Thomas Duncan Bourdillon, known as Tom Bourdillon, was an English mountaineer, a member of the 1953 British Mount Everest Expedition which made the first ascent of Mount Everest.
Background
Bourdillon was the elder son of Robert Benedict Bourdillon (1889–1971), a scientist who had been a founder member of the Oxford University ing Club in 1909, and of his wife, Harriet Ada Barnes. He was a grandson of Francis William Bourdillon, nephew of Francis Bernard Bourdillon and cousin of John Francis Bourdillon.
Education
He was educated at Gresham"s School, Holt, and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Physics and was president of the Oxford University ing Club.
Career
He made a career as a physicist in rocket research. 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 the challenge of the Greater Ranges and Mount 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 main summit, which was reached by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay three days later.
Bourdillon died with another climber, Richard Viney, in a climbing accident on 29 July 1956 while ascending the east buttress of the Jägihorn in the Bernese Oberland. On 15 March 1951 Bourdillon married Jennifer Elizabeth Clapham Thomas (born 1929), the daughter of Ronald Clapham Thomas.