John 'Babbacombe' Lee
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John Henry George Lee, better known as John 'Babbacombe' Lee, (1864 - c. 1945) survived three attempted judicial executions in England and is known as the man they couldn't hang.
Lee was born in Abbotskerswell, Devon, served in the Royal Navy and was a known thief. In 1885 he was convicted of the brutal murder of his employer Emma Keyse at Babbacombe Bay near Torquay. The evidence was weak and circumstantial, amounting to little more than Lee having been the only male in the house at the time of the murder, his previous criminal record and being found with an unexplained cut on his arm. Despite this and his constant claim of innocence he was sentenced to hang.
However, on February 23 at Exeter prison, three attempts were made to carry out his execution. All ended in failure as the trap door of the scaffold failed to open. This was despite the fact it had been carefully tested by James Berry, the executioner, beforehand. As a result, Home Secretary Sir William Harcourt commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. Lee continued to petition successive Home Secretaries and was finally released from gaol in 1907. The only other known man in history to survive three hangings is Joseph Samuel.
It has been speculated [attribution needed] that an overweight priest, upon the gallows, could bend the soil planks, not allowing the opening of the trap door. This incident helped lead to the creation of the Official Table of Drops, listing how far a person of particular weight should fall when being hung.
After his release Lee seems to have exploited his notoriety, supporting himself through lecturing on his life, even becoming the subject of a silent film. Accounts of his whereabouts after 1916 are somewhat confused, and one researcher even speculated that in later years there was more than one man claiming to be Lee. It has been suspected that he died in the Tavistock workhouse sometime during World War II. However one recent piece of research concludes that he died in the US under the name of "James Lee" in 1945.[citation needed] According to the book titled The Man They Could Not Hang by Mike Holgate and Ian David Waugh, Lee's gravestone was found at Forest Home Cemetery, Milwaukee.
In the 1970s, Dave Swarbrick (the fiddle-player in the English folk-rock band Fairport Convention), found a series of old newspaper articles about Lee and composed a rock opera entitled Babbacombe Lee which was recorded and released by Fairport Convention as an LP.
Folk song collector Gwilym Davies was given a notebook in 1971 by Mrs Hunt, of Greywell, Hampshire, in which the words of a poem, 'The Death of John Lee' were written.[1] The words, with a composed tune, were published in 1972 by Gwilym Davies in 'A Hampshire Garland'.
[edit] References
- The British National Archives contain extensive documentation on the execution, including drawings of the trap mechanism and accounts from all members of the execution party.
