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 &amp; 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.