The 1960s: when everything in Cornwall began to change

On March 18^th 1967 the Liberian registered oil tanker, the Torrey Canyon, struck the Seven Stones reef west of Land’s End. Attempts to refloat the ship failed and it began to break up, releasing the 100,000 tons or so of crude oil on board.

Attempts by the RAF to bomb the ship and burn the oil were less than successful. Several of the bombs missed and much of the oil ended up on the coasts of Cornwall and Brittany. Meanwhile, heavy-handed use of chemical dispersants did as much damage as the oil. The Government and their ‘experts’ refused to listen to local advice and thus failed to tap into local knowledge and expertise. As a result, thousands of sea birds perished and miles of coastline were polluted.

Images of bombed oil tankers, dying sea birds and beaches clogged with oil are iconic reminders of the 1960s in Cornwall. But they aren’t the only or the most important ones. This was the decade of counter-culture. The ‘summer of love’ in California had its echo at St Ives as hippies from the English suburbs descended on the town in an attempt to recreate their own version. Locals gazed bemusedly at the hippies, who were blissfully unaware they were recreating the earlier painterly westwards migration. The local business community fumed. Hordes of fish and chip gobbling tourists were one thing; scruffy hippies with little to spend quite another.

Moreover, it wasn’t just a matter of culture. The 1960s was the decade when population turnaround occurred, with the beginning of mass in-migration, itself triggered by mass car-borne tourism. Demographic change was followed by social change. In the words of the late Ron Perry, this was a ‘bourgeois invasion’, Cornwall being ‘swamped by a flood of middle-class, middle-aged, middle-browed city-dwellers who effectively imposed their standards upon local society’.

As that was happening, a ferocious campaign had been waged to prevent planned ‘overspill’ from London to Cornish towns. With the exception of Bodmin this was largely successful in the short term, although it did little to stem the unplanned migration in search of the ‘Cornwall lifestyle’. But it did bring Cornish nationalism to public attention, as Cornish Celts started to ape their big brothers and sisters in Wales and Scotland.

Whether their preference was the Beatles, the Beach Boys or Bob Dylan, Cornish people of a certain age will remember the 60s as the decade when everything began to change and nothing was ever the same.