The Golden Age of Glamour

There’s a strong case to be made that no nation, at any point in history, has worshipped the breast more devoutly than Great Britain in the late 20th century. Even France with Delacroix’s bare-chested Marianne leading the populace to revolution couldn’t quite summon the passion that British males displayed for Page 3 girls like Linda Lusardi and Maria Whittaker in the 1980s across various tabloid newspapers. It’s even said (and never disproved) that the three most photographed British women of the decade were Margaret Thatcher, Princess Diana, and Sam Fox – the most famous of all The Sun’s glamour girls, who first appeared in the paper with the header “Sam, 16, Quits A-Levels For Ooh-Levels”.

The Sun fielded Page 3 girls at any given opportunity in the paper’s prime, when the tabloid was selling four million copies a day, including for the Falklands War and charity fundraisers. The paper’s most successful editor, Kelvin McKenzie, recently recalled how when British armed forces were fighting Argentina his busty pin-ups were given military-themed headlines, including the pun-tastic “All Shipshape and Bristols Fashion”. When I look back at my schooldays, I recall perky bosoms constantly peeking out at you from mundane places. My parents’ pub displayed little bags of peanuts hanging in rows from a piece of card emblazoned with a sultry beauty. As you pulled the packs away, ever-more flesh was revealed until – wham bam – you were staring at a hefty cleavage. The Pirelli calendar, packed with naked beauties, was on display in family-run garages. Benny Hill, Carry On, and The Kenny Everett Show, complete with breasty dolly-birds like Cleo Rocos, were a staple part of British humour. Glamour modelling was a solid route to stardom for women with enough chutzpah and a double D-cup.

The Sun ran its first Page 3 topless photo (model Stephanie Khan sitting in a field in her “birthday suit”) in November 1970 as part of new editor Larry Lamb’s circulation battle with The Mirror. Naked breasts were only out on occasion initially, as straightlaced owner Rupert Murdoch came round to the idea. But profits soon overcame scruples and The Sun’s women reporters were enlisted to help ensure the poses weren’t overly smutty. This Mr Kipling-style tension between naughty but nice; smutty but wholesome, came to be a defining feature of the Page 3 phenomenon. Their judgement seemed finely tuned since The Sun’s circulation doubled in the first year of introducing the slot, and by 1978 it was Britain’s bestselling paper by a wide mile.

One of the earliest and most celebrated Page 3 girls was blonde Jilly Johnson, a fresh-faced, rebellious blonde from Surrey, who epitomised the national ideal of cheeky, nice-girl pin-ups. In 1975 she became the first topless model to grace The Mirror’s rival glamour-girl spot (as a left-leaning paper, they’d been more restrained), almost by accident. She told me over the course of a riotous conversation how she’d been modelling bikinis for glamour photographer Beverley Goodway when he announced there were only three frames left and she should “give me what you’ve got!” Johnson “was larking around and trying to shock him – he was incredibly shy – so I whipped my top off, and he pressed the shutter. A moment of madness!” It was as big a surprise to her as everyone else when she appeared on Page 3 of The Mirror the next day. The candid snap propelled her onto chat shows and “overnight stardom”.

Jilly’s mischievous moment epitomised what Page 3 fame could do for a young woman. “It opened so many doors,” she says, before pausing. “Long term, it probably closed a few.” The model believes she missed out on “a couple of big ad campaigns” because of the glamour poses, and also that there was a widespread assumption that “a lack of clothing meant a lack of brain cells.” Johnson also acknowledges there were “a few MeToo situations” in ad agencies, which she attributes to agents who didn’t provide protection and her own gullibility. Happily, she escaped unscathed, went on to write two books, and says firmly of Page 3: “it was the best thing that ever happened to me.” In similar vein, Sam Fox became a chart-topping singer and Melinda Messenger, the biggest Page 3 name of the 1990s, built a TV presenting career, quietly studied for a Masters, and is now a practising psychotherapist.

Even so, it’s clear the final huzzah of topless modelling wasn’t quite as “wholesome” as the previous decades and played out against a battleground of mounting political outrage, led by feminist stalwarts like the Labour MP Clare Short, who proposed a bill to try and ban Page 3 in 1986. Short made it clear the measure would only cover newspapers. “If some men need or want pictures, they should be free to buy appropriate magazines, but they have no right to foist them on the rest of us.” Which sounds utterly reasonable from a modern perspective, but The Sun, its readers, and Conservative MPs saw her stance as a declaration of war. When you track down audio of the parliamentary debate, it’s hard to believe the level of vile abuse levelled at Short, most of it not recorded in Hansard. The Tory buffer Robert Adley is on record as saying, “She would have our newspapers resembling Pravda!”

Short kept up her fierce opposition and had another crack at Page 3’s “degrading pornography” in 2004, by which time Rebekah Wade was The Sun’s editor. Although Wade had expressed her own doubts in the past, once instilled as the tabloid queen she was vicious in defending The Sun’s right to serve up tits as family fare. The paper even published a photo of Short’s face superimposed on a topless model, with the headline “Fat, Jealous Clare Brands Page 3 Porn”. The piece went on to proclaim that “Page Three girls are intelligent, vibrant young women who appear in The Sun out of choice and because they enjoy the job. Unsurprisingly, millions of our readers – men and women – enjoy looking at them.” The past is another country and there are more breasts there.

The battle raged on for another decade, and the old-school feminists were bolstered when author and actress Lucy-Anne Holmes set up the “No More Page 3” campaign in 2012, when she noted that during the UK Olympics that summer The Sun’s glamour models got more coverage than British women athletes. Rocket fuel was added to the revolt when the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo “No More Page 3” in the House of Commons chamber in 2013 and was rebuked by the Speaker for breaking with dress-code convention. Around that time, I was summoned by Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour, as former editor of the Erotic Review magazine, to debate the conflict with former Page 3 model Peta Todd – who by then was married to Olympian Mark Cavendish. We agreed that the feature would die a natural death as ever-fewer readers found it normal to see giant breasts while munching on their Cornflakes.

And so it proved, In January 2015 The Sun joined other tabloids in dropping Page 3 girls forever. The Daily Star staggered on for four more years, but it was viewed as more of a grown-up comic than a newspaper. Though, as glamour model Keeley Hazell’s piercing, tragi-comic recent memoir Everyone’s Seen My Tits (possibly the greatest title in modern publishing) makes clear, the last decade of Page 3 was far more fraught than the “wholesome” era, with lads’ mags poaching pin-ups for their front covers, and tabloids running stings to catch models with football and soap stars. There’s a particularly painful episode where a dodgy ex of Hazell’s sells their sex tape to a newspaper, leaving her reeling. Like Johnson, Hazell did not set out to show her breasts and writes of her first shoot: “My boobs had gone national. And I was mortified.” But London-born Hazell is also blazingly direct about the lack of opportunities for girls like her from poor, working-class households attending schools where teachers made it clear they’d amount to nothing. She writes “There’s an old East London saying: ‘The only way out of the ghetto is boxing, singing, or crime.’ For me, it was my tits.”

Even though Hazell topped the Page 3 roster, she would encounter disdain from those outside the glamour world. She recalls doing a lingerie job and then discovering that the renowned fashion photographer Rankin, who was shooting the session, wouldn’t be putting his name to it. “If the same set of images had been published in Vogue magazine,” she says, “my perceived value as a model and how the world viewed me would dramatically shift.” The savage hypocrisy over which bare breasts prove acceptable, according to where they appear (whether it be The Sun, Vanity Fair, or the National Gallery) could be debated for all eternity. In recent years, Jason Sudeikis modelled Ted Lasso’s Keeley Jones on Hazell and told her she would almost certainly play the role – only for the model-turned-actress to find the show’s bigwigs preferred Bedales-educated Juno Temple, daughter of film director Julien. Any student of the UK’s class system will agree with Hazell’s wry comment that, “In England, no matter what politicians claim, opportunity is largely dictated by what womb you came out of.”

Perhaps that is why I can’t find it in my heart to condemn Page 3, even if the idea outrages my own teenage children. Social mobility is ever a problem in a nation that suffers stark class and educational divisions, with little political willpower to narrow the gap. Glamour modelling undoubtedly offered some very smart beautiful women – like Johnson, Messenger, and Hazell – a path to fame and fortune. And as Hazell writes, “Money doesn’t just give you access, it gives you freedom.” Some feminists burn bras, others discard them, my own brand of feminism means you don’t judge.