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. Background 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. 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 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