The late Billy Naughton, College Road, said he spluttered into his cup of tea, when he instantly recognised the upper-class, nasal drawl, of William Joyce reporting continuous Nazi victories on Radio Hamburg, Reichsrundfunk, during its English-language broadcast in October 1939. He was ridiculed as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ and was the butt of Musical Hall jokes, yet he was listened to and despised for his clever mix of fact and lies.
A precocious child, Joyce was born in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York, in April 1906, the eldest child of Michael Joyce, a building contractor, originally from Co Mayo, and his wife Gertrude (nee Brooke ).
The Joyces returned to Ireland, where Michael bought a pub near Westport, and moved to Galway where he acquired shares in the successful tram company running horse-drawn vehicles from Eyre Square to Salthill. They lived in comfort at Ruttledge Terrace, Rockbarton. The family was outspokenly pro - British.
William was educated at the Convent of Mercy primary school, and St Ignatius College before high-tailing it out of Galway in December 1921, when his presence was noticed in the Black and Tan tender parked in Shop Street, and at other places.
After a series of applications to join the British army were turned down, he enjoyed a successful academic career at university, before joining the British Union of Fascists under Oswald Mosley. He was involved in street thuggery and anti-Jewish rallies. During one fight he was slashed across his right cheek, leaving a deep scar, a mark which helped identify him when he was arrested at Flensburg, close to the Danish border, where he had fled with his wife Margaret, from the Allied armies. A British soldier recognised his distinctive voice. He was wounded during his arrest.
His much publicised trial for the medieval crime of treason, based on the fact that he owned a British passport (he had falsely claimed to be British ), despite being born in America. In January 1946 he was hanged at Wandsworth prison.
On August 20 1976, thanks to the successful pleading on behalf of his daughter, Heather (Iandolo ), he was reburied at the New Cemetery, Bohermore, Galway, which caused considerable interest at the time.
Loyal to Britain
Billy Naughton, a class pupil of Joyce, described him as a boastful boy, who had an untidy appearance. ‘He had a strong, aggressive voice, and breathed nasally, almost snorting. It was said that his nose was broken in a fist-fight in the playground. He was passionately pro-British, and frequently got into fights with boys who had Sinn Féin sympathies. He professed loyalty to Britain, claiming that ‘Patriotism is the highest virtue that I know’.
Another classmate, E L Kineen, recalled that Joyce was a ‘morose and lonely little fellow…for all his brightness there was something missing in Willie. He would give impromptu speeches in the playground warning classmates about the growing danger of communism’.
He had a passion for chess, and played with his friend Myles Webb. He was 10 years of age when the 1916 Rising happened, and he was fascinated and excited by the military response. During the War of Independence he found the fighting, the conspiracies and the intrigues exhilarating. He is believed to have found the body of an RIC officer, who was shot dead; and later he claimed to have seen a Sinn Féiner cornered by police and gunned down. This may all have been schoolboy fantasy, and a boastful story to tell his colleagues.
He was more serious about religion. Despite the Jesuits best efforts, he abandoned Catholicism when his divinity teacher said that his mother, who was a Protestant, would not get into Heaven.
Appalled, Joyce, 14 years of age at the time, who adored his mother, stormed out of the class and announced he would be an Anglican from that day forward.
‘Bitter denunciation’
Refused entry into the British army Joyce studied mathematics and chemistry at Battersea Polytechnic, as a pre-medical student, but ‘with a reputation for laziness and violent political views’, left the course early. His studies in English and history at Birkbeck College were more successful. He was a brilliant linguist and mathematician, and graduated BA with first class honours in 1927. He published an academic article on philology (a study of language in history ), and later falsely claimed that his research had been plagiarised by a Jewish academic.
In 1932 he enrolled at King’s College, London, for a Ph.D in educational psychology, but events prevented him completing the course.
Patrick Maume ** says that Joyce was disturbed by the difference between depressed post-war Britain and the imperial ideal that he had imbibed in Galway. He was mocked for his outspoken patriotism and obvious Irishness. He identified strongly with Thomas Carlyle, an earlier, angry anti-liberal from the provinces. Joyce’s life was marked by repeated episodes of hero worship followed by disillusion and bitter denunciation.
‘Heavy drinking’
The London Times, in its obituary for Heather Iandolo, September 8 2022, (she died July 8 2022, aged 93 ), recalled that the former history teacher, who lived ‘in a small austere house, in Gillingham, Kent’, was a devout Catholic, nevertheless, she was a regular visiter at her local synagogue, where she had spent a life-time atoning for the sins of her father.
In April 1927 Joyce had married her mother, Hazel Barr. They had two daughters, Heather and Diana, but separated eight years later, largely because of his ‘infidelities, heavy drinking and temper’. **
Though Heather was no Nazi sympathiser, and was never an apologist for his ‘treachery’, she came to the view that he had been the subject of a miscarriage of justice. She also could not help but be fond of him. As she recalled to Joyce’s biographer, Nigel Farndale,* he had, in the years before the war, been a good and attentive father to her and her younger sister Diana. ‘He would play the piano and sing silly songs, and old Irish rebel songs for a joke. He used to do funny things to make us laugh.’ He sang to her, what she thought was a song called ‘Dulwich over Alice’, but it was in fact the Nazi national anthem, Deutschland Uber Alles.
Fasinated by Germany
He brought Heather to the British Union of Fascists headquarters in Sloane Square, where he showed her all the Blackshirt paraphernalia. For a time he was director of propaganda, and he had his own office and staff. There was an armoury and a gymnasium in the building, and drums were played in the yard. Heather later remembered that there were marches on some Sundays, and ‘only later I found out that Jews were attacked.’
While Joyce was still married to Heather’s mother, they had a young German to stay, a boy named Lothar Streicher, ‘the son of a prominent Nazi who was very correct in every way’.***
‘There were weekends in large county houses, lots of meetings; it seemed so many people were involved: war veterans, intellectuals, all very English, but quite fascinated by Germany and Italy’.
‘While my parents were separated I stayed with him at weekends at his lodgings in Bremerton Street, off the King’s Road. We would walk around the city, have meals in restaurants where music was played. Sometimes he was sad. If Heather could not sleep he would bring her downstairs to sleep on the sofa. In the morning she returned to her mother.
The last time she saw her father she was seven years old. Her grandmother remarked that with him Heather was so disciplined. She would stand stiffly with her hands by her side, ‘looking grave.’
As the riots grew more fierce in east London, her mother stopped the girls going on walks with their father.
Complusive radio
Joyce’s nightly news programmes began with ‘Germany calling …Germany calling’….but his nasal voice sounded like ‘Gairmany calling…Gairmany calling.’ He reported the progress of the German armed forces, greatly exaggerating their successes. Strict censorship limited war information to the British people, so listening to Joyce was compelling. ‘He was very well informed, and often came out with extraordinary details’. Some German planes returning to base, but running low on fuel, and thinking they were still over the sea, offloaded their bombs over fields in west Mayo. Joyce apologising for the incident, actually named the town lands affected.
At one stage when the war was going well for Germany, Joyce boasted that Adolf Hitler would be in the stand in Ballybrit at the next Galway races. Billy Naughton said, ‘we may have laughed, but it was compulsive radio’.
Next week: A second marriage, and flight to Germany.
NOTES: * ‘Haw-Haw - The tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce’, by Nigel Farndale, published 2005.
** Dictionary of Irish Biography.
***Lothar was the son of Julius Streicher a prominent member of the Nazi party, a founder and publisher of the virulent antisemitic newspaper, Der Sturmer. It became a central element of the Nazi propaganda machine making Streicher a multimillionaire. After the war, however, he was convicted of crimes against humanity, and executed.
Other sources include The Times (September 8 2022 ), and Galway Advertiser 1976.
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