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. Career A retired diplomat, a friend of Drower's uncle William, hired Drower to help plan a science museum for Saudi Arabia, but the project never came to fruition. Prompted in part by a random assault on his own doorstep that almost killed him, Drower decided to relocate from his council flat in a Brentford tower block to a cottage in Kirk Andreas on the Isle of Man, near where his parents were living in retirement. Drower had learned how to code in Fortran as an undergraduate, and had deepened his knowledge of computing by teaching himself how to use an early Apple PC. On the Isle of Man he got a job as a computer technician working for Manx Independent Carriers. He also wrote the original operating software for the Isle of Man Hyperbaric Chamber (a decompression facility for deep sea divers). Literature and music In London, Drower had written comic autobiographical sketches for a motorcycling magazine and an unpublished fantasy novel.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. He broadcast his poems on Manx radio and travelled around the island performing them in pubs and village halls, and he edited the magazine of the Isle of Man Poetry Society. 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. 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. Activism 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