41 Facts About William Joyce

William Joyce was hanged in Wandsworth Prison by Albert Pierrepoint on 3 January 1946, making him the last person to be executed for treason in the United Kingdom.

William Brooke Joyce was born on Herkimer Street in Brooklyn, New York, United States.

William Joyce's father was Michael Francis Joyce, an Irish Catholic from a family of tenant farmers in Ballinrobe, County Mayo, who had acquired US citizenship in 1894.

William Joyce's mother was Gertrude Emily Brooke, who although born in Shaw and Crompton, Lancashire, was from a well-off Anglican Anglo-Irish family of physicians associated with County Roscommon.

William Joyce attended Colaiste Iognaid, a Jesuit school in County Galway, from 1915 to 1921.

William Joyce's parents were unionist and hostile to Irish republicanism, and his mother was a devout Protestant.

William Joyce's father purchased several houses, and rented some to members of the Royal Irish Constabulary.

However, William Joyce was discharged a few months later when it was discovered that he was underage.

William Joyce remained in England and briefly attended King's College School, Wimbledon.

William Joyce's family followed him to England two years later.

William Joyce had relatives in Birkenhead, Merseyside, whom he visited on a few occasions.

William Joyce then applied to Birkbeck College, London, where he entered the Officer Training Corps.

William Joyce developed an interest in fascism and worked with, but never joined, the British Fascists of Rotha Lintorn-Orman.

On 22 October 1924, while stewarding a meeting in support of Conservative Party candidate Jack Lazarus ahead of the 1924 general election, William Joyce was attacked by communists and received a deep razor slash across his right cheek.

In 1932 William Joyce joined the British Union of Fascists under Sir Oswald Mosley and swiftly became a leading speaker, praised for the power of his oratory.

In 1934 William Joyce was promoted to be the BUF's Director of Propaganda, replacing Wilfred Risdon, and later appointed deputy leader.

William Joyce was instrumental in changing the name of the BUF to "British Union of Fascists and National Socialists" in 1936 and stood as a party candidate in the 1937 elections to the London County Council.

In 1936, William Joyce lived for a year in Whitstable, where he owned a radio and electrical shop.

Between April 1934 and 1937, when Mosley sacked him, William Joyce served as Area Administrative Officer for the BUF West Sussex division.

William Joyce was supported in the role by Norah Elam as Sussex Women's Organiser, with her partner Dudley Elam, the son of an Irish nationalist, taking on the role of Sub-Branch Officer for Worthing.

Elam shared many speaking platforms with William Joyce and worked on propaganda speeches for him.

One particular sore point for William Joyce was the Government of India Bill, passed in 1935, designed to give a measure of autonomy to India, allowing freedom and the development of limited self-government.

William Joyce harboured a desire to become Viceroy of India should Mosley ever head a BUF government, and is recorded as describing the backers of the bill as "feeble" and "one loathsome, foetid, purulent, tumid mass of hypocrisy, hiding behind Jewish Dictators".

William Joyce was sacked from his paid position when Mosley drastically reduced the BUF staff shortly after the 1937 elections, after which William Joyce promptly formed a breakaway organisation, the National Socialist League.

In later life, Elam reported that, although she disliked William Joyce, she believed that his execution by the British in 1946 was wrong, stating that he should not have been regarded as a traitor to England because he was not English, but Irish.

William Joyce had been tipped off that the British authorities intended to detain him under Defence Regulation 18B.

When William Joyce became the most prominent broadcaster of Nazi propaganda by the end of 1939, the name stuck to him.

Joyce himself began to trade on the notoriety of the nickname more than a year later, on 3 April 1941, when he announced himself as "William Joyce, otherwise known as Lord Haw-Haw".

At the height of his influence, in 1940, William Joyce had an estimated six million regular and 18 million occasional listeners in the UK.

William Joyce recorded his final broadcast on 30 April 1945, during the Battle of Berlin.

William Joyce signed off with a final defiant, "Heil Hitler and farewell".

Besides broadcasting, William Joyce's duties included writing propaganda for distribution among British prisoners of war, whom he tried to recruit into the British Free Corps of the Waffen-SS.

William Joyce wrote a book Twilight Over England promoted by the German Ministry of Propaganda, which unfavourably compared the evils of allegedly Jewish-dominated capitalist Britain with the alleged wonders of Nazi Germany.

On 28 May 1945, William Joyce was captured by British forces at Flensburg, near the German border with Denmark, which was the last capital of the Third Reich.

William Joyce was then taken to London and tried at the Old Bailey on three counts of high treason:.

Inquiries in the US, adduced in evidence at his trial, found that William Joyce had never been a British subject, and it seemed that he would have to be acquitted based upon a lack of jurisdiction; he could not be convicted of betraying a country that was not his own.

Lord Porter's dissenting opinion assumed that the question as to whether William Joyce's duty of allegiance had terminated was a question of fact for the jury to decide, rather than a purely legal question for the judge.

William Joyce argued that jurisdiction had been wrongly assumed by the court in electing to try an alien for offences committed in a foreign country.

William Joyce was executed on 3 January 1946 at Wandsworth Prison, aged 39.

William Joyce was the penultimate person hanged for a crime other than murder in the UK.

William Joyce had two daughters with his first wife, Hazel, who later married Oswald Mosley's bodyguard, Eric Piercey.