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The Execution of William Joyce

William Brooke Joyce, an American-born fascist and Nazi propaganda broadcaster during World War II, is hanged in Wandsworth Prison by Albert Pierrepoint on January 3, 1946, making him the last person to be executed for treason in the United Kingdom.

Joyce is born on April 24, 1906, in Brooklyn, New York, the eldest of three sons of Michael Joyce, an Irish Catholic from a family of tenant farmers in Ballinrobe, County Mayo, and his wife, Gertrude (née Brooke), who although born in Shaw and Crompton, Lancashire, is from a well-off Anglican Anglo-Irish family of physicians associated with County Roscommon. The Joyces return to Ireland in 1909. William, a precocious child, attends Coláiste Iognáid SJ, a Jesuit school in County Galway, from 1915 to 1921. At the age of fourteen, he abandons Catholicism for Anglicanism, apparently after being told that all non-Catholics, including his mother, would be damned. In adult life he is nominally anglican, though his adherence to Christianity is tenuous.

The Joyces are unionists and teach their children fervent imperialism. During the Irish War of Independence, Joyce openly associates with the Black and Tans and acts as a scout for them. An acquaintance claims that his views are so extreme even loyalists dislike him. On December 9, 1921, he flees to England to join the Worcestershire Regiment and is followed to England in 1923 by the rest of the family. When he enlists, he claims to be eighteen, but after he contracts rheumatic fever, his age is discovered, and he is discharged in March 1922. For a time, he studies mathematics and chemistry at Battersea Polytechnic Institute as a pre-medical student (1922–23), but he leaves of his own accord, with a reputation for laziness and violent political views. His studies in English and history at Birkbeck College are more successful. He is a brilliant linguist and mathematician and graduates BA with first-class honours in 1927. He publishes an academic article on philology and considers progressing to an MA. He later falsely claims that his research had been plagiarised by a Jewish academic. In 1932, he enrolls at King’s College, London, for a Ph.D. in educational psychology.

Joyce is disturbed by the difference between depressed post-war Britain and the imperial ideal that he had imbibed in Galway and is mocked for his outspoken patriotism and obvious Irishness. He identifies strongly with Thomas Carlyle, an earlier angry anti-liberal from the provinces. His life is marked by repeated episodes of hero worship, followed by disillusion and bitter denunciation. In 1923, he joins the British Fascists, an organisation that has a significant Irish loyalist membership, and in 1924 he allies himself with a militant splinter group, the National Fascists. Most British fascists see themselves as Tory auxiliaries, and they often provide a security presence at conservative meetings. On October 22, 1924, while stewarding a meeting addressed by a Jewish conservative candidate, he has his face slashed and is left with a prominent scar across his right cheek. He joins the Conservative Party in 1928 and is active in the Chelsea constituency until 1930, when he is forced out because of his eccentricities and sexual misbehaviour. On April 30, 1927, he marries Hazel Kathleen Barr. They have two daughters but separate in 1935, largely because of his infidelities, heavy drinking, and temper. The marriage is dissolved in 1937.

In November 1933, Joyce abandons his Ph.D. studies to work for Sir Oswald Mosley‘s British Union of Fascists (BUF). By early 1934 he has become its paid publicity director, traveling throughout Britain to organise meetings. He is a powerful, rabble-rousing speaker, driven by an instinctive awareness that vitriolic verbal abuse gives speaker and audience a sense of power and solidarity. MI5 sees him as a compelling, though deranged, personality. On February 8, 1937, he marries Margaret Cairns White, a BUF activist from Lancashire, with whom he had cohabited since 1936.

Joyce leads a BUF faction that favours a recruitment strategy based on uncompromising ideological assertion. This is challenged by populists who prioritise marches and displays and hold that indoctrination should follow membership. In February 1937, he is BUF candidate for the London County Council in Shoreditch. The party wins 14 per cent of the vote. In March 1937, he, along with many full-time BUF staff, are sacked when the BUF cuts expenses. But his dismissal also reflects Mosley’s awareness that his obsessive rhetoric repels “respectable” recruits and that he is no longer a biddable, slavish admirer of “the Leader.” He later falsely claims near-exclusive credit for the BUF’s escalating antisemitism, a view that Mosley eventually finds it convenient to adopt in order to evade his own responsibility.

In April 1937, Joyce founds the National Socialist League, helped by a wealthy patron. He supports himself as a private tutor, refusing to take Jewish pupils. He is active in various antisemitic and pro-Nazi groups such as the Right Club and engages in “peace” campaigns based on the view that British interests lay with Germany against Russia. Political marginalisation intensifies his admiration for Nazi Germany and hero worship of Adolf Hitler. By the time of the Munich crisis in 1938, he has decided that if war comes, he will go to Germany, though he also considers moving to Ireland. He renews his British passport for one-year terms in August 1938 and August 1939.

On August 26, 1939, Joyce and his wife leave London for Berlin. He is allegedly tipped off about his impending arrest and internment by an MI5 officer, to whom he had supplied information on communists. His siblings, whom he recruited into his fascist organisations, are variously penalised for his activities. At a loose end in Berlin, he is persuaded by a British associate to become a radio announcer with the English-language service of the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (RRG). He makes his first broadcast on September 6, 1939, and receives a contract in October. He finds in radio an outlet for his forceful style and delight in saying the unsayable, and in the early years of the war takes an exultant pride in recounting Nazi victories. His performances are admired by Joseph Goebbels, whom Joyce, to his regret, never meets. On September 26, 1940, he acquires German citizenship.

The novel experience of hearing the enemy in one’s own living room attracts wide audiences in Britain. Joyce’s practice of naming newly captured prisoners of war in his broadcasts is also a compelling motive for listening. In fact, he tries to recruit British prisoners of war as collaborators. The name “Lord Haw-Haw,” invented by the Daily Express radio critic in September 1939, initially applies to several English-language broadcasters but in time becomes associated with Joyce. He is initially a figure of fun, imitated by comedians, but there are sinister undercurrents of terrifying omnipotence, intensified by his sneering, gloating delivery and his delighted deployment of the “big lie” technique. It is widely believed that British-based fifth columnists supply him with information, that he predicts air raids, and shows minute local knowledge. In time, fear and his growing notoriety feed popular hatred of him in Britain, though his anti-British taunts allegedly win appreciative Irish audiences. He exults that he is daily committing treason and rendering himself liable to the death penalty.

In 1940, Joyce publishes a commissioned self-justifying propaganda work, Twilight over England. His representation of himself echoes that of Hitler in Mein Kampf – the provincial patriot, whose martial sacrifices are betrayed by corrupt elites, learning through poverty the hollowness of bourgeois patriotism and the need to synthesise socialism with nationalism. He shares with his hero a paranoid belief in his own ability to create an alternative reality through language and obstinacy. He dreams of becoming the English Führer.

In Berlin, the Joyces’ marriage comes under increasing strain, marked by drunken rows, domestic violence, and infidelity on both sides, though they retain a fierce mutual fascination. They divorce on August 12, 1941, but remarry on February 11, 1942, while continuing their previous behaviour. As the Axis powers begin to fail, his broadcasts become more defensive, focusing on the Soviet threat. On October 14, 1944, he is awarded the German War Merit Cross, first class. On October 22, he is sworn into the Volkssturm (territorial army) and begins drilling. The Joyces are evacuated from Berlin in March 1945, initially to Apen near the Dutch border and then to Hamburg, where he makes a last, drunken, defiant broadcast on April 30, 1945, the day of Hitler’s death. After an unsuccessful attempt to escape to Sweden, the Joyces hide at Flensburg near the Danish border. On May 28, 1945, he is shot and captured while gathering firewood.

Joyce is brought back to Britain on June 16 after Parliament passed legislation simplifying treason trial procedures. At his September 17-20 trial, he proves his American citizenship, but the court holds that his illegally acquired British passport incurred duties of allegiance. His appeals are rejected by the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords. His fate is influenced by British public opinion, and possibly by a desire to avoid antagonising the Soviet Union. In his death cell he blames the defeat of national socialism on German limitations. He also fantasises that he could have saved Hitler from his incompetent subordinates.

Joyce is hanged at Wandsworth Prison on January 3, 1946. Unlike most of his fellow Nazis, he proclaims to the end his allegiance to national socialism and hatred of Jews. He corresponds cheerfully with Margaret, joking evasively about the death camps and expressing a belief that his spirit will survive, watch over her, and continue his work. To neo-Nazis he becomes a martyr. Even among those to whom his activities had been repellent, a significant body of opinion holds he should not have been condemned on a questionable and innovative technicality. The historian A. J. P. Taylor maintains that Joyce was executed for making a false declaration to obtain a passport, a misdemeanour that normally incurs a £2 fine.

In 1976, Joyce is reinterred in Galway as it is feared that a grave in England might become a fascist shrine. Thomas Kilroy‘s play Double Cross (1986) juxtaposes Joyce and Brendan Bracken as Irishmen who reinvented themselves through fantasies of Britishness. The BBC Sound Archive has recordings of some of Joyce’s broadcasts and transcripts of others, collected during the war as evidence for a future treason trial.

(From: “Joyce, William Brooke (‘Lord Haw-Haw’)” by Patrick Maume, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Birth of Richard Chenevix Trench, Anglican Archbishop & Poet

Richard Chenevix Trench, Anglican archbishop and poet, is born in Dublin on September 9, 1807.

Trench is the son of Richard Trench (1774–1860), barrister-at-law, and the Dublin writer Melesina Chenevix (1768–1827). His elder brother is Francis Chenevix Trench. He is educated at Harrow School, and graduates from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1829. In 1830 he visits Spain. While incumbent of Curdridge Chapel near Bishop’s Waltham in Hampshire, he publishes The Story of Justin Martyr and Other Poems (1835), which is favourably received, and is followed by Sabbation, Honor Neale, and other Poems (1838), and Poems from Eastern Sources (1842). These volumes reveal the author as the most gifted of the immediate disciples of William Wordsworth, with a warmer colouring and more pronounced ecclesiastical sympathies than the master, and strong affinities to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, John Keble and Richard Monckton Milnes.

In 1841 Trench resigns his living to become curate to Samuel Wilberforce, then rector of Alverstoke, and upon Wilberforce’s promotion to the deanery of Westminster Abbey in 1845 he is presented to the rectory of Itchen Stoke. In 1845 and 1846 he preaches the Hulsean Lectures, and in the former year is made examining chaplain to Wilberforce, now Bishop of Oxford. He is shortly afterwards appointed to a theological chair at King’s College London.

Trench joins the Canterbury Association on March 27, 1848, on the same day as Samuel Wilberforce and Wilberforce’s brother Robert.

In 1851 Trench establishes his fame as a philologist by The Study of Words, originally delivered as lectures to the pupils of the Diocesan Training School, Winchester. His stated purpose is to demonstrate that in words, even taken singly, “there are boundless stores of moral and historic truth, and no less of passion and imagination laid up” — an argument which he supports by a number of apposite illustrations. It is followed by two little volumes of similar character — English Past and Present (1855) and A Select Glossary of English Words (1859). All have gone through numerous editions and have contributed much to promote the historical study of the English tongue. Another great service to English philology is rendered by his paper, read before the Philological Society, On some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries (1857), which gives the first impulse to the great Oxford English Dictionary. He envisages a totally new dictionary that is a “lexicon totius Anglicitatis.” As one of the three founders of the dictionary, he expresses his vision that it will be “an entirely new Dictionary; no patch upon old garments, but a new garment throughout.”

Trench’s advocacy of a revised translation of the New Testament (1858) helps promote another great national project. In 1856 he publishes a valuable essay on Pedro Calderón de la Barca, with a translation of a portion of Life is a Dream in the original metre. In 1841 he had published his Notes on the Parables of our Lord, and in 1846 his Notes on the Miracles, popular works which are treasuries of erudite and acute illustration.

In 1856 Trench becomes Dean of Westminster Abbey, a position which suits him. Here he introduces evening nave services. In January 1864 he is advanced to the post of Archbishop of Dublin. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley had been first choice, but is rejected by the Church of Ireland, and, according to Bishop Wilberforce’s correspondence, Trench’s appointment is favoured neither by the Prime Minister nor the Lord Lieutenant. It is, moreover, unpopular in Ireland, and a blow to English literature, yet it turns out to be fortunate. He cannot prevent the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, though he resists with dignity. But, when the disestablished communion has to be reconstituted under the greatest difficulties, it is important that the occupant of his position should be a man of a liberal and genial spirit.

This is the work of the remainder of Trench’s life. It exposes him at times to considerable abuse, but he comes to be appreciated and, when he resigns his archbishopric because of poor health in November 1884, clergy and laity unanimously record their sense of his “wisdom, learning, diligence, and munificence.” He finds time for Lectures on Medieval Church History (1878), and his poetical works are rearranged and collected in two volumes (last edition, 1885). He dies at Eaton Square, London, on March 28, 1886, after a lingering illness. He is buried at Westminster Abbey.

George W. E. Russell describes Trench as “a man of singularly vague and dreamy habits” and recounts the following anecdote of his old age:

“He once went back to pay a visit to his successor, Lord Plunket. Finding himself back again in his old palace, sitting at his old dinner-table, and gazing across it at his wife, he lapsed in memory to the days when he was master of the house, and gently remarked to Mrs. Trench, ‘I am afraid, my love, that we must put this cook down among our failures.'”


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Birth of The Reverend Edward Hincks

edward-hincks

The Reverend Edward Hincks, Anglo-Irish clergyman best remembered as an Assyriologist and one of the decipherers of Mesopotamian cuneiform, is born in Cork, County Cork on August 19, 1792. He is one of the three men known as the “holy trinity of cuneiform,” with Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson and Jules Oppert.

Hincks is the eldest son of the Rev. Thomas Dix Hincks, a distinguished Protestant minister, orientalist and naturalist. He is an elder brother of Sir Francis Hincks, a prominent Canadian politician who is also sometime Governor of Barbados, and William Hincks, the first Professor of Natural History at Queen’s College, Cork and afterwards University College, Toronto.

Hincks is educated at home by his father and at Midleton College before entering Trinity College Dublin. He is elected a Scholar of the College in 1810, and in 1812 wins the Gold Medal and Bishop Law‘s Prize for Mathematics. He is elected a Fellow of the College in 1813 and four years later takes his M.A. In 1819, following the death of Thomas Meredith, he is presented to the Rectory of Ardtrea in County Tyrone. Though Ardtrea is a valuable and highly prized Rectory, it is also isolated for a young bachelor, and he resigns the position in 1826, taking up the Rectory in nearby Killyleagh, County Down, an office he holds for the remainder of his life.

The undemanding nature of his clerical duties leave him with more than enough time to pursue his interest in ancient languages. His first love is for the hieroglyphic writing of ancient Egypt. His greatest achievement is the decipherment of the ancient language and writing of Babylon and Assyria: Akkadian cuneiform.

Hincks deduces correctly that cuneiform writing had been invented by one of the earliest civilisations of Mesopotamia, who then bequeathed it to later states such as Babylon, Assyria and Elam. In 1848 he is awarded the Cunningham Medal of the Royal Irish Academy for his achievements.

By 1850 Hincks comes to a number of important conclusions regarding the nature of Assyro-Babylonian cuneiform. He also discovers that cuneiform characters are “polyphonic,” by which he means that a single sign can have several different readings depending on the context in which it occurs. However, not everyone is convinced by the claims being made by the Irishman and his distinguished colleagues. Some philologists even suggest that they are simply inventing multiple readings of the signs to suit their own translations.

In 1857 the versatile English Orientalist William Henry Fox Talbot suggests that an undeciphered cuneiform text be given to several different Assyriologists to translate. If, working independently of one another, they come up with reasonably similar translations, it will surely dispel the doubts surrounding their claims.

As it happens, Talbot, Hincks, Rawlinson and Oppert, are in London in 1857. Edwin Norris, secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, gives each of them a copy of a recently discovered inscription from the reign of the Assyrian emperor Tiglath-Pileser I. A jury of experts is impaneled to examine the resulting translations and assess their accuracy.

In all essential points the translations produced by the four scholars are found to be in close agreement with one another. There are of course some slight discrepancies. The inexperienced Talbot makes a number of mistakes, and Oppert’s translation contains a few doubtful passages due to his unfamiliarity with the English language. But Hincks’ and Rawlinson’s versions are virtually identical. The jury declares itself satisfied, and the decipherment of cuneiform is adjudged a fait accompli.

Hincks devotes the remaining years of his life to the study of cuneiform and makes further significant contributions to its decipherment. He dies at his rectory in Killyleagh on December 3, 1866, at the age of 74. He is survived by a wife and four daughters.


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Birth of Kuno Meyer, Scholar of Celtic Philology

kuno-meyer

Kuno Meyer, German scholar distinguished in the field of Celtic philology and literature, is born in Hamburg, Germany on December 20, 1858. He was considered first and foremost a lexicographer among Celtic scholars but is known by the general public in Ireland rather as the man who introduced them to Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry (1911). His brother was the distinguished classical scholar, Eduard Meyer.

Meyer studies in Hamburg at the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums. He spends two years in Edinburgh, Scotland, as a teenager (1874–1876) learning English. From 1879, he attends Leipzig University, where he is taught Celtic scholarship by Ernst Windisch. He receives his doctorate for his thesis Eine irische Version der Alexandersage, an Irish version of the Romance of Alexander, in 1884.

Meyer then takes up the post of lecturer in Teutonic languages at the new University College, Liverpool, the precursor of the University of Liverpool, which is established three years earlier.

Meyer continues to publish on Old Irish and more general topics on the Celtic languages, as well as producing textbooks for German. In 1896, he founds and edits, jointly with Ludwig Christian Stern, the prestigious Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie. He also cofounds Archiv für celtische Lexicographie in 1898 with Whitley Stokes, producing three volumes from 1900 to 1907.

In 1903, Meyer founds the School of Irish Learning in Dublin, and the next year creates its journal Ériu of which he is the editor. Also in 1904, he becomes Todd Professor in the Celtic Languages at the Royal Irish Academy. In October 1911, he follows Heinrich Zimmer as Professor of Celtic Philology at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. The following year, a volume of Miscellany is presented to him by pupils and friends in honour of his election, and he is made a freeman of both Dublin and Cork.

At the outbreak of World War I, Meyer leaves Europe for the United States, where he lectures at Columbia University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and elsewhere. A pro-German speech he gives in December 1914 to Clan na Gael on Long Island causes outrage in Britain and some factions among the Irish, and as a result, he is removed from the roll of freemen in Dublin and Cork and from his Honorary Professorship of Celtic at Liverpool. He also resigns as Director of the School of Irish Learning and editor of Ériu. Harvard University also had extended an invitation to Meyer to lecture on campus, but it subsequently cancels the invitation in the fall of 1914 on account of Meyer’s propagandist activity.

Meyer nevertheless accepts candidacy for the post of exchange professor at Harvard, at the recommendation of German professors there. However, when the April 1915 issue of The Harvard Advocate awards first prize to an anti-German satirical poem “Gott mit Uns” written by an undergraduate, Meyer sends the university and the press a letter of protest, rebuking the faculty members who served as judges for failure to exercise neutrality. Meyer also declines his candidacy from the exchange professorship in the letter. In a reply, President Abbott Lawrence Lowell says, in explaining Harvard’s policy, that freedom of speech includes pro-German and pro-Allied voices alike.

Meyer is injured in a railway collision in 1915 and meets 27-year-old Florence Lewis while he is recovering in a California hospital. They marry shortly afterwards. He returns to Germany in 1917 and dies in Leipzig on October 11, 1919.

Posthumously, in 1920, Meyer’s name is restored, both by Dublin and Cork, in their Rolls of Honorary Freemen. The restoration occurs on April 19, 1920, in Dublin, where Sinn Féin had won control of the City Council three months earlier, rescinding the decision taken in 1915 by the Irish Parliamentary Party. The restoration in Cork follows on May 14, 1920.


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Death of Philologist Eugene O’Curry

eugene-ocurryEugene O’Curry, philologist and antiquary, dies of a heart attack in Dublin on July 30, 1862.

O’Curry is born at Doonaha, near Carrigaholt, County Clare, the son of Eoghan Ó Comhraí, a farmer, and his wife Cáit. Eoghan has spent some time as a traveling peddler and has developed an interest in Irish folklore and music. Unusual for someone of his background, he is literate and is known to possess a number of Irish manuscripts. It is likely that Eoghan is primarily responsible for his son’s education.

Having spent some years working on his father’s farm and as a school teacher, O’Curry moves to Limerick in 1824 and spends seven years working there at a psychiatric hospital. He marries Anne Broughton, daughter of John Broughton of Killaderry near Broadford, County Limerick on October 3, 1824. He is a supporter of Catholic emancipation and in 1828 writes a poem congratulating Daniel O’Connell on his election as an MP.

During this period O’Curry is establishing a reputation for his knowledge of the Irish language and Irish history, and, by 1834, is in correspondence with the antiquary John O’Donovan. He is employed, from 1835 to 1842, on O’Donovan’s recommendation, in the topographical and historical section of Ordnance Survey Ireland. O’Donovan goes on to marry O’Curry’s sister-in-law, Mary Anne Broughton, in 1840. O’Curry spends much of the remainder of his life in Dublin and earns his living by translating and copying Irish manuscripts. The catalogue of Irish manuscripts in the British Museum (1849) is compiled by him for a fee of £100. He is responsible for the transcripts of Irish manuscripts from which O’Donovan edits the Annals of the Four Masters between 1848 and 1851.

In 1851 O’Curry is elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy and, on the founding of the Catholic University of Ireland in 1854, he is appointed professor of Irish history and archaeology. He works with George Petrie on the Ancient Music of Ireland (1855). In 1852, he and O’Donovan propose the Dictionary of the Irish Language, which is eventually begun by the Royal Irish Academy in 1913 and finally completed in 1976.

O’Curry’s lectures are published by the university in 1860, and give a better knowledge of Irish medieval literature than can be obtained from any other one source. Three other volumes of lectures are published posthumously, under the title On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (1873). His voluminous transcripts, notably eight huge volumes of early Irish law, testify to his unremitting industry. The Celtic Society, of the council of which he is a member, publishes two of his translations of medieval tales.

Eugene O’Curry dies of a heart attack at his home in Dublin on July 30, 1862, and is survived by two sons and two daughters. He is buried at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin. O’Curry Road in the Tenters area of Dublin 8 is named in his honour.