From the archive, the 1948 Olympic Games:

Women's high jump final I The opening ceremony I Review of the Games

Dorothy Tyler places a small box on the dining table of her home near Croydon, removes its cover and reveals a pile of near-pristine black and white photographs.

In one we see her as a smiling 16-year-old in Berlin holding the silver medal she won in the high jump there in the 1936 Olympic Games. In another, taken 16 years later, she is competing at the Empire Games in New Zealand, a precursor to the Commonwealth Games, where she would win gold.

In the best-known photograph of the first female star of British athletics, though, she is not wearing kit but everyday clothes and is leaping over a low-slung washing line while holding a washing bowl. The unlikely composition is made even less convincing by the sight of Tyler flashing a smile for the camera.

Taken by a newspaper in the weeks before the 1948 Olympics in London, the picture ran with a caption claiming to depict how Tyler occasionally combined training with her household chores. "They were a bit naughty," she says, laughing. "The truth was I never did much housework. I didn't like it."

A former world record-holder in her event and the first British woman to win an Olympic medal, Tyler has received the recognition her success deserved probably only in recent years. For example, she was given an MBE in 2002 and inducted into the England Athletics Hall of Fame eariler this month.

"When I went to the Palace, Prince Charles asked why it had taken so long for me to be given it," she says. "I replied that it took you lot so long to ask!"

In a long and storied career, that was not her only unusual encounter with a member of the ruling elite. While in Germany in 1936, she attended a party organised by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels but open only to female Olympians. "They were the only men there," she says. "It was a little odd, but they kept themselves to themselves."

For all her talent and experience, however, Parlett did not expect to fare greatly in the 1948 Games. For she had given up athletics once the Second World War began and returned to it at her local athletics club in Mitcham, South London, only in the late spring of 1948 by which time Britain had named their provisional squad.

Then a mother of two who worked part-time as a typist, she had little time to devote to training but found that her technique was still sound and helped her to win local and regional competitions. Inspired, she decided to try to qualify for the Olympics, even though by then that was possible only by winning the National Championships at White City Stadium.

"I was very lucky," she says. "I hardly had to practice. Jumping came naturally."

With the Games only a couple of months away, the prospect of the festival of sport coming to the city had by then caught the public's imagination. "Crowds were streaming down the road in White City," she says, before quoting a peer of hers, Emile Zatopek, the great Czech long-distance runner who won gold and silver in 1948. "The Olympics had given people something to look forward to. As Emile Zatopek said, they were like the sun coming out after the dark days of war."

An irreverent and optimistic 89-year-old, Tyler recalls the War with an unexpected positivity. Working as a physical-education instructor and as a driver at military bases around Britain, she says that she enjoyed that period for the solidarity it inspired in people.

That time did not compare to her experience of the 1948 Games. Having won the Nationals, she progressed easily through the opening rounds of her event in the Games until only her and Alice Coachman, of America, remained. In the final athletics discipline at Wembley Stadium that year, the pair embarked on a suitably compelling duel in which neither could gain an advantage.

When the judges eventually said they had a winner on a countback of jumps, Tyler initially thought she had won because she had made fewer overall jumps. Instead, Coachman prevailed as she cleared the final height on her first attempt - Tyler did it on her second - making the American the first black female athlete to win Olympic gold.

Tyler felt no bitterness over the result. "I was just glad to have reached the final and to have jumped that high," she says. "The Games provided a nice distraction to real life but you didn’t make it a priority, you couldn’t afford to - you had to work, look after your family. I just congratulated the other girl and asked for her address so that I could write to her."

Coachman replied, too, but Tyler says the correspondence did not last long. Perhaps she did not have the time to continue it.