Early Life
Francis Howard Bickerton was born in Iffley, Oxford 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 (née 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 1901–1904. In 1906 he enrolled at London's City & Guilds (Technical) College where he became one 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.
Read more about this topic: Francis Howard Bickerton
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“Both Eliot and Pound condense; their best verse is weighted—Pound’s, with sensual experience primarily, and Eliot’s with beliefs. Where the mind’s life is concerned the senses produce images, and beliefs produce dramatic cries. The condensation is important.”
—R.P. Blackmur (1904–1965)