5th
August 1921. Educated at Wellington College and University
College Oxford, he curtailed his degree to attend a wartime
course at Sandhurst, being commissioned into the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment on 7th March 1942. Wounded at the Battle of El Alamein in October 1942, he lost his right eye and, thereafter, wore a distinctive smoked-glass monocle.
Completing his degree after the war, he joined the foreign service in 1949 and served on postings to Lebanon, Qatar and Manila. On 5th May 1960 he married Jane Randall, a secretary at the Foreign Office, before his posting as British consul in Algiers. Further assignments to Brussels and Paris advanced him up the promotion ladder until he was selected as Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Dublin, arriving on 9th July 1976.
The ambassador was concerned about security and, right from the start, varied his route to and from work. However, there was a single choke point close to his home with a choice of right or left. On 21st July, the IRA detonated a huge bomb under the car – Ewart-Biggs and Judith Cook, the PA to Brian Cubbon, the senior civil servant in Northern Ireland, were killed, and Cubbon and the driver severely injured.
Despite a manhunt involving 6,000 Irish Army and Gardaí personnel and the arrest of 13 members of the IRA, no one was convicted of the killings. Thirty years after the event, files released by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office revealed that a partial fingerprint found at the scene was matched to a known IRA gun-runner. Irish Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave declared: ‘This atrocity fills all decent Irish people with a sense of shame’.
Jane Ewart-Biggs heard of the death of her husband on her car radio. When she relocated to the UK after his death, she was presented with a tax bill for importing the car her husband had bought her in Dublin. Despite only a brief stay in Ireland, she threw herself into the peace process, establishing a prize in her husband’s name, recognising those who have promoted peace and reconciliation in Ireland. She later entered politics, joining the Labour Party and, in 1981, being created Baroness Ewart- Biggs, of Ellis Green in the county of Essex. A hard-working member of the House of Lords, she was also president of the British committee of UNICEF.
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