Life
1906-1946 [‘Lord Haw-Haw’]; b. Brooklyn, New York; his father,
Michael, prominent in the GAA, who married a Miss Emily Brooke, dg. of
an English doctor with Northern Irish relatives who visited Galway for
fishing, having made money on the Pennsylvania Railway in youth and later
purchased a pub at Rockbarton Park, Salthill, Co. Galway from 1909 [var.
1914]; ed. St Ignatius Jesuit School, Galway; his father deemed loyalist;
family moved to England under IRA pressure, chiefly occasioned by William’s
custom of travelling with the Auxiliaries in their tenders and, presumably,
supplying local information, 1922; married and divorced; joined Mosley’s
British Fascist Union, expelled 1937; fnd. National Socialist League;
travelled to Germany, 1939; broadcast from 18 Sept. 1939 (‘Germany
calling, Germany calling’); took out German citizenship, 1940; captured
by British at Flensburg nr. Danish border, May 1945, being wounded in
the leg; tried at Old Bailey, and hanged for treason at Wandsworth Prison,
3 Jan.; reinterred in Galway, 1979; he is the subject of Double Cross
(1986), a Field Day play by Thomas Kilroy; his daughter successfully
campaigned for the reinterment of his body in Ireland in the 1970s. DIB
DIH
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Criticism
J A. Cole, Lord Haw-Haw: The Full Story of William Joyce (London: Faber
1987).
Francis Selqyn, Hitler’s Englishmen: The Crime of Lord Haw-haw (Harmondsworth: Penguin [1992]).
David O’Donoghue, Hitler’s Irish Voices: German Radio’s Wartime Irish Service, foreword by J. J. Lee (Belfast: Beyond the Pale 1998).
Mary Kenny, Germany Calling: A Personal Biography of William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw (Dublin: New Island Press 2003), 400pp.
Mary Kenny, Germany Calling: A Personal Biography (Dublin: New Island 2004) [w/o subtitle in rev. pb. edn.].
Nigel S. Fallon, London Times (16 Feb. 1995).
Mary Kenny, Germany Calling (Dublin: New Island), reviewed anonymously in Books Ireland (Feb. 2004).
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Notes
American citizen?: Though born in the US, the prosecution relied on his possession of a British passport acquired in July 1940 and said to
have been gained by falsely claiming to have been born in Galway, in order
to press treason charges.
Paul Muldoon has a poem, ‘Lord Hawhaw’, reprinted in Soft Day, A Miscellany Of Contemporary Irish Writing, ed. Peter Fallon and Seán Golden (Notre Dame/Wolfhound 1980)
A Radio programme in the form of a documentary interview with his daughter and early acquaintances in Galway was transmitted by RTÉ on 15 Sept. 1999.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)