Amy Gentry has long been a heroine of mine. She was born in White Hart Lane in Barnes and lived in Thornton Road in Sheen, hence my request to English Heritage to commemorate her with a Blue Plaque. My research brought up many memories that I’m happy to share.

My first encounter with Amy was in 1964 when she welcomed me to Weybridge Ladies Amateur Rowing Club. She was a tiny lady with a big smile. She told me to report for training on Sunday and so began one of the happiest chapters of my life. The club then had fewer than 20 lady members and the boats were mostly heavy, built for men, and passed on when they were being replaced. Amy, as she coached, taught us all she had learned from her own many years of rowing success. We won some races and had a lot of fun along the way.

Apart from rowing Amy was also a singer with the local amateur operatic society. Perhaps in the hope of widening our cultural horizons she took us along to serve the interval refreshments and listen from the wings. At the other extreme she dragooned us into running an annual jumble sale. More to our taste was the serving of teas on Saturday afternoons to people strolling along the towpath.

Amy was never short of ideas for raising much needed funds and one such was a sponsored row. The ten miles to Windsor and back was an ideal distance and Amy duly selected the crew to do the job. On the appointed day the river was very high, and she deemed conditions too dangerous. She would brook no argument. We later learned that a crew had got into difficulty near to where we would have been and two people had drowned. An unforgettable lesson.

Amy later lived on Hamhaugh Island and once rescued a cygnet only a few days old and reared it to adulthood in her bath. As an islander she had to row to the mainland and could be seen most days in her dinghy wearing her green wellies and navigating the current from Shepperton weir to bring her to exactly outside the clubhouse. One scary eccentricity was her driving as she paid all her attention to her passenger and precious little to the road ahead.

Amy, who seemed to know and be known by everyone connected with rowing in the Thames Valley, had located a double sculler for sale in Marlow. To save the expense of transport back to Weybridge she suggested we scull it back. It was a tough call with all the locks to navigate to say nothing of the distance, but Amy always encouraged us to surpass our own expectations. It was dark by the time we got the boat home. With the same skill, when the first National Rowing Championships had only one entry for women’s quadruple sculls, Amy decided we should enter a crew to make a race of it. We had no boat ready, no crew, no hope, but Amy with her customary determination saw to it all and we won. Is it any wonder she is my heroine?

It is fitting that the Blue Plaque commemorating Amy appears on her old home in Sheen on the centenary of Weybridge Ladies, the club she founded. It remains a community where women can row, compete and belong, just as Amy intended.

Jean Gilbert in the orange coat, standing below the Blue Plaque