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Patricia Wheeldon (left) and Lorraine Cabell flank Rams vice-president Harry Payne at Derby's Locarno Ballroom in January 1970

There are many things in football that haven't changed, but plenty that have too. Some of the traditions of the game have been lost to social change, and yet others to that sometimes killjoy assassin known as 'political correctness'.

One that might arguably fall into the latter category is the demise of the annual tradition that was the battle for the coveted title of 'Miss Derby County'.

The competition began in the 1960s, possibly in the 1968-69 season when Derby County famously won promotion to the First Division.

The contest was run each season in conjunction with the Supporters Association and Derby County Promotions, and the winner was generally presented with her award at the annual Supporters' Dance. The players attended the function and it was their votes that decided the winner.

The first recorded victor appears to be Lorraine Cabell in 1968-69 (pictured here), and she was succeeded in 1969-70 by Patricia Ann Wheeldon, from Rolleston-on-Dove, Burton on Trent. She is shown at her moment of triumph in January 1970 at the Locarno Ballroom in Derby. Both girls are sporting the 'beehive' hairstyle then in vogue.

For the record, in true beauty contest tradition, Pat Wheeldon was described as 'an attractive brunette, with measurements of 36" 23" 36", a freelance model who keeps herself in trim by weight lifting and swimming, and her ambition in life is to win the pools'. Full marks for honesty!

Patricia achieved a measure of success on the wider stage, for she had previously won the Miss Britain contest, and went on to gain second place in Britain's 1970 'Miss Bikini' competition. At a more local level, among the various promotional duties she undertook for Derby County was the selling of 'Golden Goal' tickets at the Baseball Ground.

The subsequent winners were Wendy George (1970-71), Iris Ward (1971-72), Sally Pritchard (1972-73), Joanne Beeston (1973-74), Sheila Ann Walsh (1974-75), Tarina Prince (1975-76), Mary McNulty (1976-77), Tracey Jayne Jessop (1977-78), and Patricia Blair (1978-79).

Tracey Jayne Jessop was later runner-up in the 1979 Miss England competition, but more successful still was the 1970-71 winner Wendy Anne George, the daughter of the landlord of the White Swan in Littleover.

In 1969 she had become Miss Great Britain, but relinquished her Rams title in September 1971 to get married. She became Mrs Ian Turnbull and went to live in Wigan, where in 1984 she took over the Abbey Lakes Hotel in Orrell, running the business until financial difficulties forced her to close it in 1999.

Of late she has been the Honorary Secretary of the Royal Lancashire Agricultural Show, and in 2004 she inaugurated the Miss Royal Lancashire Show contest, which, when this piece was written in 2007, was still going strong and still being run by Wendy.

For all the past winners of the Miss Derby County contest, the one-time annual event is by definition a distant memory, for it became clear in time that the contest had run its course. Indeed the club themselves were partly responsible for its demise, for when the glamour photographs they printed in the matchday newspaper 'The Ram' became increasingly more candid, a sense of disquiet developed in some quarters over whether a football club should associate itself with the sexist profession of 'modelling' at all.

Matters reached a head after the 'Ram' issue of 24 August 1977, when the club was forced to print a public apology for showing 'a little too much flesh' - a photograph which today would fail to raise an eyebrow on all but the most prudish.

It emerged that a handful of concerned mothers had written in complaining that the newspaper was no longer suitable reading for 'young boys'. Strangely, no young boys had written in to back them up. In fact programme sales at that time had dramatically peaked, and 'Junior Rams' of impressionable age were among the most avid readers. Collectors have since dubbed the notorious edition 'the nipple issue'.

The Miss Derby County contest possibly continued for a year or so thereafter, but seemed to have faded from football's social calendar by the 1980s.

Since the likelihood of such an event ever being revived seems extremely remote, it only remains to mark its passing in the traditional manner - 'R.I.P. Miss Derby County'.

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County:  Derbyshire