Death
Ewart-Biggs was 55 when he was killed by a land mine planted by the IRA. He had taken previous precautions to avoid such an incident since coming to Dublin only two weeks before the incident (e.g. varying his route many times a week), but due to a vulnerable spot on the road connecting his residence to the main road, at that point had only the choice between left or right. He chose right, and approximately 150 yards from the residence, hit a land mine (said to contain hundreds of pounds of explosives). Ewart-Biggs and fellow passenger and civil servant Judith Cooke (aged 26) were killed. Driver Brian O'Driscoll and third passenger Brian Cubbon (aged 57, the highest-ranking civil servant in Northern Ireland at the time) were injured.
Read more about this topic: Christopher Ewart-Biggs
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)
“From the very nature of progress, all ages must be transitional. If they were not, the world would be at a stand-still and death would speedily ensue. It is one of the tamest of platitudes but it is always introduced by a flourish of trumpets.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The things a man has to have are hope and confidence in himself against odds, and sometimes he needs somebody, his pal or his mother or his wife or God, to give him that confidence. He’s got to have some inner standards worth fighting for or there won’t be any way to bring him into conflict. And he must be ready to choose death before dishonor without making too much song and dance about it. That’s all there is to it.”
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