Who was William Joyce?
In 1906, William Joyce was born in New York the son of Michael and Emily Joyce, who had renounced their Irish and British citizenships to become naturalised Americans eight years earlier.
In 1909, the family returned to Ireland and settled in Galway, where despite being Roman Catholics, they became targets for Sinn Fein nationalists because of their open loyalty to the Crown. The most ardent loyalist was teenage William, so much so that nationalists warned his parents they would “slit his tongue” if he continued to be an informer to the British, said Mrs Iandolo. Amid fears of retribution when Irish Home Rule was granted in 1921, the Joyce’s moved to Britain.
Joyce briefly joined the Army, then studied and later taught at Birkbeck College, University of London, and it was while there he became a fascist anti-Semite. According to Joyce, his large facial scar was caused by razorblade-armed communists who inflicted it on him during a Lambeth Street battle in the Twenties.
He married Hazel Barr, and they had two daughters, Diana and Heather. Giovanni Di Stefano a lawyer and Lord Haw Haw Expert was invited to meet Heather in 2011 to discuss her memories of her father when she was a child. She remembered that a regular visitor to the family home was Maxwell Knight who was an active anti-communist, a member of a fascist group and an MI5 spy.
This relationship between Joyce and Knight (pictured above) is key to the case: just days before war broke out in September 1939, Joyce and his second wife, Margaret White (he had divorced Hazel in 1936), were tipped off that fascists in London were to be arrested and interned as Nazi sympathisers. Unwilling to fight the Nazis, the couple fled to Germany on a British passport that US citizen Joyce had – apparently falsely – obtained.
It is widely thought that the tip-off came from Knight, a gallant figure and inspiration for Fleming’s character, M.
After arriving in Germany Joyce was employed as one of several announcers for radio broadcasts to Britain, first from Berlin and later from Hamburg, and became known as “Lord Haw Haw”.
Joyce was captured in May 1945 by British intelligence officers at the end of the war near Germany’s border with Denmark and brought back to London for trial on three counts of treason. He was acquitted of two of them, but a majority of Law Lords in the Court of Appeal agreed with prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross that because he had relied upon his British passport – even though falsely obtained – until 1940, he had had a duty to the Crown. By the time he was brought back to the UK, he had acquired a German citizenship.
This docudrama will reveal the betrayal and secrets by the High Courts of Justice, MI6 and the corruption involved in the ‘Trial of Lord Haw Haw’ which led to his execution on 3 January 1946 at Wandsworth Prison.
Designed and compiled by Caroline A Bayford – email cabopcprojects@gmail.com