Uneasy Listening

Paul Laity

Germany Calling: A Personal Biography of William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ by Mary Kenny
New Island, 300 pp, £17.99, November 2003, ISBN 1 902602 78 1
Lord Haw-Haw: The English Voice of Nazi Germany by Peter Martland
National Archives, 309 pp, £19.99, March 2003, ISBN 1 903365 17 1

William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, recorded his last ever broadcast from the temporary offices of the German Radio Corporation, in Hamburg, on the day Hitler shot himself. British troops were on the point of entering the city and Joyce and his colleagues had raided the cellars of the Funkhaus, drinking everything they could find. If you listen to the distant, crackly recording (which never made it onto the airwaves), the voice is nasal, raspy, over-insistent, and there are traces of the trademark sneer. But his speech is comically slurred, the cadences are unexpected and his Irish accent, usually barely detectable, comes through strongly.[*] Blind drunk and defiant, Joyce, the fervent Nazi, the Mosleyite mob-orator, had returned to the Galway of his youth.

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[*] A number of his broadcasts, including this final one, can be heard at www.earthstation1.com/Lord_Haw_Haw.html

Vol. 26 No. 13 · 8 July 2004 » Paul Laity » Uneasy Listening (print version)
Pages 22-24 | 4713 words

Letters

From Chris Kirtley

It's a shame that Paul Laity hadn't read Hugh Pennington's article on 'The Great MMR Disaster' when he wrote that William Joyce 'caught rheumatic fever from wearing damp fatigues' (LRB, 8 July). Rheumatic fever is caused by an immune response to infection by the bacterium Streptococcus pyogenes, not by wet clothes.

Chris Kirtley
Catholic University of America, Washington DC

From Mary Kenny

In his review of my biography of William Joyce, Paul Laity writes: 'Kenny tells us that Joyce was "kindly, thoughtful, considerate of others, humorous and calm about his fate"' during his last days in prison. This is not my judgment, but that of those who were with him, including the warders, with whom he seems to have been popular.

It was not my purpose to write a 'determinedly sympathetic' biography of Joyce. I set out to explore a character who was caught between English and Irish political passions in a troubled time, and who still seems to exert some sort of pull on those who remember him. I came across evidence that, however odious Joyce's views were and however unattractive his conduct, some people who knew him liked him – the anti-Fascist journalist William Shirer, for example, and the Scotland Yard chief, Leonard Burt, who said that he never arrested a more likeable guy.

I certainly became sympathetic to Joyce's family, who were unfairly stigmatised by association; and I feel affection and respect for his daughter, who has had to struggle with the conflict of having loved her father, while rejecting absolutely his politics and values. Quentin Joyce also suffered, all his life, for having felt loyalty and love for his brother. This is the human story of a family, but I would not wish it to be seen as a hagiography of a man whose ideas remain repellent.

Mary Kenny
Deal, Kent

From David Turner

Paul Laity writes of William Joyce's departure for Germany that 'he was alerted by someone in MI5 that he would be interned as soon as war broke out. Kenny is "almost certain" that the source of this information was the head of MI5, Charles Maxwell Knight' (LRB, 8 July). In fact, the head of MI5 in 1939 was Vernon George Waldegrave Kell, who ran the organisation from its inception in 1909 until his dismissal by Churchill in 1940. Maxwell Knight was MI5's star agent-runner. The allegation that Knight tipped off Joyce has been in circulation for some time. In his 1964 biography of Joyce, J.A. Cole refers to the source of the tip-off as an 'intelligence officer'; Cole adds that Joyce had previously fed the same officer intelligence on British Communists and that Joyce claimed he had been asked by the officer to go to Germany to spy on the Nazis before they came to power. The first writer to name the officer as Knight appears to have been W.J. West in Truth Betrayed (1987).

There is solid evidence that Knight was a senior member of the British Fascisti/ British Fascists in the 1920s, when Joyce was also active in that organisation. An MI5 file, now in the National Archives, reportedly refers to an MI5 officer denying that he had tipped off Joyce, but admitting speaking to him before he left for Germany. However, we still lack evidence establishing beyond doubt that it was Knight who tipped off Joyce.

David Turner
Borden, Kent