William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw-Haw, continues to attract attention. Colin Holmes has written a comprehensive study of this marginal figure on the British right and is clearly dissatisfied with previous publications on the subject. His research is extensive and in a number of places provides correctives to positions taken by other authors. He acknowledges the strength of Mary Kenny’s, Germany calling (2003) but warns against ‘Irishing’ Joyce (p. 454). He is also critical of Nigel Farndale’s conspiratorial claims in Haw-Haw (2005) of MI5 relations with Joyce (pp 457–8). Holmes is anxious to provide a fuller picture of an individual who for a period captivated the listening public during the Second World War with his broadcasts from Berlin. He also seeks to challenge the various versions of history provided by Joyce and those who continued to lionise him after his execution.
Joyce was born in the United States but grew up in Galway. His father was Irish (but a naturalised U.S. citizen) and Catholic, his mother English and Protestant. The family was loyalist and the young Joyce’s association with British forces and the Black and Tans during the War of Independence may have placed him on an I.R.A. execution list (p. 19). The family left Ireland once the Irish Free State was established, rather than live under the new regime. Joyce had already forsaken his father’s religion and identified more closely with his mother’s religious beliefs and her British politics (indeed, she supported him throughout his subsequent political career). For Joyce and his family being Irish and British was no longer compatible and they made the choice to identify with Britain and the empire. Ireland, however, did follow Joyce to England. The author questions the conventional story that Joyce himself told: that he had been attacked and scarred by a Jewish communist in a brawl. However, Joyce’s first wife told Holmes in 1992 that in fact the attack was carried out by an Irish woman, and a contemporary newspaper report on the attack provides evidence to support an Irish connection here.
During the 1920s any Irish connection fades and Joyce is closely associated with right-wing conservative movements at first, and then fascism. He works alongside Oswald Mosley in the British Union of Fascists, though later setting up the National Socialist League. On Holmes’s account Joyce was an intelligent, courageous and charismatic person, but also a violent ideologue with a dogmatic and narrow political view point. The British Empire and racial issues were key elements in right-wing politics and Joyce identified with them. He was also anti-semitic and anti-communist which drew him into the orbit of the German Nazis during the later 1930s. There is a contemporary feel about some of this ideology, including hostility to finance capital, a commitment to national economic protectionism and suspicion of the political power structure. Inter-war fascism shared with communism a rejection of the liberal democratic order, seeking a collective solution to the problems of the day.
Yet, looking back at Joyce’s career from the vantage point of 1939, his life was a failure. His narcissism attributed failure to the machinations of Jews, communists and others, but in reality he was a fairly uninteresting individual who had not achieved much. The decisive moment comes when he travels to Germany and supports Hitler in the war. His reasons were clear, ‘I would sooner see a beaten Britain, free from the domination of the old financial order, than a victorious Britain that was in practice only a Jewish-American colony’ (cited p. 407). Joyce’s broadcasts in support of the Nazi war effort made him a household name, acquiring a substantial audience in Britain and Ireland during the early years of the war.
What damage did Joyce do with these broadcasts? He was undoubtedly a Nazi and became a German citizen in 1940. The decision to charge him with treason raises important questions about identity, loyalty and state legitimacy. Can an individual give up their allegiance to the state that they had once identified with (as clearly Joyce had until September 1939)? If so, should the individual be punished for acts carried out during the war? All the allied states prosecuted their citizens for supporting the Nazis during the war and, in comparison, the British were relatively benign. More ambiguous are the cases of sub-state nationalists who sided with Germany in the hope of establishing a new state: in most cases, this was a victor’s justice.
It is possible to appreciate the dilemma of the British authorities in Joyce’s case, while noting that their legal case was weak, if not suspect. Mr Justice Tucker who presided had already declared Joyce a traitor at a trial in 1940, which questioned his independence. The issue finally rested on whether the possession of a British passport between September 1939 and July 1940 entailed that Joyce owed allegiance to the crown. The prosecution insisted that he did and that his actions were consequently traitorous: the jury agreed with this and Joyce was sentenced to death. It remains questionable whether Joyce had a fair trial, given the emotional circumstances of the war. Ironically the war provided him with the opportunity to shine and also the means to condemn him.
