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Biography
Phaedrig Lucius Ambrose O'Brien, 17th Baron Inchiquin (4 April 1900 - 1982) was the holder of a hereditary peerage in the Peerage of Ireland, as well as Chief of the Name of O'Brien and Prince of Thomond in the Gaelic Irish nobility. He was a geologist.
Biography
The third of five children born to Lucius O'Brien, 15th Baron Inchiquin and Ethel Foster, and younger brother of Donough O'Brien, 16th Baron Inchiquin, he was also the uncle of the current incumbent, Conor O'Brien, 18th Baron Inchiquin. He was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford where he graduated MA.
He briefly served in Britain in World War I, which ended before he would have gone on active service or been promoted, as a Gunner in the Royal Field Artillery.
O'Brien further studied at Imperial College London's Royal School of Mines, but worked in Kenya as a farmer and coffee planter from 1922 until 1936 when he was professionally engaged as a geologist in the mining industry by the Anglo-American Corporation of South Africa.
He left in 1939 to serve in World War II with the Rifle Brigade, being commissioned in 1940 as Second Lieutenant and rising to Major in 1943. He was attached to the East African Intelligence Corps in Somaliland, Ethiopia and Madagascar, was mentioned in despatches in 1941, as well as wounded.
After demobilisation in 1946 he returned to the Anglo-American Corporation and worked for the company until he entered the British Colonial Service in 1954. He was employed on survey to the government of Northern Rhodesia(now Zambia), as senior geologist, becoming assistant director in 1957.
He retired from the Colonial Service in 1959 but continued to work as a consultant geologist until 1967. He is not to be confused with the British exploration geologist Christian O'Brien (1914-2001).
After succeeding to his brother's peerage, he returned to the British Isles where he maintained Thomond House on the former ancestral estate of Dromoland Castle in Ireland, and a smaller home in England at Richard's Castle near Ludlow.
On 19 February 1945 he married Vera Maud Winter, the daughter of Reverend Clifton Winter. He died in 1982. He had no children, so the peerage was inherited by his nephew, Conor.