August 2014
Paedophile church elder and well-known former council clerk convicted of abuse in 1970s
A CHURCH elder well-known across North Devon has been found guilty of abusing a 14-year-old boy he molested after offering him a job on his North Devon farm.
Philip Huxtable was a lay preacher, clerk to numerous councils, governor of two North Devon schools and leader of a Boys Brigade troop who had been running a youth club in a Chapel hall when he met and befriended the teenager in the early 1970s.
At the time was also working with the National Farmers Union and went on to abuse the boy again in the union’s offices in the centre of Barnstaple.
Huxtable groped the boy and made him touch him after giving him a Saturday job at his farm at Shirwell, near Barnstaple, where he bred pedigree Dexter cattle and Dorset Devon sheep.
The abuse lasted for around three months during and after a summer holiday and took place in a cowshed and in a van when he gave the teenager a lift to his home in a nearby village.
The youngster kept his abuse secret for almost 40 years before telling his family, a counsellor and the police.
The verdicts at Exeter Crown Court exposed 78-year-old Huxtable as an abuser after a life in which he has been a pillar of the community.
He was a farmer with his own smallholding but also worked for the NFU, where he toured farms all over North and Mid Devon sorting out insurance problems for members.
After moving from his farm he went to live in Braunton and then Barnstaple and was an elder of the Christ Church Methodist and United Reform chapel at Braunton and Captain of its Boys Brigade for 18 years.
He was also chair of governors at Shirwell Primary School for eight years and a governor at North Molton school for 20 years. He has served as clerk to the Pilton, Shirwell and Fremington parish councils and chairman of the Dexter Cattle Group.
Huxtable, aged 78, of Westaway Close, Barnstaple, denied four counts of indecently assaulting the boy in the mid-1970s when he was aged 13 to 15.
He was found guilty of three of the counts and cleared of the fourth on the instructions of judge Erik Salomonsen, who adjourned sentence for a probation report and further details about Huxtable’s health problems.
The Judge said he had been impressed by the references he had already seen which paid tribute to the defendant’s lifelong contribution to the local community in North Devon.
He said: “We have heard from his character witnesses of the creditable life he has lived over many years. In terms of disposal, the maximum sentence is ten years but I am enjoined to follow the current guidelines.
“I am prepared to ask the probation service to prepare a report.”
He told Huxtable: “You have lived with this for very many years. You were entitled to plead not guilty and that is what you decided to do, although you had acknowledged at an early stage in your police interviews there had been sexual activity of a lesser sort on three to four occasions.”
The judge also noted that the boy had also been abused more seriously at around the same time by an older youth in his village, who has since died.
He asked police to prepare a victim impact statement which sought to distinguish how much of the psychological damage could be attributed to Huxtable.
During a three day trial the jury heard how Huxtable ran a youth club for local teenagers in the early 1970s and employed the boy with a Saturday job at his farm in the summer and autumn of 1973 when he was 14.
The boy said the farmer exposed himself to him as they were cleaning a cowshed and went on to touch him repeatedly there and in his van.
He said he had been abused again five or six years later when he went to the NFU offices to get car insurance.
He explained why he had not made any complaint back in the 1970s. He said: “It is hard for people to understand it now, but things were different then. The discipline and everything were different. If I had told my father he would probably have hit me for telling tales.”
Huxtable said his only sexual contact was in the cowshed and had been initiated by the boy and rejected by him. He denied abusing the victim in his van, saying he needed both hands on the wheel to negotiate the winding lanes around his farm.
He explained his apparent admissions in police interview by saying he had been browbeaten into saying thing he did not mean by the detectives.
He will be sentenced at a later date.
