FORMER RAF Spitfire fighter pilot and eminent physicist Roy Bickerton has died aged 82.

Mr Bickerton was a former director of the world’s largest fusion magnetic experiment, the Joint European Torus, in Culham, where he made several major contributions to fusion research.

He was born on July 3, 1926, in London. As a schoolboy during the Blitz in London he was a runner for Air Raid warden posts.

After leaving school he joined the RAF and qualified as a pilot just as the war ended and as a result did not see combat. But the RAF gave him a grant to read physics at Exeter College, Oxford.

Afterwards Mr Bickerton began work on fusion research at the United Kingdom Authority Laboratory at Harwell, before joining Culham Laboratory in 1962.

When Culham was chosen as the site for the JET project, Mr Bickerton was became its scientific director in 1980. In 1985 he was appointed deputy director and he retired in 1988.

In 1989 Mr Bickerton and his wife Gladys moved to Austin, Texas, where he worked at the Institute of Fusion.

After returning home to Cumnor, Mr Bickerton served as a Liberal Democrat councillor on the Vale of White Horse District Council in the 1990s.