Death in Devon and Ted Hughes’s Theory of the Troglodyte
Tommy Gilhooly speaks to John Cornwell about his true crime classic Earth to Earth.
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Devon. 1975. Three unmarried siblings of the ancient Luxton clan are found dead on their idyllic farm – a broken leg, a stabbed neck and each head blasted by a shotgun. Strangely, all the doors were locked from the inside. John Cornwell went to investigate. The result was Earth To Earth (1982), now being republished as a ‘true crime classic’.
Theories of insanity, an ancestral curse and internal conflict over the family farm – West Chapple in Winkleigh, North Devon – are unearthed by Cornwell over the course of the book. His meticulous investigation involved interviews with locals, research into the history of the Luxton family and consideration of the forensic evidence put forward at the inquest. For this, Earth to Earth scooped the non-fiction Gold Dagger Award upon its publication.
Now, half a century since the killings, Cornwell is revisiting the official verdict of a suicide pact between Frances, Robert and Alan Luxton, exploring darker, murderous scenarios due to anomalies in the original evidence.
The untold story of Ted Hughes’s interest – and eventual interference – with Cornwell’s investigation is also included in this new edition. Hughes had moved to Devon in 1961 and his own farm, Moortown, was adjacent to the Luxtons’ land. The future Poet Laureate shared with Cornwell his own strange, occultic theory of why the Luxton tragedy occurred: that the local community where the killings took place was, in fact, a ‘troglodyte’. Using the metaphor of immunity, Hughes envisioned a process by which outsiders, or antigens, within this seemingly bucolic community – this troglodytic ‘body’ – are targeted by the locals and destroyed.
Then, when Cornwell’s investigation was on the cusp of publication, Hughes turned against the project. Having read a proof copy, Hughes feared the book might trigger the immune response of the Devonian ‘troglodyte’, reawakening malevolent forces within the community. Hughes wrote to Cornwell arguing that he should plead with his publisher to withdraw his own book. ‘In the letter he sent me’, Cornwell reveals in our interview below, ‘he implies that if my book were published, at least two people would have become vulnerable to this “troglodyte” thing.’
We discussed the process of writing Earth to Earth, the genre of true crime, Ted Hughes, his theory of the troglodyte and what might exactly have happened on that day in Devon in 1975.
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Why have you returned to your original investigation?
It’s an anniversary, fifty years, and a good time to review the verdicts I had then, to see whether I feel the same. To review, not just who killed who, and whether there was a murder involved, but the nub of the project itself, which started out back then as: a terrible depression leading to suicide in a most beautiful part of the countryside – an idyllic farm. To ask myself, was that really what it was all about?
We’re also dealing now – have been since the new Labour government came in, but even before that – with questions about the problems of family farms which are passed on from generation to generation. That’s right in the eye of a huge political storm.
New forensic evidence also turned up. Two experts said that they didn’t agree with the precise order in which the three Luxton siblings died. Particularly, there was this question as to whether Frances ‘acquiesced’ in her death, or whether in fact she was murdered – and, also, whether one of the brothers murdered the other.
And, in my publisher’s view, this book is a classic. Now, that’s not for me as an author to say, but it’s very nice when someone else says it. So, it’s a classic of true crime, which is now enjoying, has been enjoying for some time, huge attention.
Why do you think true crime has become so popular?
Let’s look at just crime to start with. In our Western tradition – and this goes right back to the Ancient Greek plays, Shakespeare, Macbeth and so forth – what I think it’s all about is that word catharsis. You go through all the agony and the pity because it strengthens people in a certain way. If you add true crime to it, quite often that becomes localised. Reading and witnessing, in terms of theatre and cinema, you can see a very deep and natural fascination for it. The payoff is that it’s making you feel fortunate that it didn’t happen to you. The other part is that you’re feeling that you’ve got to be careful. Nevertheless, it’s huge entertainment. Why do people enjoy this? I think the procedural aspect of it, the detective work – which is a natural page turner – that makes it very enjoyable, and it takes you right out of yourself – if it’s good.
How did Earth to Earth come to be?
Originally, my editor thought of it as a ‘Penguin Special’: a popular sociology book about the stresses, pressures and potential depression, of living in the countryside. The first time round, I wrote the book in four months. It took the whole thing chronologically. All the people I’d interviewed were not in the book, only what certain people had said. It was just very boring, and I put it aside – threw it in the bin, actually.
I’m much more fascinated by books which are in the first person.
Years later, I was at a dinner party and a literary agent asked me about my work and whether I was writing. I told her about this book and the difficulty I had with it. We talked it through over many hours. She got very excited because she thought it a great theme, an amazing story, ‘you’ve got to do it!’ She mentioned this writer A. J. A. Symons. The book was The Quest for Corvo, a biography of Frederick Rolfe. Symons wrote the biography by telling you the story of how he did his research: all the different places he went to, finding letters and interviewing people. It all became alive in this work of detection.
Fortunately, I had kept all of my tape recordings and my notes. So, I went back and rewrote Earth to Earth in this new form. The key to it was not anything like ‘true crime’, or ‘catharsis’, none of those things were in my head; it was really bringing to life a story that I had made into rather a dead thing. I did it very quickly. I wrote it, gosh, in three months.
Why was rewriting it in the first person – as opposed to the third person – so important?
I’m much more fascinated by books which are in the first person, in which the author puts themselves into it. It brings the whole thing alive in the way a third-person monograph doesn’t. The essential thing is it enables you to set off on a course of detective clues in a way which is procedural, keeping your reader enticed by every new resolution, and then signalling where you’ve got to go next. It’s natural.
You explore the forensic evidence, but do you think Ted Hughes’s immunity theory – of Devon as a troglodyte involving antibodies targeting antigens – holds any truth to what happened that day in 1975?
To begin with, I thought that the Luxton siblings were victims of the neglect of their neighbours, rather than any kind of sinister affliction – which was Ted’s idea – that they were being hounded in some way. I’ve seen more clearly, in this revisiting, that the problem was that they had refused help.
Hughes’s diagnosis of what happened had much more to do with himself and deeply personal feelings about Devon – which is strange, because why did he stay there? He took up the idea of the immune system as a very strong metaphor – a very powerful, peculiar idea… But that’s all it was, a metaphor, a fantasy.
Confusing metaphor with realism is always a problem.
It struck me in retrospect as an idea he was playing with, it wasn’t serious, it had no merit whatsoever. I think that he was captivated by this immune system idea so much that he couldn’t resist applying it. Then, of course, at the end of his life he came up with the same idea as to why he got cancer, because writing prose crashed his own immune system.
Do you think there was a danger to Hughes applying these obsessive metaphors to real life events – such as the one you were investigating?
In the letter he sent me, he implies that if my book were published at least two people – the Satow brothers – would have become vulnerable to this ‘troglodyte’ thing. The only way to stop this was for me to tell the publisher, ‘Sorry, I’m withdrawing the book’ – with 8,000 copies already run off! Whose going to pay for that? It’s pretty dangerous stuff, isn’t it? Confusing metaphor with realism is always a problem.
One of the best bits of the book is when you enter the Luxton house where the killings took place. How important was it to go in there? I feel that, now, people would be more cautious around going in…
It seemed to me, unless I got inside that house I wasn’t going to get a story. I really wanted to know what it was like in there… I’m much more interested in what readers think about it, what you think about that – would you have done it?
I thought it was very daring—
—would you have done it?
Yes. I like to think I would. But I would probably be terrified for multiple reasons. Was there any sense that this was taboo, going into this private house where all this violence had taken place?
I wouldn’t say it was terrifying, but I was fairly frightened. I thought it was worthwhile. It’s always: what’s the payoff?
Which is?
The payoff was what you just said earlier! It’s the best bit of the book. And I knew that. I just had to get into that house. I knew that if I went in the daytime I would be stopped. I was caught the day before when I was looking through the window.
How far are you convinced by the alternative scenario of murder, put forward by two latter-day forensic experts, and described in your republished edition?
The thing that really worried me at the time was how Frances and Alan had the same blood temperature: they were killed at the same time. During the inquest there was all this nonsense about how Alan was fully dressed. He wasn’t! He was in his pyjamas, and he was right down to eight stone or something. If you look at that evidence, it becomes clear that they were very close together in death. That’s a whole new thing. It seemed pretty convincing… I guess we’ll never know.
As much as a book can perhaps do this, do you think you’ve brought justice to the Luxton story?
Have you ever read ‘The Ruined Cottage’ by Wordsworth? It’s about a young family who’ve got a smallholding. It’s the early nineteenth century, and the husband goes off to war and never comes back. The wife is left on her own. You see her life deteriorating: the children get ill, and they die; she can’t cope with the animals; the animals end up living in the house with her; everything goes down and down and down until you end up with her in a state of depression; and then she dies. What you have here is a number of pressures which are building up over time and invading. It’s not one single thing – there’s poverty, the disasters of war, blight on the farm, sick animals, and terrible weather – all these things combine into an orchestra.
Sustainability and isolation can be disastrous. We’ve got to come together constantly.
I wouldn’t wish to compare my book with ‘The Ruined Cottage’, but that’s much more my feeling about this book. That it is to do with pressures over generations, pressures involving climate and weather. I’m seeing that much more clearly now in the context of climate change and how that can impact. I’m seeing it more clearly in terms of the ways governments can completely screw up farming: there were only eight hundred thousand farmworkers left in the late nineteenth-century; it had partly to do with the lifting of tariffs off foreign food products which pretty well destroyed the economics of farming; then, on top of that, there’s a whole decade of massive climate change; and all the other things that afflict farmers, even in the best of times. Doing justice to the story in those terms is very important to me. I hope that, this second time round, I’m signalling that more clearly, because, originally, my editor and I saw it as dark happenings and depression amid great beauty. It’s a revision of that.
You describe the Luxton story as a ‘micro-history of isolation in mid-twentieth-century rural England’. Do you think, then, that something like this could happen again today?
My idea behind that sentence is that it’s very much for today. How do we cope with climate change? There are two features to it: one is mitigation, the other is adaptation. One of the ways of adapting is to go for sustainability. I can see going right back to the 1880s that the Luxton family had taken that decision – to go for classic sustainability – if we can’t make money out of farming then we shut the gate, very little goes out, very little comes in… we will cope…. That is a form of isolation because you’re not moving forward and you’re not moving out. You’re closing in on yourself like a clenched fist. That’s one aspect of the problems that we face today with how we cope with climate change, particularly people in agriculture. The idea is that sustainability and isolation can be disastrous. We’ve got to come together constantly.
What are your thoughts on Hughes’s poetry, his collection Moortown Diary from his time in Devon. With its subject of farming, does Hughes’s verse shed any light on the Luxton story at West Chapple Farm?
With Moortown, the interest to me then, and now, is the huge importance of the weather, not as you would get in those typical pastoral poems of the seasons, but in a poem like ‘Tractor’. The weather is there as a constant potential enemy, something you have to struggle with. It’s so beautifully done. That’s why I included in the book my discovery of the diary of Frances Luxton. It’s a schoolgirl’s diary, but everyday there is the weather, the weather, the weather…
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John Cornwell is an author, journalist and Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge where he directs the Science and Human Dimension Project. He has written for many well-known publications including The Sunday Times, The Spectator, TLS, New York Times and the Observer. He is author of Hitler’s Pope, The Secret History of Pius XII, A Thief in the Night, Power to Harm and a biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Earth to Earth, a true crime classic of the lives and violent deaths of a Devon farming family, will be published by riverrun on the 10th April 2025.
Tommy Gilhooly is an English graduate of the University of Cambridge and was runner-up in the review category of The Orwell Society/NUJ Young Journalist’s Award 2023. His writing has appeared in publications including Literary Review, The Telegraph, The Fence and Engelsberg Ideas.
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