Mr M.M. Bowker donated numerous birds from the Transvaal to the Albany Museum in 1906. He is most probably Miles McGowan Bowker, youngest child of Thomas Holden Bowker* and his wife Julia Eliza McGowan. Miles was educated at St. Andrews College in Grahamstown and farmed for a while on Tharfield, near the mouth of the Kowie River in the Eastern Cape. With his brother John Mitford Bowker he went to Johannesburg in the late eighteen-nineties and went into business dealing in mining properties. During the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) he served in with the British forces in the Second Brabant Horse. Afterwards he raised the Port Alfred 'Imperial Mounted Police' and for six months guarded Boer prisoners at Port Alfred. He then farmed, with his brother John Mitford, at Potchefstroom, but soon moved to Zimbabwe to prospect for minerals. He lived for some years on his farm Weymouth at Banket, just north-west of Harare. In 1946 he was still mining at "Hobo Mine", near Umsweswe, Zimbabwe.
In 1920, at Enkeldoorn, Southern Rhodesia (now Chivhu, Zimbabwe) he married Gertrude Katharine Neethling. They had one son.
