In May 2008, the Irish researcher Breandán Ó Corráin, was in Hampstead Cemetery Fortune Green Road, looking for a grave. He found row number J8 and worked his way along the line checking the numbers on the back of the stones to the position of grave number 35, but there was nothing visible. Having travelled so far, he decided to dig and eventually found a small headstone covered with six inches of soil. It said:
‘In Loving Memory of Darrell Figgis, died October 25th 1925. Not gone from memory or from love, but to our Father’s home above’. This was the grave he was looking for which had remained hidden for over 80 years and Breandán wrote a letter to the Irish Times about his discovery.
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This is a very tragic story with three interlinked deaths between 1924 and 1925. Darrell Figgis was at the heart of the fight with Britain to establish the Irish Free State, but divisions within the movement and his early death made him a forgotten man.
He was born at Glen na Smoil, Palmerstown Park, Rathmines in Dublin, on 17 September 1882, the son of Arthur William Figgis and Mary Anne Deane. His father was Irish and his mother was English. While still an infant, the family emigrated to Calcutta where William founded the tea company A.W. Figgis & Co. Darrell and his mother returned to England on 28 Feb 1893, though his father continued to spend much of his time in India. As a young man Darrell worked in London at the tea brokerage of his uncle Edmund Figgis.
In the 1901 census the family are at 99 Forburg Road Hackney: Mary A Figgis, 41, Darrell 18, tea broker, Bryan 17, tea broker, born Calcutta, Florence 8, born Calcutta. William was probably in India. On 28 November 1905 in a civil ceremony Darrell married Emily (Millie) Tate at the Islington Register Office, and on 1 June 1907, they had a religious marriage at St Martin in the Fields. Two years later they were living at 20a Hillfield Park Muswell Hill.
Darrell was bored by the tea business, and he became interested in Irish culture and literature by writers such W.B. Yeats and J.M. Synge. He impressed the writer G.K. Chesterton who wrote an introduction to Figgis’s debut poetry collection, A Vision of Life published by Dent in 1909. The following year, with support from Chesterton, Figgis joined the Dent publishing company where he worked as a reader and editorial advisor. In addition to his poems, Dent published several of his works, his first novel, Broken Arcs (1911), and his essay collection, Studies and Appreciations (1912).
32 Montpelier Rise Golders Green
By 1911 he and Millie had moved to 32 Montpelier Rise, Golders Green and he gave his occupation as author. Their last address in England from late 1911 to October 1914, was 42 Asmuns Hill (at the junction with Willifield Way), Golders Green.
In Ireland the movement to establish an Irish State had begun and Figgis was very keen to be involved. In 1913 the Irish Volunteers were formed and Figgis and Millie moved to Achill Island off the west coast of County Mayo, where he built a cottage at Pullagh. In Dublin he worked closely with key people in the Irish movement such as Eamon de Valera, Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins.
Gun Running for the Volunteers
Figgis visited Sir Roger Casement in his lodgings at 55 Ebury Street Belgravia to discuss how to move things forward. On 8 May 1914, Figgis attended a meeting at No.36 Grosvenor Road Westminster, home of John Richard Green and Alice Stopford Green, with Sir Roger Casement and leaders of Sinn Fein when it was decided to secretly arm the Volunteers. Figgis and Erskine Childers, the famous author of The Riddle of the Sands (1903), travelled to Hamburg on 28 May 1914 to negotiate the purchase of arms from the dealer Moritz Magnus Jnr. They succeeded in buying 1,500 old Mauser rifles and 49,000 rounds of ammunition for just over £2,000. Erskine Childers sailed his yacht the Asgard to the mouth of the River Scheldt to rendezvous with a German tug boat carrying the guns. He took 900 rifles while another member of the committee, Conor O’Brien took the remainder in his smaller yacht, the Kelpie.
Asgard yacht
After a lengthy journey Childers and the Asgard arrived at the small port of Howth, 45 miles east of Dublin, on 26 July. As they started to unload the rifles to the hundreds of Volunteers from Dublin, troops and the police intervened and a violent fight broke out. While Figgis spoke with the senior police officer as a delaying tactic, taxis from Dublin ferried the men and guns away. The guns on Kelpie were transhipped to another yacht, Chotah, owned by Sir Thomas Myles, before being landed at Kilcoole in County Wicklow on 1 August 1914.
The Irish Free State
Although he did not take part in the 1916 Easter Rising, Figgis was arrested as a leading member of Sinn Féin and imprisoned in Reading Jail. After his release, he returned to Ireland and in 1917 he and Austin Stack were elected Honorary Secretaries of the party. He was arrested again in May 1918 and spent almost a year in jail.
He was released from Durham in March 1919. In September he was appointed secretary of the Commission of Inquiry into the Resources and Industries of Ireland by the newly constituted Dáil Éireann (The Assembly of Ireland). In July 1920 while Figgis was participating in a Dáil Court at Carrick-on-Shannon, the proceedings were interrupted by a British Army raid and Captain Cyril Crawford summarily condemned Figgis and Peadar Kearney to be hanged and sent for ropes.
Figgis wrote about the incident in his book Recollections of The Irish War (published posthumously in 1927).
Captain Crawford leveled his revolver at me and ordered my instant arrest, exclaiming excitedly, ‘I know you, Figgis; you are one of the leaders of Sinn Fein; you are one of the heads of treason. I have you now’ he shouted. He announced his intention to try us instantly by drum-head court-martial. I looked at the man in amazement. At first I had thought that he was drunk, but now I saw that he was not drunk. I wondered therefore how it came about that an officer, so clearly mad, should continue in authority. It was not till afterwards that I learned that he had but a few days been liberated from hospital after a drinking bout followed by delirium tremens. With every movement that I made he covered me at once with his revolver, his finger on the trigger, and had I once lost control he would certainly have shot. Only by speaking to him coldly, as though I and not he were in command, was he held in check. I had in fact to keep control of him by firm control of myself, without releasing that control for one instant.
The incident went on for hours until another officer intervened and Keaney and Figgis were set free.
After considerable high-level negotiations, the highly controversial Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed at Number 10 Downing Street on 6 December 1921 and Dáil Éireann voted narrowly to approve the treaty on 7 January 1922: the vote was 64 in favour and 57 against. The landmark agreement brought an end to the Irish War of Independence and established the Irish Free State as a self-governing dominion within the British Commonwealth, similar to Canada, and Australia, but they had to swear allegiance to the King which angered some hard-line republicans. The six counties of Northern Ireland had the option to join Ireland but declined.
(In 1937 a new constitution renamed the state ‘Ireland’ and severed the remaining constitutional ties to the British Crown. In 1949 The Republic of Ireland Act came into effect, officially declaring the state a republic and definitively leaving the British Commonwealth).
Darrell supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and he was given the most important task in his career as the acting chairman of the committee which drew up the Free State Constitution at the Shelbourne Hotel. The fallout from the Treaty divided the Sinn Féin party and the IRA and led to the Irish Civil War from June 1922 to May 1923. Figgis was extremely critical of the pact between Michael Collins, then Minister for Finance and Director of Intelligence for the IRA, and President De Valera, and was expelled from the party. 
Darrell Figgis
The De-Bearding of Figgis
As we have seen, Figgis was not popular with some of the more extreme Irish republicans, who thought he was too much of a dandy, strutting around Dublin with his proud red beard and stylish clothes. They nick-named him with the derogatory phrase ‘The man from Golders Green’.
On 13 June, three days before 1922 election, Harry Boland of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) decided to humiliate Figgis and teach him a lesson. He sent three men, including Bob Briscoe, who later became Lord Mayor of Dublin – to attack the Figgis house at No.17 Lower Fitzwilliam Street in Dublin. Opening the door, and fearing they had come to shoot her husband, Millie attempted to block their way and was roughly treated by the gang, who smashed down the door to the study, held Figgis down and cut off half his red beard.
‘Poor Darrell Figgis lost his nice red beard’, mocked Kitty Kiernan in a letter to her lover Michael Collins the day the story appeared in the Evening Herald. ‘When I read about it I could imagine you laughing and enjoying it very much. But it was a mean thing for Harry’s cronies to do . . . he was lucky it was only his beard’.
Despite the assault, Darrell stood as an independent candidate in the 1922 and 1923 Irish general elections and was elected a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Dublin County constituency.
Millie and Darrell’s relationship
The de-bearding incident left Millie with a badly strained neck, fragile mental health and the marriage began to break down. In 1923 Darrell started a relationship with Rita North, an attractive 19-year-old dancing mistress who lived with her parents in Thomas Street, Dublin. They were seen around town and at tea dances in the Shelbourne and the Gresham hotels. On the evening of 18 November 1924 Darrell was working in the study when Millie told him she was going out to visit some friends. She took a taxi and asked to be driven to a tea room in the Dublin Mountains. Near Rathfarnham, she took out the Webley revolver that had been given to Darrell by Michael Collins following the beard-cutting incident and she shot herself in the head. She was pronounced dead at the Meath Hospital.
Figgis went to the hospital where he was handed Millie’s blood-soaked suicide note. It read:
‘My Dearest Husband – I am heartfully sorrow to cause you pain and sorrow, but the events of the past ten years has at last broke down my barriers. I have not stressed the matter to you, but the injury to my neck when the men came to cut your beard has been a constant trouble to me, and sometimes my nerves have been unendurable. I would have ended long since but for the pain and suffering I should cause you. Please forgive me but I cannot face the prospect of being a drag on you – or upon myself. ….With every thought for you, my dearest husband, Your wife, Millie’.
After considerable efforts we have not found a photo of Millie.
Figgis resumed his relationship with Rita and continued to work as a TD for his constituency. In October 1924 Figgis went to London, where as usual, he stayed at the Royal Automobile Club (RAC) in Nos.89 to 91 Pall Mall. On the 5th Rita phoned him saying she had just got off the sleeper in Euston and was pregnant. A friend at the RAC told Darrell about Dr Zarchi in Shaftesbury Avenue who helped actresses and dancers with unwanted pregnancies. He took Rita to see Dr Zarchi who said she was four months pregnant and in a serious condition having tried to abort herself a few weeks earlier. Figgis booked her into the modest Astoria Hotel at 12 Greek Street as Mrs Southe. He said she should tell her family, but she did not want her parents to know she was pregnant. Rita said she would be better in a few days and they could get married. Eventually, she agreed to tell her uncle, and her sister Mrs Quinn travelled from Dublin and saw Rita at the Astoria.
Rita North
Dr Smercha Zarchi lived at No.1 Alderton Crescent (near Hendon Central Station), and practised at 80 Shaftesbury Avenue. He first saw Rita on 6 October, when she was staying at the Astoria Hotel, and she took the five minute walk to see Dr Zarchi each day. Figgis paid Zarchi a fee of 25gns, plus 15gns for a maternity home, and 10gns for a hospital doctor. Rita travelled by tube to Zarchi’s home in Hendon on 9 October. He did not give Darrell the address because he suspected they were lovers even though they told him they were brother and sister. Dr Zarchi thought termination would occur naturally but then he found a malformation. When Rita did not improve, he phoned the Willesden Cottage Hospital for a private room on 12 October and took Rita there the next day. At the hospital the consultant Dr Norman C. Lake (a surgeon at Charing Cross Hospital) conducted an operation on 13 October, and Figgis was told there was nothing to worry about. But Rita got worse and a second operation was conducted five days later. Sadly, Rita did not improve and aged 21, she died on 19 Oct 1925. An inquest opened three days later when Darrell said he had known Rita for just over two years. The coroner wanted a postmortem and to hear medical evidence and the inquest resumed on 5 November. The verdict was ‘death from peritonitis due to an artificial cause’. The public, however, jumped to the conclusion that she died in a failed illegal backstreet abortion.
(Dr Zarchi was struck off the medical register after he had appeared at the Old Bailey on 29 June 1943 for unlawfully using an instrument with intent to produce a miscarriage).
The night of the inquest verdict, 22 October 1925, Figgis went back to the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall where friends said they had never seen him so depressed. On October 26, Darrell went to a boarding house in No.4 Granville Street Bloomsbury, giving the landlady, Miss Jane Griffiths, the name Mr Southe and saying that he would be staying for a few nights. Although he was obviously a well-to-do gentleman, he curiously picked a poky room at the top of the house. He went out for an hour and had a short conversation with the landlady before retiring for the night. When the maid brought hot water to his room the following morning at 8am, she found Figgis lying on his side in the bed and a strong smell of gas in the room where the gas bracket was turned on full. Darrell Figgis had killed himself at the age of 43.
Darrell Figgis
The Funeral
The Figgis family were shocked by Darrell’s suicide. His brother Bryan and sister Mrs Florence Phillips bought a grave in the unconsecrated section of Hampstead Cemetery, and on 30 October 1925 a small group of only nine mourners comprising his family and friends attended his burial. 
The small group of mourners
Brother Bryan escorting Mrs Figgis at the burial
While old comrades such as Sir Roger Casement (d.1916), Michael Collins (d.1922), Arthur Griffith (d.1922), Eamon De Valera (d.1975), and many others, were given State funerals through the streets of Dublin, with fine memorials erected over their graves, only a few people attended the burial of Darrell Figgis. Then the man who had done so much for the new Irish State was written out of its official history.
Recently, a hundred years later, a friend was walking her dog in the cemetery and saw that someone had erected a stand decorated with a Irish ribbon and a photo of Figgis, as shown in the following photo. This is how I first learned about the grave.
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