[2] The Army sent Lowther to Oxford University, where he completed a degree in Electricity and Magnetism in just six months, and he was commissioned into the Royal Armoured Corps in September 1942.
By this time the Lowther Estates, which comprised some 90,000 acres (360 km2) in Westmorland and Cumberland, were largely run down and burdened by debt, and the Inland Revenue was demanding the payment of death duties amounting to some £2 million.
[3] Thereafter regarded as the saviour of his family estates, he resisted inclusion in the Sunday Times Rich List on the grounds that he was virtually penniless.
He thereafter became passionately concerned with the issue of the conservation of the Lake District and an opponent of the modern notion of building wind turbines.
When one of his sons struck a deal to place wind turbines on part of the estates that he controlled, the Earl opposed the construction at the subsequent public inquiry.
Before their divorce in 1962, they were the parents of a son and two daughters: On 6 March 1963 Lonsdale married Nancy Ruth Stephenson (née Cobbs), originally of Camarillo[6] and Pacific Palisades, California.
[10] Just four days before the Earl died in 2006, "a new company called Lonsdale Settled Estates was set up to administer the family land and buildings, with trustees, including the current Lord Lonsdale's half-brother Charles Lowther and a distant cousin, Viscount Ullswater" (a former equerry to Princess Margaret)[11] that his eldest son claims, disinherited him "in all but name.