Armar Lowry-Corry, 5th Earl Belmore

The 5th Earl gained the rank of captain in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. He held the offices of High Sheriff of County Fermanagh (1895) and High Sheriff of County Tyrone (1901), justice of the peace in County Fermanagh and County Tyrone and a deputy lieutenant of County Fermanagh. He was in charge of the family's ancestral seat, Castle Coole, in County Fermanagh during the Second World War, when all country houses in the county were requisitioned by the armed forces because of the strategic importance of the flying-boat base on Lough Erne.

As Mark Bence-Jones explains, "Lord Belmore, an elderly and autocratic bachelor of elephantine build, tried to keep the military out of his own demesne of Castlecoole (sic), but it was discovered that the place was held originally by a Plantation grant which obliged the grantee to help with the defence of the country. So the authorities declared Castlecoole escheated, giving it back to Lord Belmore when the military left. The military did not, however, go into the house, where Lord Belmore lived on undisturbed. Living with Lord Belmore in that palatial classical mansion overlooking a lake inhabited by a flock of greylag geese were his rather sad bachelor brother and his four unmarried sisters, the Ladies Lowry-Corry, with whom he was not on speaking terms. When Lord Belmore first inherited Castlecoole there were eight unmarried sisters living with him there; since then one had married and three had died – one drowned in the lake and, according to legend, turned into a greylag goose. Lord Belmore and his brother and sisters had always occupied the same places in church, strung out in a line according to age; there were gaps where the deceased Ladies Lowry-Corry had been, for when they died the survivors had not closed ranks."^[3]

Lowry-Corry died in Castle Coole, Enniskillen, on 12 February 1948, aged 77.^[4] He was succeeded by his only surviving brother.