CASUAL visitors to the Miley pub in Rochford probably don’t realise the women pulling their pint is a three times Olympic Games finalist and only missed out on a medal by a couple of points.

Ann Pearce, 75, was one of the world’s diving elite throughout the 1950s and competed at the Helsinki, Melbourne and Rome Games in 1952, 1956 and 1960.

She’ll be at this summer’s Games watching the diving.

But she also admitted that she’d been an unofficial spectator at the 1948 Olympic diving competition.

“That was a bit naughty really because I was only a youngster and I’d travelled from Ilford, where I lived, to Wembley with a friend.

“We knew a door which was always open and we sneaked in to watch the diving finals.

“I don’t think you’d be able to do that now,” she joked.

Ann – born Ann Long – had a remarkable involvement with the Olympics at three pivotal post-war events which helped cement the Olympic ideal and went a long way to restoring relations after Europe’s and the world’s darkest days.

Born in July 1936, she spent many of her formative years in Ilford and was lucky enough to come under the wing of Cyril Laxton who was one of the country’s best diving coaches and taught Betty Slade who was an international standard diver in the 1930s.

Ann said: “My father had been in the Somme in the First World War and for the Second World War he helped man the searchlights. I’d been evacuated to Jaywick and learned to swim there and then later on would go swimming with my father. At that stage I didn’t know that diving even existed. To me as a child it was all just mucking about in pools.”

She learned to dive and becme a member of Ilford Diving Club, and together with other youngsters would give diving demonstrations at many of the London pools and lidos which were such a popular part of post war life in the late 1940s and 1950s.

“Poplar, Port of London Authority pool, Highgate, Marshall Street Baths – you name it, we did demonstrations there. We were sometimes diving into just 6ft of water. Health and safety would now allow it now. But I just loved diving and the friendships.”

Ann’s secret trip – as a 12 year old – to Wembley to watch the Olympic diving was a pivotal moment for the youngster, but even as a youngster she knew that much of her life would be taken up with sport.

And when she was selected to dive for Great Britain in the Helsinki Games she drew on the experience of making tens of thousands of previous dives to calm her nerves.

“In Helsinki I knew that I had to control my nerves on the diving board,” she said. “You are always nervous up there but you have to learn to control the adrenalin.”

Diving’s structure means you make many compulsory dives before you make it to the final 12 and in her first Olympics Ann kept her nerve and was placed seventh in the springboard and in the platform dive competition was placed fifth – just two places away from a podium bronze.

One of Ann’s great friends then – and now – is fellow diver Charmain Welsh and it was through Charmain’s father, a colliary manager in Durham, that the teenager improved her diving skills still further.

She said: “There was a cooling pit at the colliary and we were allowed to put on crash helmets and dive into the pool for practice. The miners would sit out and watch us dive and we’d come out of the water as black as anything. Looking back it was so funny – I can’t imagine what they thought of us training like that.”

Back in London, Ann really wanted to be a sports teacher but her parents believed a job in the City offered more options. She had done diving displays for scores of insurance companies and banks, but eventually ended up working for the Bank of England.

“My dad didn’t want me to get the job because of my diving success so I didn’t tell tell them who I was when I applied,” she said. “But when I got the job I was called up to see some of the governors because they were interested in my international diving medals and to hear about the Olympics.

“I was training hard, running each day to Ironmonger Row in my lunch hour to get in some dives at the pool. And this was on top of diving in the mornings and evenings.

“Straight after Helsinki I knew I was going to try to get to Melbourne. Diving is one of those sports where people last longer. It’s not a speed sport where you have a short competitive life. In diving, experience counts for so much and you can do it for a long time.”

During this time Ann had competed in Germany before the wall went up, knew Budapest before the revolution, and dived in Stalin’s Russia at the Youth Games in front of Stalin.

The Melbourne Games of 1956 took three or four days to reach because of the limitations of international passenger flight at the time and there was scant little financial support.

She said: “Sport then was so different to today. We were not allowed to earn any money from sponsorship because if you did you were deemed to be a professional. I was offered ads for toothpaste and there was the possibility of work on panel shows, but things were very strict.”

The Melbourne Olympics again saw Ann finish just outside the medals in sixth and seventh slots in the springboard and platform. And four years later – after countless hours in the pool – she was back again, this time at the Rome Olympics.

“I knew they would be my last Games,” she said. “But I did not dive well in Italy. I never really felt fit. Now they have months of acclimatisation and training camps. At that time we’d turn up and be diving the next day. They were very different times.”

After Ann’s Olympic adventures were over she married her late husband Ron and the couple moved to Rayleigh where she taught at Love Lane School – now Rayleigh Primary – and at Doggetts Primary School in The Boulevard in Rochford. She also taught for many years at Southend’s Warrior Square pool, introducing thousands of youngsters to diving.

She said: “The thing with international diving is that all the public sees is the competition and the medals. Nobody sees the tears, or the getting up at 5am every day to train before school or work. It’s all that effort you have to put in.”

Ann, who will be 76 in July, still owns the Miley pub in Union Square, Rochford, which is run by her daughter Louise.

And most of her seven grown up children live locally – apart from one who moved to Perth – so she has a close family.

She’s a firm believer in the Olympic ideal, but believes it’s a radically different animal to the halcyon days when she was competing for the pure joy of the sport without much thought of financial reward or earning money from endorsements.

“To be quite honest, anyone who’s been to the Olympics is called an Olympian, but I think more should be done to allow those people who have competed at Games to get to see the modern Games.

“Sometimes you see sports where arenas have seats available because they have gone to sponsors or big corporations and people have not turned up.

“Making sure more competitors from the past get tickets would improve the richness of the Olympics and make sure people understand there are other generations that led the way to the current Games.”