IT was a practical joke with tragic consequences.

George Bull and Fred Dibden locked tipsy Henry Ember in a pub's outside loo, unaware gas was seeping into it, as had been the case for several weeks.

"We've strapped the door up," the pranksters joked. "What a fool he will look like in the morning and we shall have the laugh on him."

But Ember did not see the following morning.

He was found dead.

Ember had left open the privy door adjoining the Old Shirley Brewery Tap, Southampton.

Bull and Dibden mischievously followed, fastening the door with a plug around which a strap had been loosely tied.

But Ember fell asleep.

He had been drinking with a young lad called Flux who worried about his lingering absence, came across the two men delighted by their jape.

It was however another customer at the pub who discovered Ember sitting on the seat, leaning to one side. Though there was an opening at the top of the door, the smell of gas was firmly evident when it was opened.

Dr Mott carried out a post-mortem and determined the cause of death as asphyxia.

"Even if the door had been open, it would affected the deceased very prejudicially," he told jurors at Hampshire Assizes in 1870 when Bull and Dibden stood trial for manslaughter.

However, he conceded: "Whether as to cause death, I cannot say. With the door closed, in so confined a space, it would have had the effect of causing death. The bad effect of the gas would act more readily on a drunken person."

Death had been induced by inhaling too great a quantity of coal gas.

Mr Justice Willes, in placing the case before the jury, said if Bull and Dibden had unlawfully imprisoned Ember which had either caused or hastened his death, it was manslaughter.

"By that I mean simply causing or accelerating the death of a person with malice by an unlawful act. The only question for you to decide, therefore, is whether they, by their unlawful act of closing the door, which in the eyes of the law is an imprisonment, cause the death of the deceased."

Following their conviction but endorsed with a recommendation of mercy, the judge asked the foreman: "You think this was coarse joke that had an ending which they had never contempltated?"

He replied: "That is so."

The judge told the defendants that "the wisest course of action" was to bind them to keep the peace for 12 months.

They were then discharged.

BLOB Their trial followed that of another manslaughter case in which Samuel Whittle, a 44-year-old labourer, was accused of killing his wife, Elizabeth, at their home in Burley by failing to provide her with sufficient nourishment but it was stopped, following an extraordinary blunder by the Crown.

Though she had been attended by a Ringwood doctor during her illness, there was no evidence of a post-mortem examination.

"It is impossible for this case to proceed," the judge remarked to the prosecution who were forced to offer no evidence.

The jury were empanelled and having been told of the situation, were directed to acquit the prisoner.