For those who can hark back to their experience of the Second World War with a sense of reminiscence, one figure who probably comes to mind is none other than William Joyce (1906-46) – otherwise known as Lord Haw-Haw – the aristocratic-sounding Nazi broadcaster, whose anti-British transmissions on the wireless placed fear into the unassuming listener.

Ranking alongside Germany’s documented figures of the 1939-45 conflict, such as leader Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) and Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945) – at least for notoriety – Joyce takes his place in martial history merely for skillfully teasing and placing fear into an agitated and anxious British population, as well as for making it known that Germany’s military intelligence was perhaps more knowledgeable about British and ally manoeuvres than what was initially surmised by Whitehall defence chiefs.

Born in Brooklyn, New York City, of Irish descent, William Joyce resided in Ireland as a youngster and, in 1922, immigrated to England with his family. By the early 1930s, he was a member of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, and soon after secured a British passport by deceptively claiming to have been born in Galway, on the west coast of Ireland. The entire island of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom from 1801–1921, so the fabrication that he was born in the ‘Emerald Isle’ was clearly a shrewd feat by the articulate Joyce.

Following his shock expulsion from Mosley’s political party in 1937, Joyce founded his own zealous British National Socialist political grouping and subsequently fled to Germany before the Second World War was set in motion in September 1939.

However, Joyce’s legacy would soon enough be cemented when he metamorphosed into Germany’s chief radio propagandist, broadcasting from September 1939 to April 1945 against the United Kingdom and its allies from ‘Radio Hamburg,’ gaining the nickname Lord Haw-Haw, on account of his pompous drawling accent.

He was captured by the British at Flensburg, tried at London’s Old Bailey in 1945, and afterwards put to death. His exoneration was his United States birth, but his UK passport, valid until July 1940, lawfully established nine months of treason.

Only Haw-Haw could be undoubtedly ranked alongside Hitler’s closest sidekick Joseph Goebbels as a proficient propagandist. Goebbels was well-versed in stage management and misinformation. As Editor of the Nazi pamphlet Voelkische Freibeit and Germany’s ‘Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda,’ Goebbels, like Lord Haw-Haw, had a profound gift for public speaking, which made him a tremendously powerful advocate of the more extremist aspects of the Nazi philosophy and its crusade for domination.

Yet Northern Ireland – like England, Scotland and Wales – didn’t escape the persistent focus of Haw-Haw. He repeatedly enlightened the province’s mainly loyal population that they too would undergo the wrath of Germany’s military energy. And so, for the bulk of Ulster folks, his prophesying became a regular feature for the duration of the war. Here are the remarkable accounts of three County Antrim women who can recall Haw-Haw’s broadcasts with much lucidity.

North Belfast women, Nuala Hamilton (née Kane), was only a mere seven-year-old child when the hostilities began in 1939. She resided near the Waterworks on the Antrim Road. She can remember the regular broadcasts from the Nazi sympathiser. Here is her anecdote on Haw-Haw:

“Well I can remember listening to Lord Haw-Haw on my radio as a child and not really understanding about all the propaganda they use to talk about. And the one thing that I can always remember is him saying the coup the Germans got sinking the Ark Royal. And it turned out that it was actually down at the shipyard getting a refit at the time. So again, that was Lord Haw-Haw’s propaganda. Again, now, as a child I wasn’t sure what the Ark Royal, the Yard, or anything was. As I grew older I of course realised what it was all about.”

Isobel McCartney’s experience was equally interesting. She grew-up on Belfast’s working-class Shankill Road, in the west of the city:

“We always gathered at night to listen to Lord Haw-Haw because he foretold when the raids were coming. He made joke of us. You know, ‘the last one was bad but the next one was going to be worse.’ But we had to listen to find out. But there was always a raid when he said there was going to be raid. If it was going to be the Belfast ship yard that night or Mackie’s, Shorts aircraft factory or Ewarts mills. And he always gave the names of where the bombs were going to land.

But we were prepared. But we did heed him. We did heed him. And we went round telling everybody about Lord Haw-Haw that so-in-so was going to get it tonight. And sure enough they did. He always told it in a joke, in rhyme. He always made a rhyme about it. But we knew what he was getting at. We knew where the bombs were coming to,” she said.

Isobel O’Dowd (née McDowell) lived with her family close to the industrious village of Whiteabbey, on the northern shoreline of Belfast Lough, during the war spell. Although only 5 years-old at what time Britain declared war on Germany, Isobel can bring to mind her thoughts on the infamous genteel-sounding media manipulator, even reminiscing about her family’s chosen medium that picked up his infamous transmissions.

She said: “You had what was called an accumulator. And you had what was a battery, a dry deck, as it was called. And the accumulator had to be topped up each week when you took it to the local garage and paid six pence and they topped it up. It was like a tall glass battery and it had a sort of little metal handle that you could actually carry it with. That was one of my chores. My brother done it one Friday night and I did it the next Friday. I had to go down to Sammy Logan’s garage that was at the bottom of Station Road and get the accumulator topped up.

And I can remember at night you got the ‘doom, doom, doom Germany Calling – Lord Haw-Haw.’ My mother used to sit seized. He was always saying what was going to happen to us. And I remember Hitler saying that he was going to give us a rude Easter egg, and this was before Easter, and then we had that raid on Easter Tuesday evening. The next raid on Belfast was mostly south Belfast, to be quite honest. I remember this really red glow in the sky with the distant sound of explosions. It was really a distance from the first two raids from us.”

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