If the concept of Miss World and beauty contests is unfashionable these day, it was still all the rage 50 years ago.
In January 1973, the reigning Miss World, Belinda Green, paid a visit to Newcastle and the Chronicle's old Thomson House offices to take part in a fashion shoot. The 20-year-old Australian had won the title the previous year, beating American Lynda Carter – later to be TV’s Wonder Women – into second place.
Belinda squeezed in her Tyneside visit between trips to Paris, Frankfurt and Saigon and a whirlwind round of modelling engagements, TV interviews, lunches and cocktail parties. “You only get four hours sleep,” she told our reporter. “And they expect you to look good, too!” As well as the Chronicle fashion shoot, Miss World also enjoyed a game of bingo in Wallsend before jetting off.
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A year later, the next Miss World, Marjorie Wallace, hailing from Indianapolis, USA, was also in Newcastle and also dropped by the Chronicle offices for an interview. Our (female) reporter declared the visitor "absolutely gorgeous", writing: "She’s perfect from the top of her blonde head, right down her 35-24-35 figure, to the tips of her painted toe nails."
What few people would have known was that beauty contests, in fact, had their roots in our region. As early as 1905, an event called the Blonde and Brunette Beauty Show, which was open to girls over 16, was held at the Olympia Theatre on Newcastle's Northumberland Road.
Times, tastes and attitudes have moved on since Miss World was a regular, mainstream fixture. Back then, no self-respecting town, holiday resort, caravan park, shopping centre, nightclub - or even newspaper - was complete without its own “Miss”. In the 1970s and 80s, there were regular contests for Miss Chronicle and Miss Sunday Sun.
Miss World was launched by Eric Morley in 1951 as part of that year’s Festival of Britain - and was televised for the first time in 1959, spawning a host of imitators. If the Miss Butlins and Miss Pontins competitions of the 1970s were light-hearted affairs, later contests would be more professional and competitive. For winners, there was the prospect of money and careers in fashion and glamour.
But during the 1980s, beauty contests began to fall out of fashion, and high-profile ones were somtimes disrupted by women’s liberation protesters. The Miss World TV show was shunted from BBC to Channel 5 in the 1990s - and then on to little-known satellite channels. The current Miss World, it turns out, is Sargam Koushal from India, but the title attracts much less interest than it did 50 years ago when Belinda Green stopped off at the Chronicle offices.
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