Guest review by Dennis Hamley: EARTH TO EARTH by John Cornwell

 

"The author had to revisit it and write a new conclusion, which survived an attempt by Ted Hughes to have the book pulped ..."

Dennis Hamley read English at Jesus College, Cambridge, and has a PhD from Leicester. After teaching, lecturing and acting as County English Advisor for Hertfordshire, he retired to write full-time. He has written widely for children and young adults; one of his best-known books, The War and Freddy, was shortlisted for the Smarties Prize. His recent adult novel, The Second Person from Porlock, is a fantasy riff on the chaotic life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge; with Writers Review Publishing he has reissued Spirit of the Place. He lives in Oxford with his wife Kay, an artist.

Earth to Earth is a true crime classic revisited. 

This extraordinary book was first published in 1982. It concerned an event in 1975. This event has reverberated through fifty years, causing renewed arguments and accusations, so much so that the author had to revisit it and write a new conclusion, which survived an attempt by Ted Hughes to have the book pulped.

The scene is Devon, in the strip of land which runs through the gap between Exmoor and Dartmoor. Near the village of Winkleigh is a farm, West Chapple. In 1975 it was farmed by the three Luxton siblings: Frances, born in 1908, Robert John (usually known as Robbie), born in 1911 and Alan, born in 1921.Their father, also Robert John, died in 1939 and Wilmot, his wife, in 1949.

On September 23rd, 1975, all three siblings, Robbie, Frances and Alan, were found dead. Each had been shot in the head with a shotgun. Bone, brain and blood had spread over the ground. Robbie had strange wounds on his face, Frances had a broken leg. The three doors and entrances were locked from the inside.

John Cornwell is a fellow emeritus of Jesus College, Cambridge. He is a working investigative journalist with a wide range of non-fiction books, including Coleridge, Poet and Revolutionary, which is how I encountered him when I was writing The Second Person from Porlock. His editor at Penguin Books read about the tragedy at West Chapple and asked John if he thought it was worth investigating. Well, John agreed and this extraordinary book was the result.

Though the Luxton family had farmed West Chapple for several generations, hardly any of their neighbours ever saw them. When they did, they observed strange eccentricity. Frances went to the village shop to buy a single shoelace, Robbie docked a labourer’s wages for picking one orchard apple.

Robbie did all the work on the farm, following the traditional practices of his overbearing father. New farming methods were ignored. The only labourer, Fred Lyne, was paid partly in money but mainly in produce, enough to keep him alive. He was sacked just a week before the killings. The only power on the farm was supplied by a waterwheel. West Chapple was locked into the early nineteenth century.

Robbie forbade marriage. Nobody was to leave his farm. Both Frances and Alan attempted relationships. Robbie squashed them all. They were virtual prisoners. This drove Alan mad, partly illustrated when he wandered around dressed only in a sack as a sort of loincloth.

So John started his investigation, which can be read as both a speculative crime reconstruction and a riveting novel. What had brought the three to this slaughter? Was it a suicide pact? Had one of the siblings murdered the other two and then ended their own life? The inquest came to no satisfactory conclusion.

John interviewed other branches of the Luxton family, of which there were several, and found examples of class, snobbery, envy and contempt, suggestions of madness and murder, and put them together in a first edition of Earth to Earth in 1982. But there was trouble before the publication. So many questions. Possibilities of libel, slander. A family curse? Legal opinion sought. At last the book was published and won the Crime Writers Gold Dagger award.

But still the arguments raged. The poet Ted Hughes, a near neighbour, joined in, opposing any new edition. His accusation was that the book had ruined the Satow brothers, who lived in a manor house, Westacott, and ran it as a sort of B&B. On the contrary, said the brothers. The notoriety brought by the book had increased their business hugely. Hughes suggested seeking the truth through a Ouija board, but Gabrielle, John’s Catholic wife, objected.

And so here is the new 2026 edition. Everything finally sorted? Probably not: this is a story which could still plague generations to come.

Meanwhile, here is the most compulsive, thrilling page-turner I have read for years.

Earth to Earth is published by Riverrun. 

Read a Q&A with Dennis on Spirit of the Place.