He speaks English of the haw-haw damit-get-out-of-my-way variety, and his strong suit is gentlemanly indignation.’Four days later, Barrington expanded on this: ‘Jonah Barrington listening at the “Daily Express” short wave station in Surrey to the war on radio, introduces “Lord Haw Haw” . . . from his accent and personality I imagine him with a receding chin, a questing nose, thin yellow hair brushed back, a vacant eye, a gardenia in his button hole. Rather like P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster.’In Berlin on that same day, thirty-three-year-old William Joyce received a contract as a newsreader on the German Radio Corporation. Anybody less like Bertie Wooster would be hard to imagine, but in the weeks to come, by a ‘single-minded determination, ruthless ambition and sheer application’, Joyce became “Lord Haw Haw”: the English Voice of Germany’.Joyce had been born in New York on 24 April 1906 to naturalised American citizens. In 1909, the Joyce family returned to their native Ireland.
