Roly Drower

Drower also helped to organize the annual Sulby Fringe. 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.

Drower used his computer skills to create Manx Megalinks, a web portal intended as a resource for a variety of Manx special interest groups. He also set up a website of his own, Manxman.com, on which he posted satirical comments about Manx politics. He instituted Manxman's Black Pages as a place where people unhappy about Manx issues could ventilate their concerns. The website's postings about a property development planned by Albert Gubay, the multi-millionaire founder of the Kwik Save supermarket chain, provoked Gubay into suing Drower for libel. Gubay obtained an order unprecedented in Manx legal history which required the searching of Drower's home and the seizure of his computers, and also banned him from discussing the case with anyone – even his wife – apart from his lawyers. Despite Gubay's efforts to have him imprisoned, Drower refused to name the source who, he said, had supplied him with the information upon which his allegations against Gubay were based. Because the Isle of Man had no statute that allowed journalists a privileged right to keep the identity of their informants secret, Judge Michael Kerruish found Drower guilty of contempt of court, fined him £2,500 and ordered him to contribute towards Gubay's legal costs.

In 2009, Drower was posthumously named the inaugural winner of the Libertarian Vannin award, in recognition of his efforts to defend human rights and to uphold the values of the Liberal Vannin Party. The award was received by Drower's father at the Party's annual conference.

Drower died suddenly on 12 May 2008, aged 54, of a myocardial infarction. Several commemorations celebrated his contributions to Manx life. In 2009, his father compiled Bramblespit, an anthology of some of Drower's writings that included stories, poems, his Illiam Dhone oration and a picaresque memoir of his time at Stowe.

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".

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 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.

Drower came from an accomplished family. His great-grandparents, Joseph and Elizabeth Cunningham, set up Britain's first holiday camp. 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.

Roland Paul Drower, FRAS (born 12 Oct 1953, died 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.

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.