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Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Lord Haw Haw goes online
BY KEITH BOURKE
THE infamous broadcasts of Mayo-reared Nazi propagandist Lord Haw Haw have been made available online by the BBC.
William Joyce was born in New York in 1906 to an Irish father and an English mother, but grew up in Mayo and was educated at the Jesuit College of St Ignatius in Galway.
His father, Michael Joyce, emigrated from Mayo at the age of 21, but when William was three, the family moved back to Ireland after Michael bought a pub near Westport.
The family left Ireland for England when Joyce was 15. He went on to become a pro-Nazi orator whose broadcasts from Hitler’s Germany made him one of the first radio celebrities, with his unmistakably nasal drawl (the result of a broken nose sustained at St Ignatius’) announcing ‘Germany calling!’.
Enjoying a seven-million-strong audience in the war’s early days, Joyce deeply worried the British war office. A concerned government urged the BBC to put PG Wodehouse head to head with Joyce.
Lord Haw Haw was eventually captured by British soldiers as he cut a birch tree outside a cottage on the German/Danish border and was shot in the thigh. In his pocket were pages of a manuscript in which he said he would be glad when he was caught as the suspense was getting on his nerves, and, anyway, he loved England.
He was executed by hanging in Wandsworth Prison in 1946.
The Lord Haw Haw archives can be viewed at www.bbc.co.uk/ archive/hawhaw.
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