Andrew Gimson

Hitler’s unbalanced Orangeman

issue 22 November 2003

Lord Haw-Haw: The English Voice of Nazi Germany
by Peter Martland
The National Archives, £19.99, pp. 308, ISBN 1903365171

Although I yield to no one in my admiration of Mary Kenny as a journalist, an uncomfortable doubt arose in my mind as I read the lengthy acknowledgments with which she prefaces her biography of Lord Haw-Haw. I feared she might be too kind and generous a person to get the measure of William Joyce, the cruel, brutal, vulgar, hate-filled propaganda director of the British Union of Fascists from 1934-37, who during the second world war became, as Lord Haw-Haw, the outstanding exponent of the Nazi cause in the English language. Kenny expresses her gratitude to the family of the late Quentin Joyce, who struggled unwearyingly but unavailingly to save his elder brother, William, from being hanged for high treason in January 1946. She has had access to family papers which had previously lain undiscovered, and her mastery of the Irish and the family sources for William’s life is unrivalled.

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