Frank Bickerton

Francis Howard Bickerton was an English treasurehunter, Antarctic explorer, soldier, aeronaut, entrepreneur, biggame hunter and moviemaker. He not only made a major contribution to the Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 191114 but was also recruited for Sir Ernest Shackletons 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.

Francis Howard Bickerton was born in Iffley, Oxfordshire, onJanuary 1889, the son of Joseph Jones Bickerton , liberal councillor and town clerk of Oxford, and his second wife Eliza Frances Fox . 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 , living atOsborne 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 19011904. In 1906 he enrolled at Londons City amp Guilds College where he became one of the colleges 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 . In March 1911 the two men embarked upon a treasurehunt

Source: Wikipedia