ROWTON, MONTAGUE WILLIAM LOWRY CORRY, BARON son of the Right Hon. Henry Corry and Harriet, daughter of the 6th earl of Shaftesbury, was born in London on Oct. 8,5838, educated at Harrow and at Trinity college, Cambridge, and called to the bar in 1863. His father, a son of the 2nd earl of Belmore, represented County Tyrone in parliament continuously from 1826-1873, and was a member of Lord Derby's cabinet (1866-68) as vice-president of the coun cil and afterwards as first lord of the Admiralty. In 1866 he be came private secretary to Disraeli, with whom he maintained intimate relations until the statesman's death in 1881. When Disraeli resigned office in 1868 Corry declined various offers of public employment in order to be free to continue his services., now given gratuitously, to the Conservative leader; and when the latter returned to power in 1874, Corry resumed his position as official private secretary to the prime minister. He accompanied Disraeli (then earl of Beaconsfield) to the congress of Berlin in 1878, where he acted as one of the secretaries of the special embassy of Great Britain. On the defeat of the Conservatives in 188o, Corry was raised to the peerage with the title of Baron Rowton, of Rowton Castle, Shropshire. After Beaconsfield's removal to the House of Lords, Rowton assisted him in keeping in touch with the rank and file of the party, and on Beaconsfield's death he was put in charge of his correspondence and papers.
Lord Rowton will long be remembered as the originator of the scheme known as the Rowton houses. Consulted by Sir Edward Guinness (afterwards Lord Iveagh) with regard to the latter's projected gift of £200,000 for endowment of a trust for the im provement of the dwellings of the working classes, Rowton made himself personally familiar with the conditions of the poorest inhabitants of London; and determined to establish "a poor man's hotel," which should offer better accommodation than the common lodging-houses, at similar prices. The first Rowton House was opened at Vauxhall in Dec. 1892, the cost (L3o,o00) being defrayed by Lord Rowton and it proved so successful that in 1894 a company, Rowton Houses (Limited), was incorporated to extend the scheme which was subsequently imitated throughout Great Britain, Europe and America. (See HOUSING.) Lord Rowton also devoted himself to the business of the Guinness Trust, of which he was a trustee. As he was unmarried the title became extinct on Lord Rowton's death on Nov. 9, 1903, at London.
See Reports of the Rowton Houses, Ltd., 1895-1903 ; E. R. Dewsnup, The Housing Problem in England (1907) ; R. H. Vebch, General Sir Andrew Clarke (1905).