Vera Tanner

Vera was selected to represent Great Britain in the 1924 Paris Olympics and won a silver medal in the 4 x 100m Freestyle Relay and was fifth in the individual 100m Freestyle winning a silver in the same relay event in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics.

Tanner toured South Africa with a Great Britain ladies' team in 1929 and re-met Dupre Murrell, who she originally met at the Paris Olympics, when he accompanied the South African men's team. Murrell and Tanner married in South Africa in April 1930 and she continued her career as a teacher at St. Andrews College in Grahamstown. She retired from swimming in 1934 but took up golf in 1931, and a little over two years later won the South African East Province Championship.

Tanner moved to Hong Kong in the late 1930s and worked for the Hong Kong Education Department. During the War, she enrolled as a nurse in the Auxiliary Nursing Service (ANS) and consequently missed the compulsory evacuation of women and children. She later became a Japanese prisoner-of-war and interned at the Stanley Camp in Hong Kong.

It was reported that Vera swum out nearly two miles to the British Pacific Fleet on liberation on 30 August 1945 to direct the Fleet to the prisoners. She is in the Hong Kong history books, as she and a Police  Sergeant swam out to meet the first warship that entered HK after the 2nd WW to relieve it from the Japanese occupation. The warship stopped and picked them up out of the shark-infested waters. "Thin and half-starved as she was, she made the journey in 30 minutes."

She was released in 1945 and on return to England, married her second husband, Lieutenant Colonel Ned Curran.

The British team at the 1924 Olympic Games - Florence Barker, Constance Jeans, Grace McKenzie, and Iris Vera Tanner.

Vera's swimming medals lost to the Japanese or other looters during WW2 in Hong Kong (Bruce Curran).

https://battleforhongkong.blogspot.com/2014/07/vera-murrell-olympic-games-swimmer-and.html