Uneasy Listening 

Paul Laity

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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