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William Joyce, also nicknamed Lord Haw-Haw, is an American-born Maximist politician, writer, public speaker and pirate radio broadcaster in the Union of Britain.
A minor figure in the British Maximist movement, Joyce would briefly serve as the Popular Revolution Party's Assistant Director of Public Communications before the group's dissolution in 1931, before later becoming Deputy Director for Propaganda of the New Labour Association. Initially a Mosley confidant he would gradually attach himself to John Beckett and the so-called 'British Sorelianism' ideology current within the Maximists. Joyce gained international notoriety for a 1934 radio hijacking of an Anglo-German broadcaster.
Biography[]
Early Life[]
William Brooke Joyce was born on Herkimer Street in Brooklyn, New York, United States. His father was Michael Francis Joyce, an Irish Catholic from a family of farmers in Ballinrobe, County Mayo, who had taken United States citizenship on 25 October 1894 and worked as a builder. His mother was Gertrude Emily Brooke, who although born in Shaw and Crompton, Lancashire, England, was from a well-off Anglican Anglo-Irish family of medical practitioners associated with County Roscommon.
A few years after William's birth, the family returned to Salthill, Galway, Ireland. Joyce attended Coláiste Iognáid, a Jesuit school in Galway (from 1915 to 1921). Joyce's parents were ardent British Loyalists and hostile to Irish nationalism, with his mother being strongly Anglocentric and devoutly Protestant. There were tensions between her and her family because she married a Roman Catholic. Joyce's father bought several houses to be leased, and rented some to the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC).
Although Joyce was still only in his mid-teens, he was recruited during the Irish War for Independence by Captain Patrick William Keating as a courier for British Army intelligence in Galway, then fighting against the Irish Republican Army (IRA). He was known to associate with Black and Tans at Lenaboy Castle, and was linked to the murder of Father Michael Griffin, a known Irish republican sympathiser. Keating arranged for Joyce to be mustered into the Worcester Regiment soon after, taking him out of the dangerous situation in Ireland to Norton Barracks in England to be trained as an infantryman. However, he was discharged a few months later, after it was found out he was under age and as such, unfit to serve.
Joyce remained in England and briefly attended King's College School, Wimbledon while his family followed him to England two years later. Joyce had relatives in Birkenhead, Cheshire, whom he visited on a few occasions. He then applied to Birkbeck College of the University of London, where he entered the Officer Training Corps. At Birkbeck, he obtained a first-class honours degree in English. After graduating, he applied for a job in the Foreign Office, but was rejected and so took a job as a teacher. He developed an interest in far-right ideology, and worked with, but never joined, the British Conservative League of Rotha Lintorn-Orman. Lintorn-Orman repeatedly attempted to recruit him as a fully-fledged member, particularly when she attempted to establish links with the Ulster Loyalism movement, though he personally found her politically ineffective and gauche.
By early 1924, Joyce had now been working in casual and unstable employment, having largely been a paid steward for Conservative party meetings amid growing political violence. At one such meeting, Joyce was attacked by SPGB members and received a deep razor slash across his right cheek. It left a permanent scar which ran from the earlobe to the corner of the mouth. Joyce would claim that his attackers were Jewish but his wife at the time would claim that it was not Jews that committed the attack but 'he was knifed by an Irish woman'.
The Civil War and Early Politics[]
Upon the outbreak of hostilities, Joyce would immediately volunteer for service in the Army be recruited as an infantryman, seeing combat in Wales and Northern England before due to mass desertions he would be posted with an Auxiliary (Black and Tans) unit. At some point in early 1925, his family would return to Ireland as refugees though Joyce would instead opt to remain in Britain to carry on the fight and in private correspondence with his mother, explain his intentions as that he was worried 'if Britain were to fall to the Reds then the whole world would collapse'. Later on when Royalist Forces were on the back foot, he would desert his unit out of fear of being captured and go into hiding in the South of England during the war's closing days. Following the conflict's end, as a fugitive Joyce turned to banditry and was arrested by the Republican Army, being sentenced to two years hard labour.
In prison, Joyce would begin to reconnect with far-right figures and upon his release a year later after an amnesty, would join Rotha Lintorn-Orman's Legion of St. George though he would leave roughly three months later due to a mixture of a personal dislike of Lintorn-Orman (who he felt was too eccentric to lead the outfit) and his belief that the organisation lacked the momentum to make a real impact. After leaving he would continue to work with the organisation, as he had done with the BCL but slowly distance himself as he grew more disinterested and in general disillusioned with far-right politics. A point Arnold Leese would expound on declaring that a 'brawler like Joyce had no home among those stuffy aristocrats.'
After leaving the Legion, he would return to his post as a teacher though only briefly as by late 1927 he would be sacked from the position after an arrest following a pub fight. Due to his penchant for violence and oft-arrests, Joyce would take up various unskilled and odd jobs in between bouts of serial unemployment such as; street sweeping; a train fireman; night watchman duty; courier work and gardener. In 1928, Joyce would be re-approached by Arnold Leese, asking if he would rekindle his involvement with the far-right should Lintorn-Orman be replaced but he would rebuff these advances, having grown severely disillusioned with the movement. Joyce had grown to hold a particular antipathy to Leese as, while Joyce was nevertheless an ardent anti-Semite himself, he found Leese's 'fanatical obsession' with the 'Jewish Question' off-putting and a distraction from other politics.
Working as a hospital porter in London, Joyce would attend a PRP rally held by Oswald Mosely and be deeply impressed his charisma and oratory skills. Joyce officially joined the movement when an ex-associate from the far-right, Neil Francis Hawkins, provided him with a PRP pamphlet. Joyce declared that he was 'converted to Mosleyism that night' after reading it and quickly signed on. He joined the party in 1930 and became a volunteer organiser for its London branch. A gifted speaker, Joyce swiftly rose through the party to become a salaried member and Mosley confidant. He also gained the reputation of a savage brawler, with his violent rhetoric and willingness to physically confront anti-Mosley elements head-on playing no small part in his quick rise. While living in London, he would share a flat with John Angus Macnab, who he would also convince to join the PRP. The two men would become involved in the propaganda department under Wilfred 'Bill' Risdon while also growing close to John Beckett. Prior to the PRP's disbandment, his highest position would be that of Assistant Director of Public Communications (a largely powerless position) and be one of its most noted speakers beneath Mosley himself.
Radio Hijacking and Later Politics[]
In late 1931, Mosley sought to wind up the PRP and integrate it into the Labour Party proper under the name of the New Labour Association (NULA) to both further his own career and make a demonstration to boost his opposition to affiliated membership. Joyce opposed the move and wished for the PRP to organise as a separate party independent of the Labour Party orthodoxy, particularly as he found himself attracted to its syncretic ideology. Nevertheless when the merger went ahead, Joyce followed Mosley into the party but began to associate heavily with John Beckett. Both Mosley and Beckett had ambitions for the Maximist caucus to supplant the syndicalist orthodoxy in Labour, with it being agreed that it needed to grow a grass-roots movement to serve as a local backbone for their clique. Moreover, newly minted NULA Director of Propaganda Wilfred Risdon had quickly developed a strong dislike of the younger Joyce in the months he had worked underneath him in the PRP. To this end, Joyce was enlisted to serve as an unofficial 'delegate' in the regions of England.
By 1933, Joyce was still serving in this role and was now referred to as the 'Area Administrative Officer' for the Maximist apparatus in the 'Southeast Division', as he had moved to Worthing, West Sussex, and now ran a small electrical shop. Mosley and Beckett supported the endeavour and Joyce intended for West Sussex to become 'the central hub' of Maximist activity in the country, ranging from hosting Blackshirt summer camps to organising meetings and rallies, garden parties, etc. Despite his ambitions and Mosley sharing many speaking platforms with him, he was unable to make any real headway but did see the emergence of a small movement forming. Beckett convinced Mosley to focus on the more industrial North and the scheme was abandoned, though Joyce remained the highest Maximist official in the Southeast region outside of London.
By the next year, he had settled into a role of organiser and Maximist speaker under Mosley while still running his electrical shop, the only stable employment he had since his teaching career. Having taken an interest in radio and broadcasting, Joyce began experimenting with various wave ranges with the hopes of establishing a 'Maximist radio' station to further the cause of the movement. Instead, Joyce would find his hobby became more focused on developing radio jammers to combat the growing emerge of 'loyalist radio' that was penetrating British airwaves. Anti-Syndicalist pirate radio stations had existed since shortly after the revolution, either being based in Britain itself or close by, such as Ireland with the long-running Radio Caledonia. By the early 1930s, exile-groups in Europe had become sophisticated enough that they could afford to establish their own radio stations and the idea of propaganda radio broadcasts was employed by exile groups in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark though these were often only had the range to penetrate Southern England and France. By 1933, these had all largely been reorganised under CRGB leadership to become 'Radio Britannia', which could broadcast all the way up to the Midlands. Joyce had initially worked to jam Radio Britannia but in his experiments, had opted to take a different approach.
In November of 1934, Joyce himself took to the airwaves with a broadcasting equipment and hijacked Radio Britannia. By now, the station had become favoured among British exiles for its patriotic broadcasts, news of events in the former Empire and being a major English language station in Europe. Mid-way through a news bulletin, and for approximately 15 minutes, Joyce was able to breach the standard broadcast and declared that a new show was being ran, entitled 'Britain Calling'. For listeners tuning in nothing was initially out of place until in a sarcastic American accent, Joyce declared himself 'Lord Haw-Haw' and made various spoof predictions for 1935 such as the Kaiser abolishing the Germany monarchy and Ireland sinking into the ocean. Anglo-German engineers were able to reclaim the broadcast and stopped all broadcasts for the remaining night. Joyce readopted the Lord Haw-Haw moniker for a second (albeit far less successful) hijacking of Radio Luxembourg and finally for a one-time, 10-minute, experimental pirate radio broadcast. As he was operating against the BBC broadcast monopoly, and the government feared his antics could damage the reputation of the legitimate BBC World Service, his efforts were shut down. In part due to his sudden rise in notoriety, Joyce was appointed the new Deputy Director of Propaganda in NULA in January of 1935, giving him a seat on the organisation's Executive Committee and sizable influence over the overall messaging of the movement, a frustration to Director of Propaganda Risdon.