Denise Newman

Denise Newman’s family moved from London to Cairo, Egypt when she was very young, and Denise took to diving at an early age at the Maadi Sporting Club, winning her first tournament at the age of six. One of her earliest coaches there was Ahmed Ibrahim Kamel, a 1936 Olympian in diving. Under his guidance she won the 1937 national Open Swimming Championships and, less than two months later, the Open Diving Championships. She continued to win championships and set records both before and after her permanent return to England in 1938. World War II put an end to her hopes of competing at the 1940 Summer Olympics, however, and saw her sent to Abadan, Iran to live with her family for several years. She returned to England in 1943 and joined the Air Ministry. Already fluent in French and Arabic, she was sent to learn Japanese, which she did in six months, before joining the Japanese cipher section at the famous Bletchley Park intelligence centre.

After the end of the war Newman married Vyvyan St Aubyn Hubbard but, unusually for the times, returned to competitive sport as a diver. At the 1948 Olympics she competed at platform diving but a muscle injury suffered in the third round ruined her chances of a high placement and she finished 11th of the 15 competitors. She continued to compete for several years and even tried out for the 1952 Games, but raising a family left her with little time to train and her third placement in the trials was not sufficient for her to make the team. She retired from active competition shortly thereafter.

Newman began sailing for pleasure in the late 1950s and worked towards professional sailing qualifications in the late 1960s as a potential way to earn money as she approached the impending end of her marriage. She joined the Royal Navy Auxiliary Service in 1970 and, in her 19 year service, she rose in the ranks to command her own vessel, the training vessel Portisham. During this time she also set up her own sailing school and taught navigation and seamanship at Chichester College, beginning in 1973. In 1988 she competed in the Carlsberg Single-Handed Transatlantic Yacht Race although a series of mechanical failures meant that she could only finish 71st of the 95 starters.