William Joyce was born in 1906 in Brooklyn New York to Michael Francis Joyce - a naturalised US citizen - and Gertrude Emily Brooke. However, in 1909 the Joyce family returned to their native Galway.
William Joyce lived his early youth following the ideals of his staunch unionist parents. After partition in 1922, the family moved to England out of fear of Irish nationalist retribution.
In England, Joyce flirted with fascism in his late teens and into his twenties, but only in 1932 did he join the Britain Union of Fascists. Founded by Sir Oswald Mosley, who Joyce publicly praised and coveted, but in private slandered, calling him ‘the bleeder’, claiming that he was not radical enough.
This led to Joyce’s dismissal from the union in 1937 and Joyce subsequently founding his own fascist party, The National Socialist League. The party was brazenly anti-semitic, pro Nazi and only gained a tiny following.
In August 1939, with threats of war from Germany, Joyce left his organisation and with his second wife Margaret made the move to Berlin. Joyce justified this move in his book, ‘Twilight Over England’, where he wrote “in this great conflict I wanted to play a clear and definite part”.
This “clear and definite part” came to Joyce on September 18 1939 when he secured a job as a newsreader at the Reichsrunfunk, a German radio corporation.
Thus began Joyce’s broadcasts of Nazi propaganda to the UK. Who was this English man undermining his government broadcasting from Germany? His broadcasts were only recognised by his signature ‘Germany calling, Germany calling’ beginning every broadcast and his performative mock-upper-class, haughty English accent, which earned him the nickname Lord Haw Haw.
It was not illegal for the public to listen to Lord Haw Haw’s broadcasts but the government did strongly discourage it. Though this did not deter six million regular listeners and 18 million occasional listeners from tuning in.
Lord Haw Haw became the number one radio personality of World War II and his image was even commercialised. Smith’s Electrical Clocks produced an advertisement with a cartoon drawing of a monocled donkey at a microphone with the caption 'Don't risk missing Haw-Haw. Get a clock that shows the right time always, unquestionably'.
However, M Kelly of Galway, an old school mate of William, recognised his voice and wrote to the News Review, to share his revelation.
Lord Haw Haw’s popularity did not last and by March of 1940 his listeners dwindled. Reasons being, not because what Joyce was saying was true but because it might be true. This made people almost scared to listen to him, as it made them feel uneasy, and this in turn led to a dislike of his voice and personality.
William Joyce was arrested at the end of the war after being found hiding in Kuffermuille, a small village in Denmark and he was executed for treason by the British Government on January 3, 1946.
Lord Haw Haw’s history is a fascinating story of a man whose intense patriotism for a nation that was not his own, allowing his extreme political beliefs to drive him into a role that ultimately led to his downfall.
