Those Brash And British Page 3 Girls

In Merry England and Scotland, Wales and Ireland, some 10,000,000 tabloid readers kick off the day with a nice reminder that the newsain't all bad. They check out the morning's topless models, a grand tradition in Britain since November 1970. That was when The Sun, the country's premiere tabloid, published a bare-breasted photo of model Stephanie Rahn, thereby setting off a lively circulation war with The Star and the Daily Mirror, the U.K.'s other major tabs. As is typical of newspaper battles on Fleet Street (the home of Great Britain's national press until the recent move by most publications to a new industrial site), the "War of the Nipples" offered up ribald fun, as well as a nice breather from England's other obsessions: football and royalty. In the last election, they even had a brush with politics: A pro-Tory paper threatened that a Labor victory would mean outlawing Page 3 Girls. Not a few of the Page 3 Girls--so christened because that's the page on the which The Sun runs its morning lovelies--have gone on to modest fame and occasional fortune, the most celebrated being singer Samantha Fox. In the interest of Anglo-U.S. relations, we picked our own favorites and had them photographed in a London studio exclusively for Playboy.