Roger Kean (TL 1961) dies aged 74

KEAN (TL 1961). On January 3, of 2023,  Roger Michael Kean, aged 74, from Motor Neurone Disease.

He spent his childhood in Nigeria before coming to board at Highgate. He studied Fine Art and film technique, editing TV sports films for a decade, before moving from London to Ludlow in 1982 with his partner Oliver Frey, who died in 2022.

Together they founded Newsfield Ltd., a magazine publisher which, during the 1980s, published the two top-selling computer games magazines, Crash and Zzap!64.

In 1991, after Europress acquired Newsfield, it launched Impact Magazine, and Kean then oversaw the releases of magazines such as Sega Force, N-Force, and Amiga Force under the label. He went on to co-create Archetype to produce gaming guidebooks; in 1995 it was acquired by Prima Communications Group and Kean then transitioned into publishing novels online and running the oliverfreyart.com website. He also edited books on computer games, popular music, sports and history; his historical books included Pirates: Predators of the Seas; Forgotten Power –Byzantium Bulwark of Christianity; The Complete Chronicle of the Emperors of Rome; A New History of the Roman Emperors – From Augustus to Romulus Augustulus, 30BC-AD 476;and Exploring Ancient Egypt.

A few years ago he unearthed, in his cellar, ten paintings done while he was at Highgate under the tutorship of Kyffin Williams and Anthony Green; five were featured on a display curated by School Heritage Officer David Smith in 2018 and displayed at the School Museum; it included a long memoir by Kean of KW, whose studio in Kensington he looked after while Kyffin was in Patagonia in 1968.  The black and white photograph, from the 1966 BBC film Horizons Hung in Air, shows Kyffin Williams observing pupil Roger Kean at work.

Roger Kean, as a pupil, being supervised by Kyffin Williams

Words by Michael Hammerson (WG 1956), Notes Editor of the Cholmeleian