IF you have learnt to swim in Colchester over the past few decades, the chances are you were taught by Wyn Robinson.

The 77-year-old has taught thousands of youngsters to swim, and is now teaching their children and grandchildren.

The loss of her first son, hours after he was born, led her to throw herself into teaching youngsters.

She spent 43 years working at the Garrison pool, off Butt Road, Colchester, where she still does some classes, and also taught at St George’s School, Monkwick School and Leisure World, among others.

Although she has now had to scale back her work, Wyn is still heavily involved in teaching disabled people to swim.

She teaches at Lexden Springs special school, where she runs classes after Greyfriars Adult Education cancelled them, and with the Colchester Lifesaving Group, which she helped establish.

Her career in the water was probably inevitable since her uncle swam for England.

Wyn, who lives in Mersea Road, said: “I was too young to help him with the teaching he did, but at 13 I started doing it anyway, and at 16 I could actually get going properly.

“It just went from there really.”

As a young woman, Wyn joined the police force in Cheshire.

But when she met and married husband Jim 50 years ago, she came to Colchester, where he was based at the Military Corrective Training Centre.

The couple were then posted to Malaya with Jim’s job and it was there Wyn’s career as a swimming teacher really began. She threw herself into teaching the local children in the pool after the couple’s baby son, James, died.

She said: “I needed something to focus on. We did not know what to do, really.

“He was our first child and no one could explain what happened, so I threw myself into teaching the Malayan children.”

Wyn and Jim went on to have twin daughters, Susan and Ann, who are now 48, and another daughter Jill, now 45.

But James, named after his father, lives on in the family’s youngest members.

Wyn said: “The girls, even though they never knew him, always said they would name their first son after James, and that is exactly what they have each done.

“So we have three grandsons called James.”

On their return to Colchester, Wyn resumed helping her uncle at the Colchester Cathedral Swimming Club and the Garrison, and started her own teaching elsewhere.

From 1976, she ran the Colchester Lifesaving Team, and its success at events such as the Pan Asian Games in Australia meant she was appointed coach of the Essex Competition Team.

Wyn wrote a manual for the Swimming Teachers’ Association about teaching swimming to disabled people, and eventually became its national president and honorary life member and vice president.

Even now, she still has to complete her own exams to prove she can do the lifesaving herself, and admits those she has just undertaken will probably be her last.

She said: “I have had two knee operations and I have noticed my arthritis is slowing me down.

“The qualification lasts for two years and I do not think I will be doing it again.

“But it means finding someone else to take on the lifesaving group and also the teaching at Lexden Springs. I don’t think people realise I won’t be able to go on forever.

“When I get people coming up to me saying, ‘you taught my grandma to swim’, not their mum, then I know it must be time for me to think about stopping,” she joked.