Fairport Convention - "Babbacome" Lee - 180g Vinyl LP

2025

Babbacombe Lee is no ordinary Fairport album; it’s a “concept” album, a “folk/rock opera” – call it what you will – that tells the story, in remarkable detail, of John Henry George Lee, better known as “Babbacombe” Lee or “The Man They Couldn’t Hang,” who, in 1885, was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of his employer.  Incredibly, Lee survived three attempts to hang him, as the gallows apparatus failed to operate.

Fairport’s Dave Swarbrick, an inveterate collector of antiques, had come across a bound collection of Lloyd’s Weekly News copies in a Middlesex second-hand shop.  The magazines contained the story of the crime, the criminal proceedings, the failed hanging attempt and the subsequent story of Lee’s life.  Legend has it that the magazines Swarb found had actually been bound by Lee himself, and that the binder was signed and dated (30 January 1908) by Lee.  Swarb recognised that Lee’s story contained all the necessary ingredients for an engaging song.  After kicking the idea around with the band members, it mushroomed into the basis for a complete album.

Born in Abbotskerswell, Devon, in (or around) 1864, Lee had served in, and been discharged from, the Royal Navy, and had a local reputation as a petty thief.  After leaving the navy, he found employment as a footman at the home of Emma Anne Whitehead Keyse.  During the night of 15 November 1884, the household’s cook was awoken by a smell of burning and discovered that the part of the house occupied by Miss Keyse was on fire.  Lee raised the alarm, but when the dining room at the house was entered, the corpse Miss Keyse, with a deep gash across her throat, was discovered on the floor.  Lee was arrested on suspicion of her murder and, despite the fact that any evidence to support this assertion was purely circumstantial, was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to hang at Exeter Prison on 23 February 1885.

It was there that, for reasons never explained but regularly speculated upon, the gallows trapdoor failed to open – not once, not twice, but three times.  Following the failed execution attempt, Lee’s sentence was commuted by Home Secretary Sir William Harcourt to life imprisonment and, after a series of appeals, Lee was finally released in 1907.  He died in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in March 1945, having become something of an international Cause Célèbre as a result of his (by then) well-documented tribulations.

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https://atthebarrier.com/2021/03/16/time-tunnel-great-albums-of-1971-fairport-convention-babbacombe-lee/