The sixth of  seven children born to Charles and Harriet Bowler, John William Bowler was born at Park Terrace, Thame in 1894, his father was a brick maker at the local brickworks.

By 1901, the family had moved to Maidenhead, Berkshire, and then move on to Reading, where John was employed as a butcher’s assistant in 1911.

Enlisting with the Coldstream Guards at Caversham, Berks at the end of 1915, he went to the Western Front with the 2nd Battalion, and was, most likely, to have been in action with them on the Somme in 1916, and at Arras in 1917.

On 8th September 1917, on its way back from a few days in trenches at Langemarke east of Ypres, to a rest area near Elverdingre, the battalion came under German shell fire.  Private Bowler was one of three soldiers killed in that action.

He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Tyne Cot Memorial near Ypres.  Private John William Bowler is not currently remembered on a memorial in Thame.