International Swimming Hall of Fame Honorees By Country (United Kingdom)

The youngest of three girls, Rebecca Adlington naturally wanted to do what her older sisters did, and the sisters were all swimmers. Before long, her desire to keep up with them made her into a serious competitor.

To avoid attending Church of England religious education classes, which conflicted with her parents religious beliefs, this 11-year old Liverpudlian was assigned to swimming classes at the Garston Baths.

As a swimmer, he was the Scottish freestyle champion and record holder over several distances between 1942 and 1947 before deciding to concentrate on diving. Self-taught and self-coached, he won gold medals at the 1950, 1954 and 1958 Commonwealth Games on the 10-meter platform and represented Great Britain at the Olympic Games in 1948 in London and in 1952 in Helsinki.

When Winston Churchill defined success as going from failure to failure without the loss of enthusiasm, he might have been thinking of Mercedes Gleitze.

When he wanted to join the local Rowing Club in Durham City as a ten-year old, his mother insisted he should swim first. He liked it so much he took up swimming rather than rowing. Six years later Norman Woods Sarsfield was the city champion.

Mike Read was an English school-boy butterfly champion who earned a position on Great Britain's 1960 OlympicTeam in the 4x200 meter freestyle relay. But he loved swimming in the open water and between 1960 and 2000, he swam in more than 150 Brit­ish Long Distance Swimming Association Championships setting more than 25 records. He was the 25 Kilometer Lake Windermere International Champion in 1970 and the first person to swim four lengths of Lake Windermere in succession, a total of 42 miles in 26 hours. In total, Michael Read has completed England's longest lake Windermere 39 times.

On an August day in 1968, wearing his cap and goggles, Kevin Murphy stood on the stony Folkstone’s Shakespeare beach ready for his first crossing as a swimmer of the English Channel. During the next 41 years, he successfully completed the Channel a total of 34 times, making him The King of the English Channel with the most crossings by a male. Murphy became one of the greatest solo swimmers of all time.

At his birth in 1887, the competitive swimming stroke of preference was the trudgen stroke. Sydney Battersby mastered it for his swimming.

Jane Asher was born in 'Nkana, Northern Rhodesia, in 1931, but grew up in South Africa. She loved the water and having swimming access anytime, anywhere. At the age of 22, she moved to Britain to take a post-graduate diploma in personnel management at Manchester University in 1953. She swam on the university swim team and was selected to compete at the World University Games, but was unable to attend the meet.