Diana Harris

As a 15-year-old in 1964, breaststroke swimmer Di Harris had a memorable Great Britain international début as part of the 4x110 yards medley relay squad that knocked 1.3 seconds off the world record during the international match with Russia at Blackpool with a time of 4:34.4. Her team-mates that day were fellow teenagers Jill Norfolk, Glenda Phillips, and Sandra Keen.

The following year Harris won her first ASA title (110 yards) and, in doing so, her time of 79.2 seconds equalled the world record of East Germany’s Karin Beyer. To make the win ever more special, it was on Harris’s 17th birthday. She was the ASA 110 yards champion again in 1966 and 1968, and was runner-up in 1967, 1969, and 1970. Strangely, she never had a podium finish in the 220.

Like her grandfather Robert Hassell, Harris became an Olympian, and despite going to both the 1968 and 1972 Games her best result was in reaching the 100 metres semi-final at Mexico. Harris did, however, enjoy considerable success in international competition. She won a bronze medal with the 4x100 medley relay squad at the 1966 European Championship in Utrecht, and in that year’s British Empire and Commonwealth Games at Kingston, Jamaica, she won the 110 yards breaststroke gold medal and added a second gold, with the England medley relay team made up of Harris, Linda Ludgrove, Judy Gegan, and Pauline Sillett. Their time of 4:40.6 was another world record for Harris, who was one of six members of the Beckenham Ladies club to win gold at the Games.

Harris added further gold in 1967 when she won the 100 metres at the World Student Games (Summer Universiade) in Tokyo, when she was the only non-USA swimmer to win gold. Harris also won silver in the 200 and 4x100 medley relay. She went to her second Commonwealth Games as captain of the England women’s team in 1970 but was disqualified in her heat of the 100 and finished seventh in the 200.

Harris retired from competitive swimming in 1973 and, after attending Goldsmith school of art at London University, became a graphic designer and later an art teacher at a boy’s college in Beulah Hill, London.