Anita Lonsbrough

Although born in Yorkshire, Anita Lonsbrough first learned to swim in India where her father was serving as a Regimental Sergeant-Major with the Coldstream Guards. After the family’s return to England, Anita began her swimming career with the Huddersfield Borough Club, where she was an average freestyle performer but for the 1958 season she turned to the breaststroke and almost immediately became a world class performer. At the 1960 Olympic Games and the Commonwealth Games and European Championships of 1958 and 1962, she won a total of seven gold, three silver and two bronze medals. The highlight of this impressive series of performances was her gold medal in the Olympic 200 metres breaststroke when she set the second of her four individual world records. At the ASA Championships she won a total of eight titles in the breaststroke, freestyle and individual medley. Her eighth and last ASA victory came in the individual medley in 1964 and this was the event she contested at the Tokyo Olympics, in preference to defending her breaststroke title. She reached the final of her new event but finished seventh. Anita retired after the 1964 Games. She was awarded an MBE in 1963. She later married Hugh Porter, MBE, an Olympic cyclist who, on turning professional, became the only man to win the world pursuit championship four times. Anita followed a career in journalism and is currently the swimming correspondent for the Telegraph newspapers.