Guy Bullock

Guy Henry Bullock (23 July 1887 – 12 April 1956) was a British diplomat who is best known for his participation in the 1921 British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition. As expedition mountaineers, he and George Mallory found a northern access route to Everest by climbing the Lhakpa La col above the East Rongbuk Glacier and by going on to reach the North Col at . They did not, however, reach the summit of Mount Everest.

Early years Guy Bullock was born in 1887 in Beijing, the son of Thomas Lowndes Bullock, a member of the Radwinter branch of the Bullock family, and Florence Louisa Elizabeth Horton. Thomas Bullock was Professor of Chinese at Oxford University in 1899, and British Consul to China. Guy had an older sister.

Bullock was educated at Winchester College, where he was a member of the school's Ice Club along with Mallory who was his climbing partner. In 1905, he joined Mallory and the Winchester schoolmaster Graham Irving in the Pennine Alps where they reached the summit of the Dent Blanche.

Bullock was elected to the Alpine Club in 1909 at the early age of 22. In 1935 he became British consul in Lyon. While posted to Ecuador (1938–1941), he climbed Cotopaxi and became the first person to take photographs of the crater. In 1944 he became Consul-General for French Equatorial Africa.

After World War II an SS Black Book was discovered of over 2,000 Britons, and European exiles in Britain, who were to be arrested and eliminated following a successful German invasion of Great Britain. A "Harry Bullock" was included on this list, thought most likely to be a mistake for Guy Henry Bullock. He died in 1956 and was survived by his widow.

The Foreign Office rejected Younghusband's request to grant leave to Bullock, who was in Lima at the time, to join the expedition but he gained a special dispensation from the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, so he could have leave on half pay until the end of 1921 but with no chance of this being renewed.

To find out whether the North Col could be reached from the east, the whole expedition decamped to the Kharta region, hoping that the Kharta Chu river and valley would reach up to the North Col from the east. This approach led them to discover the Lhakpa La, where they found there was an intervening valley, the East Rongbuk Glacier. At the same time as they were discovering this, they received a message from the expedition's surveyor, Oliver Wheeler, to say that he had found the entrance to this same glacier at a point they had reached previously on their northern exploration – unfortunately they had failed to recognise its significance at the time. Without the time to return to the north after the monsoon, Bullock, Mallory and Wheeler traversed the Lhakpa La, descended to the East Rongbuk Glacier, and climbed to the North Col. At this point they were unable to go further and so had to return, which they safely did. Bullock was reunited with his wife at Lachen in the Teesta valley in Sikkim on 8 October and they eventually sailed home from Bombay. He was steady and cheerful, and so was a very good companion for Mallory, the better climber. In 1961 Graham Irving considered that Bullock had never received his fair share of the credit for the success of the expedition. Bullock had previously declined to lend the diary to Mallory who had been wanting to make use of it for his lectures after the expedition. This statement is to be relied upon.

He died in a London hospital in 1956.