From winning a World Championships medal to becoming European champion and having lunch with the queen – Table Tennis England President Jill Parker MBE has had a phenomenal career.

All this and more comes up for discussion in our latest interview as we continue our countdown to the ITTF World Team Table Tennis Championships Finals in London.

From her early days playing at the British Legion in Slough, where she evolved her playing style and was singled out for praise by English world champion Johnny Leach, we take a tour through Jill’s great achievements.

We discover that a six-week training trip to Japan, arranged by Leach, was an important formative experience for Jill when she was 16 years old.

“I learnt a lot from them,” she said. “They concentrated so well. That progressed when I came back home, and I thought ‘I’ve got to be like that and be physically fit and stronger’. And that helped me enormously.”

Jill also reveals her diligent approach to learning from defeats.

“I didn’t find any matches I lost frustrating because my philosophy has always been, and that’s my parents saying to me, ‘you go on and do your best. If you win, that’s great, but if you lose, you can learn something from that’.

“I had a little book and I always wrote down when I played against anyone, where I was winning the points and where I was losing them. I think you’re always learning when you lose matches.”

Her 1973 ITTF World Championships Women’s Doubles bronze medal with Beatrix Kishazi of Hungary is a particular highlight, and Jill remembers: “We played really well together and we knew, because we were both defensive players, what the other one was going to be doing and it worked really well.

“It was fantastic, to be in a semi-final and knowing that I’ve got a medal no matter what. Obviously, we tried our best to get to the final, but it wasn’t to be and we got a bronze, which I was really happy with.”

Winning two European titles in 1976, with Linda Jarvis in the doubles and then beating Maria Alexandru in the singles, Jill remembers an ‘epic’ singles final that went to expedite.

“I’ve got a photograph at home where my arms are up in the air, and it was just elation.”

Her place on the iconic Ping Pong Diplomacy tour and the media impact it had also comes up.

“We went into the unknown really, because obviously China hadn’t been open for a long time. It was just a trip of a lifetime.

“It didn’t hit home to us really until we got home because there was a mass of journalists there, then we were sort of whisked off to television studios. We didn’t realise the impact we had just playing this little game of table tennis with a bat and a ball.”

Appearances on cult BBC shows Superstars and A Question of Sport, receiving an MBE and becoming Table Tennis England President are also on the agenda, and Jill says: “To be president, that for me is a real accolade because it’s a sport I’ve enjoyed for over 60 years. So, I’m very lucky, I’m privileged.”