Roly Drower

Roland Paul Drower, FRAS (12 October 1953 – 12 May 2008), known as Roly, was an English software engineer, journalist, satirist, activist, poet, broadcaster and composer. He is best remembered for his contributions to the political and artistic life of his adopted home, the Isle of Man, and for his protracted legal conflict with Albert Gubay, the multi-millionaire founder of the Kwik Save supermarket chain. His grandfather, Sir Edwin Mortimer Drower, was a British diplomat who served as a judicial adviser to the government of Iraq. His grandmother, Lady Ethel Stefana Drower, was an oriental anthropologist who wrote romantic novels for Mills and Boon under her maiden name of E. S. Stevens. His uncle, Captain William Mortimer Drower, worked as a translator in Japanese prison camps during the Second World War, and later served in the British Embassy in Washington. His aunt, Professor Margaret Drower, was an Egyptologist at University College London and the biographer of Flinders Petrie. His father, Denys Drower, was a BBC announcer who was heard as 'London Calling' during the Second World War and also appeared on the Goon Show; in retirement he became a writer of fiction, local history and atheist doggerel. Drower's mother, Angela Drower, was a watercolour painter. His sister, Jill Drower, formerly a dancer in a countercultural 1960s commune, is a social historian.

Early life Born on 12 October 1953, Drower grew up in an affluent middle-class household in Putney, a suburb of southwest London. He attended a small local preparatory school until the age of thirteen, when he was sent to board at Stowe, an independent school based in Stowe House, a grand neoclassical mansion that had once been the country home of the Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos. His time in Stowe's Grafton House, enlivened by a sword fight and an extracurricular experiment with nitroglycerine, was cut short when he was expelled in 1972.

After working in railway track maintenance and then a biscuit factory while studying science and mathematics in evening classes, Drower enrolled in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London in 1976. Together with his friend David C. Jewitt, later a Kavli and Shaw laureate and the joint discoverer of the Kuiper Belt, he graduated with a first class honours degree in astronomy in 1979. He remained at UCL to undertake a Ph.D. in solar physics at the College's Mullard Space Science Laboratory under the supervision of Dr John Parkinson, but he abandoned his researches before completing his thesis.

Literature and music In London, Drower had written comic autobiographical sketches for a motorcycling magazine and an unpublished fantasy novel. On the Isle of Man, his involvement in the arts deepened. He wrote humorous memoirs, short stories and poems exploring the gamut of his many interests, including theology, mythology, philosophy, mathematics, physics, astronomy, ecology and current Manx affairs.

As a musician, he composed electronic scores that sometimes incorporated elements drawn from Manx folk traditions. He issued his work both on CD and online under the pseudonym of the Sulby Phantom Band. Towards the end of his life, he moved from his home in Sulby to rent Ballacreggan Farm, which he transformed into a refuge for Bohemian artists – a countercultural Rivendell reminiscent of the Exploding Galaxy commune in London's 99 Balls Pond Road to which his sister Jill had belonged in the 1960s.

In 2005, the Manx section of the Celtic League and Mec Vannin, a political party that seeks Manx independence from the United Kingdom, invited Drower to deliver a speech at their annual commemoration of the seventeenth century Manx politician Illiam Dhone. Drower said that in his opinion, Manx governance was characterized by "spin, arrogance, secrecy, a system of block vote, cronyism and consensus by reward".