Tom Bourdillon
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Thomas Duncan Bourdillon (born 1924, died Bernese Oberland, 29 July 1956), was a British mountaineer, a member of the team which conquered Mount Everest in 1953.
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[edit] Education
He was educated at Gresham's School, Holt, and then read Physics at Oxford, where he was president of the Oxford University Mountaineering Club.
[edit] Career
He made a career as a physicist in rocket research.
[edit] Mountaineer
Active as a climber while still a schoolboy, Bourdillon developed his climbing during his years at Oxford. By his mid twenties he was an inspiring figure in the renaissance of British climbing in the Alps, and he then moved on to challenge Everest.
Bourdillon had been with Eric Shipton on the 1951 reconnaissance of Everest and on Cho Oyu in 1952, and he was put in charge of oxygen equipment on the 1952 and 1953 British Everest expeditions. With his father, Robert Bourdillon, he developed the closed-circuit oxygen apparatus used by Charles Evans and himself on their pioneering climb to the South Summit of Everest on 26 May 1953. They came within three hundred feet of the summit, which was conquered by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay three days later.
Bourdillon died in a climb of the Jagihorn, in the Bernese Oberland, in 1956.
[edit] Films
Bourdillon appears as himself in two films, The Conquest of Everest (1953) and (archive footage) The Race for Everest (2003).
