Esme G. HARRIS

Before turning to diving, Esme Harris started her aquatic career as a freestyle swimmer, and dead-heated for first place in the junior 100 yards at the 1946 Oxfordshire County Championships, when just 13. The following year, she was the senior county springboard champion. Keen to get a place on the British Olympic diving squad, she regularly travelled from her Oxford home to London to train, and it paid off, because she won the 1948 Olympic trial at Blackpool. She was only 15 at the time of the Games and, to honour her achievement of coming 13th in the springboard competition, she was given a free pass for five years to her local pool by the council. Harris was also a keen gymnast and married a fellow gymnast and diver, Jack Gibb, in 1953.