Searching for Lord Haw-Haw

The Political Lives of William Joyce

Colin Holmes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138888845
• eBook ISBN: 9781317408345
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Fascism & Totalitarianism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Searching for Lord Haw-Haw is an authoritative account of the political lives of William Joyce. He became notorious as a fascist, an anti-Semite and then as a Second World War traitor when, assuming the persona of Lord Haw-Haw, he acted as a radio propagandist for the Nazis. It is an endlessly compelling story of simmering hope, intense frustration, renewed anticipation and ultimately catastrophic failure.

This fully-referenced work is the first attempt to place Joyce at the centre of the turbulent, traumatic and influential events through which he lived. It challenges existing biographies, which have reflected not only Joyce's frequent calculated deceptions but also the suspect claims advanced by his family, friends and apologists. By exploring his rampant, increasingly influential narcissism it also offers a pioneering analysis of Joyce's personality and exposes its dangerous, destructive consequences.

"What a saga my life would make!" Joyce wrote from prison just before his execution. Few would disagree with him.

Part I

Identities

1

Early life

It is only in spy stories that things can be arranged slickly. In real life the wheels are all jagged and rusty from long exposure, and the grooves are invariably the wrong gauge. [Simon Raven, Friends in Low Places (London, 1965), p.25.]

1

This saga begins with an ending. Galway burials seldom feature in the British press. But on 20 August 1976 The Times reported that “William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw, the propaganda radio broadcaster for Hitler during the last war will be buried in the Irish Republic this weekend.”¹ His body, undisturbed in the bleak grounds of Wandsworth prison since his execution and solitary burial in the wintry days of January 1946, had just been lifted by permission of Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary. These decayed fragments, placed in a lead-lined coffin, were loaded onto an Aer Lingus plane and then flown to the Irish Republic. There, on 21 August, at St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church, Galway, about two hundred people attended a burial service to hear Father Padraic Ó Laoi conduct a Latin Requiem Mass.² These mourners, swelled by a media presence, included people who had known the young Joyce in Ireland and members of his family.³

Heather Iandolo, one of Joyce’s daughters, dressed in deepest black, silhouetted against the brilliant sunshine of the August afternoon, had been the driving force behind these events. The previous day she had told the press: “At last I have granted his last wish. In letters he wrote in his death cell he asked to be returned to Ireland. It has taken a long time but the Home Office have always been very helpful.”⁴ An informed source has queried whether the remains were Joyce’s.⁵ But this ceremony assumed a symbolic importance for a clearly relieved Mrs Iandolo.

Joyce’s new resting place is Galway’s Bohermore Cemetery, the Protestant section. He has a simple gravestone, a small white cross, where the word resurrection is misspelt and his date of birth – a contentious matter, as will soon become clear – appears as 23 April 1906. His reburial, marking the end of a turbulent life’s journey, left him lying beside a Rainsbury and a Tuckwell.

2

In the late nineteenth century many Irish people died far beyond their birthplace.⁶ Large numbers undertook the journey to England, where important settlements developed in London and also Liverpool, that most Irish of English cities. In Scotland, Glasgow acted as a similar magnet. This continuous movement became especially heavy between 1841 and 1861, the years of the Great Hunger. As the century wore on, as steam replaced sail, a growing number of migrants ventured further afield, particularly to the United States, a country which appealed to them because it had played no part in the bloody conquest of Ireland. As a result, “between 1856 and 1921 the last great waves of Irish emigration broke on American shores” and “during this period more Irishmen and – women left their native land than in the preceding two and a half centuries.” Many counties experiencing this unusually heavy emigration were situated on the western seaboard.⁷

Joyce’s father featured in this growing exodus. Michael Francis Joyce, an elusive figure in this saga, was born in or near Ballinrobe in County Mayo. One claim is that he was born in 1868.⁸ However, Intelligence files suggest 9 December 1866.⁹ Another source has agreed on 1866 but a date of 12 December.¹⁰ Other details are more certain. Michael’s father, Martin, who had married Mary Naughton, earned a respectable living as a farmer.¹¹ But in 1888, rather than follow in his father’s footsteps, Michael left for a new life in America. He envisaged his long-term future in the golden land and in 1892 in the Court of Common Pleas, Hudson County, New Jersey, began proceedings to become an American citizen. He completed this process on 25 October 1894, with fellow Irishman John Duane as his witness.¹²

The American economy grew strongly in the late nineteenth century, the age of the Robber Barons, those successful, ruthless capitalists who significantly influenced the country’s economic development, and Michael made money in the railway and building booms. He worked for the Griffin Ironworks on the Pennsylvania railway and, underlining the importance of Irish family networks, became a partner in the Naughton Construction Company of Brooklyn.¹³ America offered better prospects but from time to time Michael would return to Ireland and on one visit met Gertrude Emily Brooke, in the Skeffington Arms Hotel, Galway. She was accompanying her father on a fishing holiday. The couple kept in touch before Michael proposed by post.¹⁴

There is a suggestion that Gertrude, often called Queenie, was born in 1879 at Crompton in Lancashire. However, the Registrar-General’s records, confirmed in a 1917 police report, have 28 August 1878.¹⁵ She came from a prosperous family and lived at 27 Manchester Road, Shaw, with her parents William and Emily, a grandmother on her father’s side, and three brothers Edgar, Gilbert and William Emile. The Brookes had long relied on having ‘downstairs’ young women servants to cater for their everyday needs.¹⁶

William Brooke, the head of the family, was born in Roscommon. A graduate of Galway, Manchester and Edinburgh, he practised as a doctor and when Gertrude expressed her wish to marry, was serving as Medical Officer of Health for the Urban District of Crompton.¹⁷ When he died in April 1914 the local press, faithful to the language of its day, described him as “a noted practitioner” and one of the town’s “most respected residents” who, “in a quiet way,” had selflessly given years of service to the community. The flag flew at half-mast on Shaw’s Town Hall. Joyce’s parents attended his funeral, riding in the second carriage.¹⁸ Emily, Dr Brooke’s widow, followed him to the grave, much more quietly, on 28 March 1917.¹⁹

Dr Brooke came from the predominantly Catholic part of Ireland. But he and his family were staunch Protestants and objected to Gertrude marrying out of their faith. It would not have been unusual for the Brookes, belonging to a religious minority, to have developed this entrenched view. But class differences might also have concerned them. Their substantial wills reflected not only Dr Brooke’s professional standing but also a regular flow of rental income derived from property investments. These documents also revealed in their tortuous legal prose an obsessive concern with preserving a ‘dynasty.’ It remained a bourgeois household to its core.

However, Gertrude possessed a decidedly steely personality. Her first-born son remarked later how stubborn she could be.²⁰ And in 1905, accompanied by her brother Edgar, a practising solicitor with offices in Clegg Street, Oldham, she sailed out of Liverpool on the Campania bound for New York and her future husband, arriving at Ellis Island on 30 April 1905.²¹ She was carrying the sizeable sum of $250.²² Her brother, now consigned to historical obscurity, travelled with her just before his life began to disintegrate. He became an alcoholic and by 1907 his name had disappeared from the Law List. Gilbert Brooke later told lawyers, teasingly, that his brother had accompanied Gertrude to America because “my mother wanted to know the thing was don...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Archive abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Identities
• Part II Ideologies
• Part III Speaking
• Part IV Connecting
• Part V Retribution
• Part VI Judgements
• Part VII Epilogue
• Select bibliography
• Index