Francis Howard Bickerton

Francis Howard Bickerton (15 January 1889 – 21 August 1954) was an English treasure hunter, Antarctic explorer, soldier, aeronaut, entrepreneur, big-game hunter and movie-maker. He not only made a major contribution to the Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911–1914 but was also recruited for Sir Ernest Shackleton's "Endurance" Expedition; he fought with the infantry, the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force in both world wars and was wounded on no fewer than four separate occasions. According to his obituary in The Times, "His loyalty to his friends, his gallantry... and the unembittered courage with which he continued to meet the difficulties of a world which gave little recognition in peace to men of his mould – leave to us who shared in one way or another his various life the memory of a rich, rewarding and abiding spirit". Bickerton was a friend of author Vita Sackville-West and was the model for the character of Leonard Anquetil in her 1930 novel The Edwardians. Early life Francis Howard Bickerton was born in Iffley, Oxfordshire, on 15 January 1889, the son of Joseph Jones Bickerton (1839–1894), liberal councillor and town clerk of Oxford, and his second wife Eliza Frances Fox (1849–1896). After the early deaths of both parents, Bickerton and his sister, Dorothea, became the wards of their maternal uncle, the neurologist Dr Edward Lawrence Fox (1859–1938), living at 9 Osborne Place in Plymouth, Devon. Bickerton received his early schooling from Joseph John Cross at Newton Abbot Hall before moving on to Marlborough College, where he boarded from 1901 to 1904. In 1906 he enrolled at London's City & Guilds (Technical) College where he became one of the college's first students to study aeronautical engineering. There is no record of Bickerton ever having formally graduated, but around 1910 he went to work in one of the iron foundries in Bedford and, while resident in that town, he met and became friends with the Antarctic explorer Aeneas Mackintosh (a veteran of Shackleton's Nimrod Expedition). In March 1911 the two men embarked upon a treasure-hunting expedition to Cocos Island but returned empty-handed three months later. The Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE), 1911–1914 Immediately upon his return from Cocos Island, Bickerton volunteered for the Australasian Antarctic Expedition led by Dr Douglas Mawson.