blackisthelight

William Joyce and Lord Haw Haw

A sneering upper class voice taunted Britain over the airwaves from Nazi Germany during the Blitz and throughout the war, warning of the coming destruction when Germany would expand the Third Reich to encompass England and beyond. The mysterious broadcaster became nicknamed Lord Haw Haw and his identity remained unknown until after the war. Lord Haw Haw was William Joyce, a prominent member of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists before the war and its most famous ‘Irish’ member, although he would not have appreciated the title.

Joyce was born in New York in 1906 to an Irish father and Anglo-Irish mother and spent his childhood in Galway from an early age. His father had come from Mayo and made his money in the US before returning to the west of Ireland when William was two. His family were strongly against the Irish independence movement, and his father rented property to the Royal Irish Constabulary. As a teenager Joyce worked as an informer for the British forces during the Irish War of Independence, becoming known for fraternising with Black and Tans and for supplying information. In a letter written later when applying to join the army in England he wrote 'I have served with the irregular forces of the Crown in an Intelligence capacity, against the Irish guerrillas'.

Because of his informing, he became targeted by the IRA and was provided with an escape route to England by an officer in the British Army who arranged for the teenager to join the Worcestershire Regiment. His army carer was short lived and he was forced out after his true age was discovered and moved to London. The rest of his family soon followed as their wealth disappeared in the flames of IRA attacks on their properties. Once settled in London, Joyce studied literature and became active in right-leaning movements including the fringes of the Conservative party and an early fascist group – the British Fascists led by Rotha Lintorn-Orman. During this period Joyce was knifed at a Conservative political meeting in Lambeth leaving him with a pronounced facial scar. Throughout his life he claimed to have been attacked by a Communist Jew, granting him some veneer of an excuse for his obsessive Jew-hatred but his wife at the time later claimed that he had been attacked by an Irish woman in revenge for his actions in Galway as a spy for the Black and Tans.

Another Irishman involved in the British Fascists at the time was Sir Michael O’Dwyer. O’Dwyer was born into a large family of Catholic farmers in Tipperary and rose through the ranks of the Indian Civil Service to become Governor of the Punjab. He oversaw the Jallianwala Bagh massacre at Amritsar in 1919 carried out by British troops under the command of Reginald Dyer, another man with strong Irish connections. O’Dwyer defended Dyer’s actions which resulted in the murder of at least 400 people, but estimates have put the death toll at a much higher number. Upon moving to Britain O’Dwyer became involved in the fascist movement before being assassinated in London in 1940 by an Indian anti-colonial revolutionary, Udham Singh, in revenge for his role in the events in Amritsar. Joyce mourned O’Dwyer’s passing and had regarded him as one of his heroes. Joyce’s experiences in Ireland during the War of Independence stayed with him, and he projected what he thought should have happened to Irish nationalists onto Indian nationalists and other anti-colonial movements. He also venerated William Carson saying he thought 'the defender of Ulster, as a political god. In bearing, will, act and thought, Carson was a fascist.’

Joyce was heavily involved in Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and became one of the most prominent members, becoming Director of Propaganda and Deputy Leader. Often acting as a stand-in for Mosley, Joyce became a strong orator and seasoned fighter, with his passionate speeches leaving a mark on proceedings wherever he spoke. He also wrote articles for the movement’s papers. Mosley’s plan for electoral campaigns fell apart due to the loss of respectability that accompanied constant fighting at BUF meetings and the movement became more street-oriented, a direction that suited Joyce. His antisemitic views grew more and more virulent, and he increasingly pushed the BUF towards Hitler and Nazism. He said himself of this time:

'What influence I had I used to promote a thoroughly anti-Jewish policy: and, in this respect I succeeded.'

In 1936, under the influence of Joyce, the BUF rebranded as the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists. In 1937 as part of an effort to purge some of the more extremist elements in the BUF, Joyce was forced out and he subsequently set up the National Socialist League. The purge occurred on the back of electoral losses in local elections and the organisation’s paid staff was heftily cut back, leaving Joyce to struggle financially. Rebecca West, a journalist who covered Joyce’s trial recounted an anecdote from one of the BUF inner circle regarding the cross-class collaboration of the movement –

“The wife of one of the few Fascist leaders who were in the inner ring with Mosley was asked, 'Did you and your husband ever ask Joyce to your house?' She answered in horror, 'Oh, no, never. That was the great thing that worried us all, about what we were to do after Tom' – as Mosley was known to his familiars – 'had become dictator. We didn't know how we were going to get rid of all these dreadful common people we had had to use to get power.'”

The NSL secured financial backing from a wealthy stockbroker and campaigned for a British Nazism using the slogan Steer Straight. The group remained small, never numbering more than a few dozen members and Joyce’s audiences shrank. Commenting on the membership, West speculated that many of the members and later his supporters at the trial were Irish people who had left Ireland following independence. 'These were for the most part from families with the same roots as the Joyces, who had been supporters of the British occupation of Ireland and who had had to leave the country for safety's sake when Home Rule was granted.'

There is not much evidence to suggest Joyce held antisemitic views while in Ireland but quickly adopted them after moving to Britain and becoming more involved in politics. His interest may have been sparked by theories that the Irish independence movement was being run by Jewish Bolsheviks, a claim echoed frequently in British newspapers as an explanation for the losses in Ireland. Struggling to understand how a guerrilla force could defeat the British Empire’s finest soldiers, writers concocted conspiracies of outside help, communist plots and Jewish treachery which became intermingled. Centuries of derogatory commentary from the British establishment towards Irish rebels had reduced the image of the country to a stubborn, ill-educated population far less capable than the British. Accepting a loss to such a rabble would mean a huge loss of face, which encouraged commentators to seek alternate, far-fetched explanations. A failure to engage in material or social analysis and self-reflection has frequently led to such conclusions and reoccurs in the Civil Rights era in the USA and elsewhere in modern history. The loss of Ireland was a major blow to the British and was the beginning of the end of the Empire. The revolution in Russia during the same period led to a huge red scare, and antisemitic conspiracies of a secret group working to overthrow the existing order quickly led to the two becoming synonymous. Many Russian Jews had indeed become involved in radical politics due to the repressive nature of Tsarist rule, and many more had emigrated west to escape persecution. Joyce may well have accepted these theories and used them to blame Jews for his own misfortunes of being kicked out of school, ran out of the country and drummed out of the military. Joyce was a highly intelligent and talented young man but couldn’t seem to catch a break. His bitterness at frustrated ambition could have found some cold comfort in a malign conspiracy aligned against him and his values.

Socialist and communist support for the Irish struggle was not hidden. Marx had identified Ireland as an Achilles heel of the British Empire and many British leftists sympathised and supported the cause of Irish independence. James Connolly and the Irish Citizen Army had played a major role in the 1916 Rising but leftist tendencies were outnumbered in the wider Republican movement and had little influence in the governing of the Free State which came to be dominated by conservative Catholic tendencies. The Alien Menace by Lieutenant Colonel A.H. Lane was an influential antisemitic book in the British fascist movement which expanded on speculations by newspapers as to the influence of Jewish Bolshevism on the Irish independence movement. Lane was a member of The Britons and the Imperial Fascist League. Lane positioned Marx and other Jewish communists as the real power behind the events in Ireland, constantly referring to Jews as ‘aliens’, a verbal tic that Joyce adopted in his own work. The book is worth quoting at length to illuminate this form of antisemitic conspiracy.

'The Irish were and are incapable of organising such a movement without foreign aid and guidance. The Irish revolution was aided and abetted by the Socialists and Communists of Britain, who, while guilty of treachery to their own country, were pursuing the historic role laid down for them by Karl Marx. To understand this disloyalty of the Socialist Party we must remember that modern Socialism or Communism owes its origin and its methods to the Prussian, Friedrich Engels, and the Prussian Jew, Karl Marx—who came here about 1850. These two Aliens devoted themselves to revolutionary and subversive propaganda, their object being the destruction of British capitalism and the dismemberment of the British Empire.'

In explaining the British withdrawal from what became the Free State:

'Why did the Conservatives, with few exceptions, immediately forget those who had faced murder, robbery and outrage, to maintain the Union with Great Britain? The only explanation is that Alien influence at Westminster and pressure from New York were too great for even Conservatives to resist.'

In reference to DeValera:

'It is this Spanish-American Jew, who now proposes to abolish the Oath of Allegiance, to cut the connection with the United Kingdom, and has set free the gunmen and terrorists of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Here we have an Alien doing exactly what Marx and other Alien revolutionaries have advocated in Ireland for many years. It is the Marxian plan of a revolution organised by foreigners.'

The book is still distributed by Christian Identity groups.

Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Joyce and his wife fled to Germany where he embarked on a career in radio, haunting the beleaguered citizens of Britain as part of the German propaganda campaign to demoralise the citizenry of opposing nations. Due to German wishes to woo Irish nationalists into a strategic alliance against Britain, Joyce had to put his hatred for the IRA aside during the war, and before the invasion of the Soviet Union, likewise his opinions on the USSR were kept in check, leaving Jews to bear the brunt of his attacks. Like many fascists, Joyce’s patriotism was dependent on the country conforming to his desires, and he worked to facilitate a foreign invasion and occupation from a country whose political system he admired more than his professed homeland. He cheered on German bombing raids during the Blitz even as his own parents house was destroyed.

Joyce realised some of his ambition when he began broadcasting from Berlin. He quickly became a phenomenon, one of the most recognizable voices in the world, and in many ways a pioneer of the medium. Goebbels had realized the propaganda potential of radio and assembled a large team to broadcast in fifty-five languages, including a dedicated Irish group called Irland Redaktion. Joyce as Lord Haw-Haw provided entertainment and a larger-than-life character at a time when BBC programming was stilted and heavily censored. Endless rumours started from his Germany Calling nightly broadcasts and they were immensely popular during the early phases of the war when information was precious and entertainment scarce. His broadcasts also reached Ireland where news of British losses was often treated with schadenfreude by a populace whose memories of the atrocities of the Black and Tans would scarcely fade for a century. This hostility to the British military from the Irish public would frequently pass over into a campist attitude of supporting German military efforts, while choosing to ignore Nazi atrocities. For a generation that had lived through the terror of counter-insurgency actions, internments, reprisal killings and the burning of whole towns, not to mention the continued partition of the island, the idea of supporting the forces responsible seemed unconscionable and talk of even worse behaviour by the SS probably seemed unbelievable.

Joyce was a prolific broadcaster during his time in Berlin and wrote his own daily show and many others. As Head of Propaganda for the BUF he contributed many articles to the group’s newpapers Action and Blackshirt. His two major written works are National Socialism Now, written as a manifesto for the NSL in 1937 and Twilight Over Britain, written in Berlin in 1940 and distributed to British POWs by the Nazis. There is no shortage of his own material to show that Joyce was an antisemite of the most extreme inclinations, and used his considerable skills to urge discrimination, attacks and extermination. Joyce’s antisemitism was obsessive and far-reaching. National Socialism Now paints a picture of Jewish conspiracy to start the First World War resulting in the sacrificing of British lives to save Jews from persecution.The conspiracy then turns to promoting pacifism in the interwar period and later to promote war once more against Hitler’s Germany.

'whenever any troublesome foreign question arises, apply the sound, hard test: “For whose benefit?” Then look for the Seal of David, or the Star of Zion.'

The war in Ireland is brought up as an example of Jewish treachery leading to the danger of collapse of the Empire:

'If one sixth of the money invested and lost outside the Empire, in South America alone for example, had been given to Ireland, there might have continued that cooperation between her and England which provided British history with Burke, Goldsmith, Wellington, Boyle, Roberts, French, Beatty and Carson. As though, however by an inevitable destiny, International Finance wound its coils through the heart of England, and its venom was carried throughout the bloodstream to the whole Colonial and Imperial system.'

Jews are blamed as the source of communist agitation and seen as part of an enormous plot to control world economies. 'International Finance is controlled by great Jewish moneylenders and Communism is being propagated by Jewish agitators who are fundamentally with the powerful capitalists of their race in desiring an international world order, which would of course, give universal sovereignty to the only international race in existence.' Anything Joyce dislikes or disapproves of, the blame can be laid at the feet of Jewish treachery. Meeting him in Berlin in 1940 the CBS journalist William Shirer described him as having 'a titanic hatred for Jews.'

In return for this imagined attempt to control and dominate, Joyce argues for physical attacks against Jews 'Perhaps an attack upon them would solve the whole problem.' The rhetoric broadens into appeals for ethnic cleansing and mass deportations, 'the deportation of a few hundred Oriental criminals will suffice for ever to silence Communism in this country.'

'It is extremely difficult to see how there can ever be an abiding peace between them and the Jews except by the exclusion or disappearance of the latter.'

And finally this rhetoric moves into talk of extermination, as Joyce salivates at the prospect of 'the day of reckoning…being prepared for them by the working classes, who have at last begun to identify their real rulers.' '…it rendered war between England and Germany inevitable, unless some hundreds of Jews were to swing in timely fashion from the lampposts of Westminster.'

Joyce sees the war as ultimately leading to the extermination of the Jewish race, which he applauds:

'When twilight falls on the field of battle, it is the twilight of the Kingdom of Judah on earth. They have tempted God—these Jews—for the last time.'

Joyce stayed in Berlin until almost the end of the war. He fled northwest ahead of the invading Soviet army and ended up in Flensburg, the last capital of the Third Reich. Towards the end of May 1945 he was shot and captured by British officers and taken into custody. Joyce was taken to London and charged with three counts of treason.

As the consequences of Nazi policies and the Final Solution became clear in the immediate aftermath of the war, Joyce downplayed the extermination camps, stating they weren’t run by the best type of man, and saying the inmates were of a type beyond the conception of British imagination. Joyce’s trial hinged on his nationality. Evidence showed that he had never been a British subject and had lied on his application for a British passport. However, the judge decided that because he had a British passport he was bound to allegiance to the country, despite the fraudulent matter in which it had been obtained. Despite his US citizenship, Joyce was hung for treason after the war, one of only four Britons to be executed by a British court for crimes during the war. He went to his death unchanged, still blaming Jews for the war. In a final letter to his brother Quentin, who followed William into the BUF and NSL he wrote:

'In death as in life, I defy the Jews who caused this last war: and I defy the Darkness which they represent.'

In one of his last letters written while awaiting execution, unrepentant and unreformed Joyce states:

'It is precisely for my ideals that I am to be killed. It is the force of ideals that the Hebrew masters of this country fear; almost everything else can be purchased by their money; and as with the Third Reich, what they cannot buy, they seek to destroy.'

In 1976, following a campaign by his daughter, his body was taken from the grounds of Wandsworth Prison and reinterred in Bohermore cemetery in Galway with a Tridentine ceremony.

ADDENDUM

Norman Baillie-Stewart, a compatriot of Joyce’s in the Nazi broadcasting world may have been the first person to be attributed the moniker Lord Haw-Haw. Stewart was usurped by Joyce in the position and the two never got along, with Bailie-Stewart later calling him ‘a thug of the first order’. A disgruntled former soldier convicted of spying in 1933, Baillie-Stewart was once again convicted and sentenced to five years imprisonment by British authorities after the war. Following release, Baillie-Stewart adopted his middle name of Patrick and settled in Dublin where he ran an import-export business from Parliament Street. He lived in Raheny until his death in 1966.

Another of Joyce’s compatriots in Berlin with Irish connections was Edward (Ted) Bowlby. Bowlby was born in Cork and lived there until he was 11 before moving to England in 1922 and later joining the BUF. Bowlby moved to the continent around 1938 and was imprisoned by the German authorities. Claiming to be Irish, he was released in 1943 following help from the Irish embassy and began working with Joyce in Berlin at the Rundfunkhaus. The two became friendly and escaped Berlin together in the closing days of the war. He avoided prosecution by the British authorities on condition that he not return to Britain and moved to Ireland in 1946 where he obtained an Irish passport and settled in Dublin. He worked as a teacher, establishing a private school in Raheny and the Leprechauns cricket club near Bray. He died in 1959.

Sources:

Cole, J.A. (1964) Lord Haw-Haw and William Joyce London: Faber and Faber

Hall J.W. (Ed.), The Trial of William Joyce, Appendix VIII

Holmes, Colin (2016) Searching for Lord Haw-Haw – The Political Lives of William Joyce London: Routledge

Joyce, William (1937) National Socialism Now London

Joyce, William (1940) Twilight Over Britain Berlin (AAARGH Reprint 2008)

Kenny, Mary (2003) Germany Calling – A Biography of William Joyce Lord Haw Haw Dublin: New Island

Lane, A.H. (1934) The Alien Menace (5th ed.) London: Boswell

Leach, Daniel (2009) Fugitive Ireland – European Minority Nationalists and Irish Political Asylum 1937-2008 Dublin: Four Courts Press

Lysaght, Charles (2009) An Irishman’s Diary, The Irish Times, 16 February 2009

Ó Siocháin P.A. (1995)  The Two Lord Haw-Haws, Irish Times, 21 February 1995

Selwyn, Francis (1987) Hitler’s Englishman – The Crime of Lord Haw Haw London: Penguin

Shirer, William (1942) Berlin Diary New York: Knopf

Thurlow, Richard (1998) Fascism in Britain – A History 1918-1998 London: I.B Tauris

Tucci, John (2005) The Intellectual History of Inter-war British Fascists, University of Central Florida

West, Rebecca (1949) The Meaning of Treason London: Macmillan