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rolling across the scaffold. There was a roar of laughter and cries of ‘Butterfingers!’ The mood of the crowd changed at once, from sullen disapproval at being cheated of a traditional beheading, into a kind of music-hall gaiety.
    There was to be no further deliberate, judicial removal of heads in Britain after the execution of the Cato Street Conspirators. It was realised by those in power that the public mutilation of corpses had no place in a modern, industrial society.
    Sixty-five years later, there was a brief and unsavoury coda to the history of beheading in Britain; a case of what one might perhaps call inadvertent decapitation. In Chapter 10, we shall be examining cases where a judicial punishment had resulted in de facto execution. We shall look now at a situation where one method of execution was prescribed by law, yet quite another ended up being inflicted on the victim.
    On 15 September 1885, a market gardener called Robert Goodale argued fiercely with his wife Bathsheba. He lost patience with her, and ended up banging her around the head with a hatchet before throwing her into a well, where she drowned. It was not, therefore, wholly surprising when Robert Goodale found himself standing trial for murder at the Norfolk Assizes, which were held in Norwich on 13 November 1885. His trial, for what the press called ‘The Walsoken Tragedy’, took place before Mr Justice Stephen. The result was never seriously in doubt, and Goodale was sentenced to hang. He was removed to Norwich Castle, where his execution was scheduled to take place in the morning of 30 November.
    A few words about Goodale might not come amiss at this point. First, he was a heavy man, weighing over 15 stones. He was very flabby and out of condition. He was also a great coward, who was terrified out of his wits at the prospect of being hanged. In the twentieth century, when the only witnesses to hangings in this country were officials who had signed the Official Secrets Act, it was possible to maintain the fiction that all executions were smoothly-conducted affairs, with the condemned men and women walking cheerfully to their deaths; the entire activity being conducted with as little fuss and discomfort as a visit to the dentist. The reality is that some of the scenes which took place at hangings, were worse than anybody’s most hideous nightmare. Robert Goodale’s execution was a gruesome spectacle; because reporters were allowed to be present at that time, we have several vivid, eyewitness descriptions of the full horror of the occasion.
    The so-called ‘Long Drop’, intended to break the victim’s neck rather than choke him to death, had been introduced to British hanging a few years before Goodale’s execution. A table of drops had been compiled; the heavier the person, the shorter the drop needed. It was a fine balancing act, the aim being to use a sufficiently long drop to break the neck, while on the other hand not so long that the head was pulled off entirely.
    According to the official chart, a man of Goodale’s weight should have been given a drop of 7ft 8in. The hangman, James Berry, was worried though, because his observation of the condemned man suggested that his neck muscles were very weak. Berry accordingly reduced the length of the drop dramatically to 5ft 9in.
    The problems which were to beset the execution of Robert Goodale began as soon as James Berry appeared in the condemned cell at a few minutes before eight o’clock on 30 November. It is sometimes forgotten that all executions rely, to a greater or lesser extent, upon the cooperation of the condemned person. At the very least, he is expected to get dressed on the day of his execution and walk to the place where his death will occur. When somebody is resolutely determined not to die, things can get very tricky. Berry later sold his memoirs to a newspaper, and there was also a reporter from the Norfolk Chronicle present during the execution. We have, as a result, a