The story of Page 3, the models and how it came to an end

In 1986 the teenage Tracy Kirby was sitting on the Tube when she noticed a man looking at her. Then he looked down at the newspaper he was reading, and back at Tracy. Then he asked her if she’d autograph his copy of the Sun in which Tracy had – unbeknown to her until that point – made her debut as a Page 3 model.

“I was so embarrassed. It was just awful,” laughs Tracy from her home in Essex. “I did sign it in the end, but I put my hand over my boobs while I did it. It was a mixture of being horrified and thinking, oh God, I’ve made it into the Sun.”

Some months earlier, 18-year-old Tracy’s boyfriend had suggested to her she should try modelling, to which she replied, “Don’t be ridiculous!” But he surprised her with a week-long modelling course as a Christmas present.

“I thought it was absolutely brilliant, I loved it,” she says. “It was mainly fashion modelling, and after the course I went around various agencies but I clearly wasn’t suited to it. I wasn't skinny enough. I had too many bumps in the wrong places. Every single agent said to me, no, you need to do glamour. And I just immediately said no, because glamour modelling to me was all the top-shelf kind of stuff, and I was horrified. No judgement to anyone else, but it just wasn’t me.”

Then glamour model agent Yvonne Paul – herself a former model – got in touch and explained that glamour could be topless, but also lingerie and swimwear, and wasn’t necessarily what Tracy thought of as porn. So she went along on a shoot with the famed Page 3 photographer Beverley Goodway, not really knowing what to expect.

“Just because you’ve been on a photoshoot it doesn’t mean you’ll make the cut,” says Tracy. “It doesn’t mean the Sun will accept you as a Page 3 model. I had no idea whether they would use the pictures or not. And then the following week I was there with my boobs out in the paper and the first I knew of it was when this guy asked me to sign his copy on the Tube.”

By the time Tracy made her tabloid debut, the Sun had been running photographs of topless models for 16 years on the first page the reader turned to after perusing whatever wordplay magic the sub-editors had wrought with the front page splash headline, and the hitherto innocuous term “page three” had become synonymous with a picture of a young woman baring her breasts.

The photos were accompanied by a pithy caption, usually little more than an alliterative introduction to the girl du jour (Tasty Tracy, Curvy Kathy, Luscious Lisa), her age, home town and a nudge-nudge-wink-wink pay-off… “Wish we were there!” the sub would practically drool, as a model posed on a beach.

Page 3 was born from a circulation war. In 1969, the Sun was not yet the dominant tabloid force it was to become. Rupert Murdoch had just taken it over and relaunched it, and had set his sights on taking down the rival Daily Mirror. The Mirror was already printing photographs of women in bikinis and underwear, and Murdoch decided to do the same. It would be a year, though, before he decided to up the ante.

On 17 November 1970, to mark the first year of the Murdoch era, the Sun printed its first topless photo on its third page. The model was Stephanie Khan, (though her name was misprinted as “Rahn”) celebrating the Sun’s special day… in her birthday suit, of course. Khan was from Singapore, and the photograph of her – backlit by the sun, turned to the side – was taken by Beverley Goodway, who would go on to take thousands of Page 3 pictures until his retirement in 2003.  

Suddenly, a national institution was born. Page 3 is a uniquely British phenomenon. That’s not to say nude models were unknown in other countries, but nobody did it quite like us. Page 3 belongs squarely in that corner of British popular culture that is saucy and self-referential, a paean to that nod-and-wink, how’s your father, don’t get many of them to a pound, sort of essentially working-class sense of humour. It’s territory populated by Benny Hill being chased by lissome, busty nurses, Sid James yak-yak-yakking as Barbara Windsor’s bra flies off during strenuous physical education, pneumatic cartoon blondes in short skirts being bothered by red-nosed drunks on seaside postcards, Robin Askwith up a ladder with eyes swivelling at what the window cleaner saw.

Except, while those other things didn’t last much beyond the 1970s and 1980s and are now filed away in the folder marked “slightly problematic nostalgia”, Page 3 endured, at least until 2015 when the Sun finally decided, 45 years after its inception, to kill it off.

In the intervening period, the Sun ran tens of thousands of Page 3 photos. Sam Fox, Linda Lusardi, Tracey Elvik, Maria Whittaker, Kathy Lloyd, and hundreds more had their careers launched. And many were plucked from anonymous lives in provincial towns and catapulted into existences they could never have imagined.

Take Debee Ashby. At the age of 17 she received a proposal of marriage – from Hollywood legend Tony Curtis. Little more than a year before she had been at school in Coventry. Until her mum, who’d always known the camera loved Debee, took her to a local modelling agency.

“I’d never even thought of being a model,“ says Debee, who now lives on the Isle of Man, pursuing a career renovating properties. “I didn’t want to go, but mum said I could have a pair of roller boots if I did.”

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Debee got her roller boots, and something else, as well. Expelled from school. “I’d only just turned 16 when I went to this quite seedy photographer in Coventry,” she says. ”I was promised that nothing would appear anywhere from the shoot. And then they did, in Men Only magazine.”

Debee’s public school took a very dim view and she was kicked out before she had the chance to sit her O-Levels. Leaving school without any qualifications, she took up the career that she had never wanted but suddenly found herself in great demand for — glamour model. And that propelled her into a world of parties and socialising, and rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous. Which is how she met Tony Curtis.

“I went with Sam Fox to a party that was being held for him,” she says. “I just saw him as an older man. I was only 17 and he was 59.”

Yet, Curtis proposed marriage to her. Gossip abounded about their relationship, but Debee maintains: “I never slept with him. I never even kissed him. I ended up looking after him, really. I think he just wanted someone to share his life.”

Also linked to Status Quo’s Rick Parfitt and even notorious gangster Reggie Kray, Debee says that celebrity-stuffed parties became the norm. She sighs a little as she recalls the frenetic social life, and says: “Sometimes I felt I’d rather just go down the George and Dragon with my old mates and be a bit normal.”

The actual pay for appearing in the Sun wasn’t as much as some people might think. Back in the Eighties and Nineties, models might have got a couple of hundred quid for a few hours of shooting pix in a photographer’s studio. The Sun generally used staff photographers, but other snappers would try to sell the shots to the rest of the tabloids that had joined the topless parade; the Star, The Mirror and the Sport.

The real money was to be made from the opportunities that appearing on Page 3 opened up. Tracy Kirby says: “The personal appearances was where the money could be made. You’d be picked up and taken to a club and do an hour, signing photos or answering questions or something, and for that you’d get a couple of grand. And then you’d just carry on partying all night. That sort of thing was constant.

“There was a lot of money coming in from that. The only downside was that unfortunately we weren’t really well advised with regards to the money. You know, investing it and things like that. So what you ended up doing was spending it.”

If aficionados see the period between the mid-Eighties and the mid-Nineties as something of a golden age for Page 3, then the man who presided over that was the Sun’s then-editor Kelvin MacKenzie. 

And while the models were free to make extra money on the back of their Currant Bun reputation, there were limits. Speaking from his home in Weybridge, MacKenzie – who has had a host of media projects since leaving the Sun in 1994 – says: “The girls didn’t get paid much but it was a good shop window for them. Some of them went on to have great careers in other things. But we were very clear at the Sun. While they were appearing on Page 3 they weren’t allowed to go off and do porn. I mean, they could, but they wouldn’t appear on Page 3 again.”

The Sun was also careful to put protections in place for its models, using a roster of trusted photographers, which might seem counter-intuitive for a feature about naked women, but which had a certain (which critics might find skewed) wholesomeness about it.

“It was just a picture of a pretty girl,” says Tracy Kirby. “Yes, the boobs were out, but I don’t think it was seedy or even sexy. It was a girl-next-door sort of thing, I think. It was like the old postcards and the Carry On Films, very tongue in cheek. We were very protected from the things people said we were victim to, being exploited and that sort of thing, and in return we had to maintain the reputation of the paper, and you couldn’t go off and do top-shelf stuff, and become known for that, because you just wouldn’t be wanted on Page 3.”

When MacKenzie began his editorship of the Sun in 1981, Page 3 had been established for more than a decade. And he wasn’t about to mess with it. He says: “Absolutely not. I mean, it was an essential part of the Sun in the same way as carrying the racing results was. It was part of the personality of the paper.

“There were people who didn’t like it, obviously, and the choice was theirs; they didn’t need to buy the Sun. And there were people who bought the paper but just flipped past Page 3, in the same way some people didn’t like reading the Sun Says leader column. There are bits you like in a newspaper and bits you don’t particularly care for.”

Page 3 was a bit that quite a lot of people didn’t care for, and over the years it became the target of many campaigns to have it banned, something MacKenzie doesn’t really understand, still. “It wasn’t offensive,” he says. “I mean, you could go down to Bournemouth beach and see topless women all day long. The girls were looked after. They weren’t exploited. We used photographers like Beverley Goodway, who fostered a good, unthreatening relationship with the girls and he worked with them for decades. The models were in control and they were the ones making money. And for some bloke working on a building site, well, Page 3 just cheered him up.”

One of Page 3’s fiercest opponents was Labour MP Clare Short. She had been fighting the Sun since 1987, when she tried to get through a parliamentary bill banning Page 3. By 2004, when she was still calling for a ban, the Sun retaliated. They sent a load of current models to her house to pose for photos outside. They ran a piece branding the MP “fat and jealous”, and photoshopped her head on to a naked model’s body.

The most recent campaign against the Sun’s glamour shots was founded in 2012, as London hosted the Olympic games. On what was dubbed “Super Saturday”, Team GB – especially its women athletes – scored a huge medal haul.

The next day, author and actor Lucy-Ann Holmes was reading the Sun on a train. She noticed that despite the celebratory air of the paper towards Team GB’s success, the biggest picture of a woman in the paper was the one who had her top off. Holmes started an online petition and attracted a host of volunteers to help run what became known as the No More Page 3 Campaign. Within 48 hours the petition had 50,000 signatures; it topped out at almost quarter of a million.

One of those who got involved in the campaign was nurse Lisa Clarke. “You know, Page 3 is not something we should be nostalgic about,” she says. “It is an emblem of a far less progressive era. When it started sexual harassment was legal in the workplace, rape was legal in marriage. There were times when women couldn’t get bank accounts and there were still universities that wouldn’t accept women. And in the context of a newspaper telling you what was news, the main image of a woman was always a sexualised one.”

Like Clare Short, the women involved in the No More Page 3 campaign received abuse and suffered claims they were “jealous, ugly, prudish, lesbians…” says Clarke. “It was never about us against the models. It was about the growing realisation that Page 3 had impacted who you are as a woman. Growing up with images of Page 3 and these perfect breasts everywhere, and then comparing them to your own has, not surprisingly, an impact on the way that women view their own bodies and their place in society and your value as a person.

“And we heard horrible stories about predatory men who had tried to take advantage of women, of sexual harassment at school by boys because they’ve got Page 3 open on the table, of girls being harassed horribly by older men on buses waving the Sun in their faces.

“The campaign was all about context. Did we really need these images in the paper all the time? Why were there endless pictures of men in suits and sports kits achieving things, but women just being passive, sexual decoration? It was never about getting annoyed at the nipples, it was about the way it was portraying women’s place in society.”

In January 2015 the Sun finally clocked the growing change of attitude and announced it was ending topless model photos on Page 3. Then, curiously, a couple of days later it announced it was bringing them back, and printed what turned out to be its actual final Page 3, because the feature never appeared again.

Which was, says MacKenzie, the wrong decision. “It was a big mistake dropping it.” he says. “They didn’t like the constant noise of the campaigners, and I don’t think they thought there was much circulation value in Page 3, which was absolutely wrong because as soon as they dropped it they lost a quarter of a million sales.

“You can’t try to produce your newspaper on the basis of a liberal minority, so I didn’t really understand the management thinking on that at all. But that’s for them to decide, and for them to pay the price.”

Many people who hadn’t seen the Sun for a while were often surprised that Page 3 was still running, says Lisa Clarke. In truth, its appeal was waning in the mid-Nineties, thanks in no part to the rise of the lad’s mag phenomenon. The pioneer of these was Loaded, launched in May 1994 by James Brown, Tim Southwell and Mick Bunnage.

Loaded stole the Sun’s thunder a bit by doing all the bits the newspaper tried to touch on for the bloke market – sport, booze, fashion, women – and packaging them up in a glossy and intelligent way. And their secret was not just presenting a pair of boobs with a punny caption.

James Brown says: “In the first 36 issues of Loaded, which I launched and edited, we interviewed Kathy Lloyd, Jo Guest and Rachel Garley.

“Rachel we just met through clubbing but Kathy and Jo most of the staff fancied. We saw the girls the same as the comedians, footballers, actors etc that we wrote about. We just really liked them, we were fans.

“We knew guys were into them but we were excited to see what Kathy, especially, was like. All three became friends of the mag. None of them appeared topless in Loaded.  In fact we were the first people to print pictures of them with their clothes on and actually interview them about their lives.”

Rachel Garley was one of the models who started her career on Page 3 and made the successful transition into the lad’s mag boom of the Nineties, appearing in Loaded and writing a sex-tips column for the magazine.

Born in Northamptonshire, she moved to France with her parents when she was 12, and shortly before returning to the UK when she turned 16 she met a photographer who suggested she come up to his studio in Wigan to do some shots. She appeared in the Sun in 1988 – on her father’s birthday, co-incidentally. Like the other models I spoke to, Rachel had the support of her family in her career – something they all say is invaluable.

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And like Debee and Tracy, glamour modelling was not something Rachel had thought about before being invited to do a photoshoot. That’s something that changed in the Nineties, specifically with the rise of the phenomenon that was Jordan, aka Katie Price, says Rachel.

Jordan planted the germ of the idea in young girls that modelling was a career objective, rather than something that most people seemed to fall into almost by accident.

“As Page 3 girls that was kind of our main focus, and we were very much girl-next-door types,” says Rachel from her home in London. “Things changed with Jordan, and with that the business changed. When we were doing Page 3 there was a stable of girls the Sun was using and we all knew each other and looked out for each other. Then when the girls started to want to actively become glamour models there was this shift, and a lot of it was about money. The money went down quite a lot.”

The rise of the lad’s mags exacerbated things, with weekly, watered-down versions of Loaded such as Nuts and Zoo hitting the shelves and overloading the market. One magazine even invited readers to send in pictures of their girlfriends under the guise of a modelling competition – essentially giving them free glamour shots, which incenses Rachel.

“We had girls coming into the agency saying they'd sent off their pictures because they wanted to be the face of the magazine,” she says. “We were like, don’t do that, you’re basically working for free, we can get you proper paid work. But it was all about becoming the next Jordan. Except you can’t because there’s already a Jordan. You have to be something different.”

A specifically Nineties phenomenon, Loaded spawned a host of imitators, the market was flooded, quality fell and the lad’s mag phenomenon died a death. But that coincided with the rise of the internet as the new millennium dawned, and there was suddenly a whole new platform for consumption of glamour model photos, that would only become more finely tuned over the next two decades and — surprising some of the models from the Eighties — open up unexpected new opportunities.

The career life of a Page 3 girl is roughly the same as that of a professional footballer — around eight years. Those like Debee and Tracy who started working in the Eighties had effectively “retired” by the middle of the 1990s.

For the majority of them, that is a phase of life they necessarily gave up in their mid-20s. “When you’re doing it, you basically think it’s going to go on forever,” says Tracy Kirby. “But obviously it’s not because it’s all about your body, and someone young and prettier is always coming up. You get to your 20s and realise they’re looking around for the next one.”

So they built other lives and forged other careers. Former models I spoke to but who didn’t want to revisit the past are working in the care sector now, one is driving a London cab, another is working on her first novel.

Tracy Kirby has her own beauty salon, and is registered to perform aesthetic treatments such as fillers. “It’s a great market, being in Essex,” she laughs. Before that she did acting – starring in Big Fat Gypsy Gangster in 2011, The Business in 2005, and appearing in EastEnders – and worked as a currency courier. Which landed her two years in Holloway Prison in 1998.

Unbeknown to Tracy, the company she was working for was a money laundering front for an international drugs ring. She was told she was facing 18 years in prison for her part in the organisation. Eventually the charges were dropped, but not before she had spent two years on remand waiting for the complex trial to come to court.

Page 3 is a part of Tracy’s life, even if it was a long time ago. She says, “Yeah, there are a few things I’d probably do a little bit differently but I certainly wouldn't want to cut Page 3 out of my life, It happened and I did that and I'm proud of it.”

Debee Ashby has good memories of her days modelling as well, particularly the camaraderie among the girls. “We mainly stuck together,” she says. “People think that a load of models together would make for a very catty atmosphere, but it was never like that. The only cattiness came from people who thought they knew what we would be like because of the job we did, especially women. I got quite savvy about that. Sometimes I would play the bimbo a bit, until I had signed a contract and got the money, and then I’d be like, right…”

After doing an assignment in the Isle of Man in 1991, at the TT races, Debee fell in love with the place and moved there in 1996. She has a 20-year-old son and lives with her partner, having run restaurants and bars on the island. And now, when she was least expecting it, a sudden return to glamour.

She thought she’d left that world behind until the rise of social media. Via Facebook and Twitter Debee’s fans found her, and she started interacting with them. Sometimes she finds it difficult — some fans don’t want to leave it at just saying hello, but want long conversations with her, which she sometimes finds exhausting. But then, couple of months ago, she discovered OnlyFans.

OnlyFans is a subscription platform that allows people to access exclusive content “for the price of a couple of beers a month,” says Debee. And yes, it is used by a lot of glamour models, and the porn industry. And it’s allowed Debee to kickstart her modelling career, almost a quarter of a century after hanging up her g-string.

“I was bored in lockdown so thought I’d give it a go,” she says. Her partner likes to watch sci-fi movies, which she’s not into, so instead she spends a couple of hours a night posting Page 3-style shots of herself as she is now. She also used to write a problem column for the soft porn magazine Penthouse (“I never had a ghost writer, they always used what I wrote,” she says proudly). Now she has found, via OnlyFans, that she’s become an internet agony aunt.

“A lot of men don’t talk about their problems to the people closest to them,” she says. “And they find it easy to talk to me, privately. And I give them advice, mostly just common sense stuff, and I listen to them. And it seems to help a lot of people.

“It’s true that a lot of the guys who subscribe are fans from the old days, but I’ve got a huge number of younger men as well. I mean, I’m 53,” she laughs. “I’m old enough to be the mum to some of them. It’s not what I was expecting to be doing at this point in my life, but it is a bit of fun.”

Rachel Garley, after talking to Debee, thinks that OnlyFans might be her next move, too. Her career lasted around five years with the Sun, then she did work for Loaded, lingerie shots for catalogues, TV ads. She trained to be a make-up artist and has spent the last three years training to be a yoga teacher. She says she’s more in touch with her spiritual side, which was something that came from the death of Sebastian Horsley in 2010.

Horsley was a flamboyant figure, an artist and writer, a maverick presence around Soho who seemed to belong to another age and yet was ahead of his time. He was an avant-garde dandy who had himself nailed to a cross in 2000 in the name of art. And Rachel was his muse and lover.

Candid about drugs, sex and his patronage of prostitutes (the Evening Standard once had to issue an apology after printing a photograph of Horsley and Rachel and referring to her as “a prostitute”), he died aged just 47, the inquest recording a massive drug overdose.

“I can’t believe it’s been 10 years,” she says. “It just occurred to me that he’s been gone longer than I was with him. I think after Sebastian died I became a lot more spiritual.”  

None of the girls necessarily look back on their Page 3 careers with rose tinted glasses. Both know that it was an environment where only the strong survive – and where the temptation to do hardcore porn was ever present. “It was a very exploitative industry,” says Debee. “A lot of girls got drawn into things they might not necessarily have wanted to do.”

Tracy agrees. “People are quick to judge glamour models but I was never forced to do anything I didn’t want to. That said, there were some younger girls who got pulled into the seedier side of it. And that was because they didn’t have that backup, that support network, from family or friends. I had that support, and I’m strong, I always spoke to my family about work and job offers, and I would never have done anything that they wouldn’t have liked, even though there were huge amounts of money being thrown around.”

Rachel says: “Modelling definitely opened doors to me that would not have been open. It was a great time and I made lifelong friends. I’m sure that if I hadn’t got into modelling I would have found something else, but I’m not sure what that would have been that would have given me that life.”

The No More Page 3 campaign might not want to look back at the age of the glamour model in daily newspapers with a nostalgic glow, but it’s a fact of life that it was a very big part of the British psyche, and something hugely particular to our cultural landscape for almost half a century. And some people won’t let it go; Twitter and Facebook are full of accounts that daily post images from the heyday of Page 3.

Would Tracy and Debee recommend the life? If they had an 18-year-old daughter who wanted to be a Page 3 girl, what would they say?

“Not in a million years,” says Debee resolutely.

Tracy does in fact have a 17-year-old daughter. She says:  “I would advise her not to for the simple reason that after it’s over it’s very hard to be taken seriously. That stigma followed me for a long time, and every time I was in the paper for doing something else, a film or TV show, it was always ‘Page 3 Tracy’ in the headline. I’m like, oh my god, come on, it was 20 years ago.”

Rachel Garley has a daughter, aged 24, and she shrugs and says: “That would be up to her.”

It’s not even a question to ask Lisa Clarke of No More Page 3.  She says: “It’s funny, it’s only five years since the Sun stopped running Page 3 but even now when I talk to young people about the campaign I first have to explain to them what exactly Page 3 was, and most of them can’t actually believe it used to be a thing. I think it’s dead now, and that’s exactly how we should leave it.”

There is one dissenting voice, though, and it is of course that of Kelvin MacKenzie. Would he be happy if his teenage daughter wanted to be a Page 3 girl? “Of course I would!” he says. “Thing is, even if I offered her half a million quid she wouldn’t do it.”

Five years gone and 50 years old, Page 3 is indeed a national institution, whatever we think of it. But in these enlightened times, it really is now consigned to the history books… isn’t it?

“You know what?” says Kelvin MacKenzie. “If they phoned me up and asked me to be the editor of the Sun again, guess what’s the first thing I’d bring back…”