On 21 December 1969, Malcom Muggeridge summed up a whole momentous decade for the Observer: ‘Oh Costa Brava! Oh Twiggy! What amusement arcades! What pop festivals!’ His version reflects his preoccupations; the sterile ins and outs of British politics and the shocking ones of the sexual revolution get vastly more space even than space exploration, dismissed in a single paragraph (‘The moon itself broached and landed on; spacemen cumbersomely trampling through its dirt’).
‘Change comes upon us stealthily, like a thief in the night,’ he asserts, which works for some 60s revolutions: the end of empire; the retreat from Christianity; a slightly premature report of ‘the final breakdown and decomposition of the upper classes’ and the emergence of counterculture. For Muggeridge, its ‘turbulent students, squatters, hippies, attenders at folk festivals, teach-ins, love-ins, etc, etc,’ are basically all the same; the facial hair and protest might change, but ‘it was the same cast in, essentially, the same play’.
Other change crystallised around a distinct moment: the death of Churchill, or the removal of Stalin from the Lenin mausoleum (‘The removers will have squirmed to touch him, fearful that even then he might suddenly rise up and purge or liquidate them’). He notes the election, of Kennedy, a New World Roi Soleil – ‘So young, so beautiful, so rich!’ – then his assassination: ‘How red the blood in colour television!’
Muggeridge saw the Lady Chatterley trial as opening the floodgates for filth. ‘Four-letter words proliferated, and appeared in the most unlikely places’ (notably out of Kenneth Tynan’s mouth on the BBC). Nudity emerged from the ‘Soho striptease’, invading the West End and the notion ‘an orgasm a day would keep the doctor away’ flourished, enabled by the Pill, ‘symbol of the decade’.
At the time of writing, Muggeridge concluded gloomily, all that was left of Swinging London was ‘some dismal hippies huddled together in Piccadilly Circus’ and the quest for self-actualisation had left ‘the psychiatric wards filled to overflowing with pursuers of happiness who had fallen down in the chase.’ Just wait until he met the 1970s.
