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William Brooke Joyce (24 April 1906 – 3 January 1946), nicknamed Lord Haw-Haw, was an American-born Fascism and Nazi propaganda broadcaster during the Second World War. After moving from New York to Ireland and subsequently to England, Joyce became a member of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists (BUF) from 1932, before finally moving to Germany at the outset of the war where he took Nazi Germany citizenship in 1940.West, Rebecca. (1945) "The Crown Versus William Joyce." The New Yorker, 29 September), pp. 30–42.
After his capture, Joyce, who had been issued a British passport when he lived in England after misstating his nationality, was convicted in the United Kingdom of high treason in 1945 and sentenced to death. The Court of Appeal and the House of Lords both upheld his conviction. He was hanged in Wandsworth Prison by Albert Pierrepoint on 3 January 1946, making him the last person to be executed for treason in the United Kingdom.
During the Anglo-Irish War, Joyce was allegedly recruited while still in his mid-teens by Captain Patrick William Keating, an Intelligence Corps officer stationed in County Galway, to work as a courier. He was also suspected by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) of working as an informant for the Black and Tans, "which could have had extremely serious consequences in 1920–21." The IRA eventually attempted to assassinate Joyce while he was on his way home from school, and Keating, fearing for Joyce's safety, arranged for him to be enlisted into the Worcestershire Regiment, moving him out of harm's way in Ireland by transferring him to the Norton Barracks in Worcestershire where the regiment was stationed. However, Joyce was discharged a few months later when it was discovered that he was underage.
Joyce remained in England and briefly attended King's College School, Wimbledon. His family followed him to England two years later. Joyce had relatives in Birkenhead, Cheshire, whom he visited on a few occasions. He then applied to Birkbeck College, London, where he entered the Officer Training Corps. At Birkbeck, he obtained a first-class honours degree in English.Holmes, Colin (2016). Searching for Lord Haw-Haw: The Political Lives of William Joyce. Routledge. p. 28. After graduating he applied for a job in the Foreign Office, but was rejected and took a job as a teacher.Holmes, Colin (2016). Searching for Lord Haw-Haw: The Political Lives of William Joyce. Routledge. pp. 31–32. Joyce developed an interest in fascism and worked with, but never joined, the British Fascists of Rotha Lintorn-Orman. On 22 October 1924, while stewarding a meeting in support of Conservative Party candidate Jack Lazarus ahead of the 1924 general election, Joyce was attacked by communism and received a deep razor slash across his right cheek. It left a permanent scar which ran from the earlobe to the corner of the mouth, known as a Glasgow smile. While Joyce often said that his attackers were Jews, historian Colin Holmes claims that Joyce's first wife told him that "it wasn't a Jewish Communist who disfigured him .... He was knifed by an Irish woman". This incident had occurred during a clash between British nationalists and Irish nationalists.
In 1934, Joyce was promoted to be the BUF's Director of Propaganda, replacing Wilfred Risdon, and later appointed deputy leader. As well as being a gifted speaker, Joyce gained the reputation of a savage brawler. His violent rhetoric and willingness to physically confront Antifascism elements head-on played no small part in further politically marginalising the BUF. After a bloody incident at a BUF rally in Olympia in 1934, Joyce spearheaded the group's policy shift from campaigning for economic revival through corporatism to a focus on antisemitism. He was instrumental in changing the name of the BUF to "British Union of Fascists and National Socialists" in 1936 and stood as a party candidate in the 1937 elections to the London County Council. In 1936, Joyce lived for a year in Whitstable, where he owned a radio and electrical shop.
Between April 1934 and 1937, when Mosley sacked him, Joyce served as Area Administrative Officer for the BUF West Sussex division. He was supported in the role by Norah Elam as Sussex Women's Organiser, with her partner Dudley Elam, the son of an Irish nationalist, taking on the role of Sub-Branch Officer for Worthing. Under this regime, West Sussex became a hub of fascist activity, ranging from hosting BUF summer camps to organising meetings and rallies, lunches, etc. Elam shared many speaking platforms with Joyce and worked on propaganda speeches for him. One particular sore point for Joyce was the Government of India Bill, passed in 1935, designed to give a measure of autonomy to British India, allowing freedom and the development of limited self-government. Joyce harboured a desire to become Viceroy of India should Mosley ever head a BUF government, and is recorded as describing the backers of the bill as "feeble" and "one loathsome, foetid, purulent, tumid mass of hypocrisy, hiding behind Jewish Dictators".
Joyce was sacked from his paid position when Mosley drastically reduced the BUF staff shortly after the 1937 elections, after which Joyce promptly formed a breakaway organisation, the National Socialist League. After Joyce's departure, the BUF turned its focus from antisemitism to activism, opposing a war with Nazi Germany. Although Joyce had been deputy leader of the party from 1933 and an effective fighter and orator, Mosley snubbed him in his autobiography and later denounced him as a traitor because of his wartime activities. Unlike Joyce, the Elams did not escape detention under Defence Regulation 18B; both were arrested on the same day as Mosley in May 1940. In later life, Elam reported that, although she disliked Joyce, she believed that his execution by the British in 1946 was wrong, stating that he should not have been regarded as a traitor to England because he was not English, but Irish.
In Berlin, Joyce could not find employment until a chance meeting with fellow Mosleyite Dorothy Eckersley got him an audition at the Rundfunkhaus (" broadcasting house"). 45/25728/244. CAB 98/18. Simpson 135–6. Thurlow, the 'Mosley Papers' and the Secret History of British Fascism 1939–1940, K/L, 175. Reporting statement from the Mail on 14.3.40. Eckersley was the former wife or second wife of the chief engineer of the BBC, Peter Eckersley. Despite having a heavy cold and having almost lost his voice, Joyce was recruited immediately for radio announcements and scriptwriting at German radio's English service. His first broadcast was reading the news in English on 6 September 1939, just three days after the declaration of war between Britain and Germany.Mary Kenny, Germany Calling (Dublin: New Island, 2003). On 18 September, he received a contract as a newsreader. After the dismissal of Norman Baillie-Stewart in December, Joyce became the principal reader of news and the writer of six talks a week, thus becoming the station's best-known propaganda broadcaster.
In a newspaper article of 14 September 1939, the radio critic Jonah Barrington of the Daily Express wrote of hearing a gent "moaning periodically from Zeesen" who "speaks English of the haw-haw, damit-get-out-of-my-way variety".Jonah Barrington, 'Radio is So Wonderful', Daily Express, 14 September 1939, p. 3. Four days later he gave him the nickname "Lord Haw-Haw". The voice Barrington heard is widely believed to be that of Wolf Mittler, a German journalist whose near-flawless English sounded like a caricature of an upper-crust Englishman. However, Mittler only made five or six broadcasts and was quickly replaced by other broadcasters, leading to uncertainty over whom Barrington had been referring to. When Joyce became the most prominent broadcaster of Nazi propaganda by the end of 1939, the name stuck to him. Joyce himself began to trade on the notoriety of the nickname more than a year later, on 3 April 1941, when he announced himself as "William Joyce, otherwise known as Lord Haw-Haw".H. J. P. Bergmeier, Rainer E. Lotz (1997). 9780300067095, Yale University Press. . ISBN 9780300067095
Joyce's broadcasts initially came from studios in Berlin, later being transferred (because of heavy Allied bombing) to Luxembourg City and finally to Apen near Hamburg, and were relayed over a network of German-controlled radio stations in Zeesen, Hamburg, Bremen, Luxembourg, Hilversum, Calais and Oslo.
Joyce also broadcast on and wrote scripts for the German Büro Concordia organisation, which ran several black propaganda stations, many of which pretended to broadcast illegally from within Britain. His role in writing the scripts increased over time, and German radio capitalised on his public persona. Initially an anonymous broadcaster, Joyce eventually revealed his real name to his listeners and he would occasionally be announced as, "William Joyce, otherwise known as Lord Haw-Haw". soon circulated about Lord Haw-Haw, alleging that the broadcaster was well-informed about political and military events to the point of near-omniscience.David Suisman, Susan Strasser, Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009, pp. 55–56. In the summer of 1942 it was decided that he should no longer read the news and, from then on, he read only his own talks in Views on the News.
Listening to Joyce's broadcasts was officially discouraged but was not illegal, and many Britons tuned in. There was a desire by civilian listeners to hear what the other side was saying, as information during wartime was strictly censorship. At the height of his influence, in 1940, Joyce had an estimated six million regular and 18 million occasional listeners in the UK. The broadcasts always began with the announcer's words, "Germany Calling". These broadcasts urged the British people to surrender and were well known for their jeering, sarcastic and menacing tone.
The Reich Security Main Office commissioned Joyce to give lectures at the University of Berlin for Schutzstaffel members in the winter of 1941–42 on the topic of "British fascism and acute questions concerning the British Empire".
Joyce recorded his final broadcast on 30 April 1945, during the Battle of Berlin. Rambling and audibly drunk,An excerpt from the broadcast can be heard in the episode on Joyce of the 1990s documentary TV series Great Crimes and Trials of the 20th century. he chided the UK for pursuing the war beyond mere containment of Germany and repeatedly warned of the "menace" of the Soviet Union. He signed off with a final defiant, "Heil Hitler and farewell". There are conflicting accounts as to whether this last programme was actually transmitted, although a recording was found in the Apen studios. The next day, Radio Hamburg was seized by British forces, and on 4 May Wynford Vaughan-Thomas used it to make a mock "Germany Calling" broadcast denouncing Joyce.
Besides broadcasting, Joyce's duties included writing propaganda for distribution among British prisoners of war, whom he tried to recruit into the British Free Corps of the Waffen-SS. He wrote a book Twilight Over England promoted by the German Ministry of Propaganda, which unfavourably compared the evils of Jewish-dominated capitalist Britain with the alleged wonders of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler awarded Joyce the War Merit Cross (First Class) for his broadcasts, although he never met Joyce.Colin Holmes9789004296381, Brill / Rodopi. ISBN 9789004296381
Two intelligence officers then drove Joyce to a border post and handed him over to British military police. He was then taken to London and tried at the Old Bailey on three counts of high treason:
"Not guilty" were the first words from Joyce's mouth in his trial, as noted by Rebecca West in her book The Meaning of Treason. The only evidence offered that he had begun broadcasting from Germany while his British passport was valid was the testimony of a police inspector who claimed to have recognized his voice during a broadcast in September or October 1939 from his past public appearances.
Inquiries in the US, adduced in evidence at his trial, found that Joyce had never been a British subject, and it seemed that he would have to be acquittal based upon a lack of jurisdiction; he could not be convicted of betraying a country that was not his own. The trial judge, Mr. Justice Tucker, directed the jury to acquit Joyce of the first and second charges. However, the Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, successfully argued that Joyce's possession of a British passport, even though he had misstated his nationality to get it, entitled him until it expired to British diplomatic protection in Germany and therefore he owed allegiance to the King at the time he began working for the Germans.
The historian A. J. P. Taylor remarked in his book English History 1914–1945 that "Technically, Joyce was hanging for making a false statement when applying for a passport, the usual penalty for which is a small fine."
In the appeal, Joyce argued that possession of a passport did not entitle him to the protection of the Crown, and therefore did not perpetuate his duty of allegiance once he left the country, but the House of Lords rejected this argument. Lord Porter's dissenting opinion assumed that the question as to whether Joyce's duty of allegiance had terminated was a question of fact for the jury to decide, rather than a purely legal question for the judge. Joyce also argued that jurisdiction had been wrongly assumed by the court in electing to try an alien for offences committed in a foreign country. This argument was also rejected, on the basis that a state may exercise such jurisdiction in the interests of its own security.
Joyce's biographer, Nigel Farndale, suggests on the basis of documents made public for the first time between 2000 and 2005 that Joyce made a deal with his prosecutors not to reveal links he had to MI5. In return, his wife Margaret, known to radio listeners as "Lady Haw-Haw", was spared prosecution for high treason. Of the 33 British renegades and broadcasters caught in Germany at the end of the war, only Margaret Joyce, who died in London in 1972, was not charged with treason.
"You have conquered nevertheless" was presumably a reference to "UND IHR HABT DOCH GESIEGT" ("and you have won nevertheless"), a phrase inscribed on the reverse side of the Blood Order medal. Other sources refer to his having said, "May the swastika be raised from the dust."
Joyce was executed on 3 January 1946 at Wandsworth Prison, aged 39. He was the penultimate person hanged for a crime other than murder in the UK. The last was Theodore Schurch, executed for treachery the following day at Pentonville Prison."Soldier Executed." Times, London, England, 5 January 1946: 2. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 20 March. 2015. In both cases, the Executioner was Albert Pierrepoint. Joyce died "an Anglican, like his mother, despite a long and friendly correspondence with a Roman Catholic priest who fought hard for William's soul". The scar on Joyce's face split wide open because of the pressure applied to his head upon his drop from the gallows.
Joyce remarried in 1936, to Margaret Cairns White. She died in 1972.
Lord Haw-Haw appears as one of the central characters in Thomas Kilroy's 1986 play Double Cross. Stephen Rea originated the role.
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