When she made her first appearance in the then Empire Games in 1938, Tyler, competing for England under her pre-marriage name of Odam, had already won an Olympic medal in front of a crowd of 80,000 - and had met Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels.

By the time her career in athletics ended she had set a high jump world record and had become a renowned coach – the first woman to gain the qualifications to coach men.

Tyler was 16 when she travelled to Berlin for the 1936 Olympic Games, where she finished second in the high jump to become the first female British athlete to win an individual Olympic medal.

At 17 she went to Sydney in 1938 and won her first major title at the Empire Games. She was England's only female gold medallist at those Games.

In Berlin, Tyler had met Hitler at a lavish function for female competitors and later recalled him as "a small man in a large uniform - I felt I wanted to slap him". Goebbels was "a bit of a womaniser".

Tyler, who married fellow athlete Dick Tyler when she was 20, was a lorry driver at the RAF base of 617 Squadron, the Dambusters, during the Second World War.

When it ended she made a successful return to athletics and won another Olympic silver medal at the London 1948 Games, and a second Empire Games gold in Auckland in 1950, 12 years after the first. She was captain of the England team in Auckland.

It might have been three but Tyler was beaten into second place in the Vancouver 1954 Empire and Commonwealth Games by Thelma Hopkins, who was an Olympic silver medallist in Melbourne in 1956.

In all three of her Empire Games appearances, Tyler finished on 5ft 3in (1.6m).

Her world record of 1.66m was set at a domestic meeting in Brentwood, Essex in 1939 but it was not ratified until 1957, the year she retired from competition aged 37.

The world record at the time was 1.67m, held by the German Dora Ratjen, who had finished two places behind Tyler at the 1936 Olympic Games.

Ratjen was in fact a man. The Nazis were said to have known, but they selected Ratjen to avoid having to choose another contender for the high jump, who was Jewish.

Ratjen's world record claim was withdrawn by the Germans when his gender became public knowledge in the 1940s, but because of an administrative error in 1946 by the International Amateur Athletics Federation, the withdrawal was not recorded until a review in 1957.

That world record was one of the reasons why, in 1959, Tyler was voted Britain's all-time best female athlete by the athletics statisticians' union.

Tyler also competed, without winning any medals, in the long jump, javelin and sprint hurdles at the Empire Games.

She was an innovative coach who was assisted in training elite athletes by the great ballet dancers Margot Fonteyn and Michael Somes – though she had not had any formal coaching herself until the age of 28 and was a self-taught athlete from her schooldays.

Tyler’s mother had been a dancer, and when Tyler asked Fonteyn and Somes to help out they were pleased to help.

"Ballet gets to your very fingertips, to every muscle in your body," Tyler said.

In 2001, Tyler was appointed MBE. In 2012, two years before her death at 94, she was the official starter for the London Marathon.