Ex-Husband Found?

Lord Haw-Haw, the humbug of Hamburg,

The life of the town, full of fun;

But still, in the winter, he's rather pathetic,

He's frozen to death, for his pants are synthetic.

Lord Haw-Haw, the humbug of Hamburg,

The hee-hawing, high-browing Hun.

Lord Haw-Haw, the mysterious Nazi propagandist with the frozen British accent, has had more than his share of 1940 Mother Goose. When British aircraft flew over Germany one night last week, Nazi transmitters (including Lord Haw-Haw's station at Hamburg) blanked out as usual so that their waves could not be used for directional purposes by the invaders. A BBC funster gibed: "He shouts with rage and screams with fear, but pipes down when our planes are near."

No one has yet accused the Royal Air Force of undertaking its German night flights to attack its No. 1 propaganda problem, but one British woman did write that she thought the R. A. F. might time its forays so as not to silence Lord Haw-Haw. Lord Haw-Haw's nightly talks are a "must" on some 50% of Great Britain's 9,000,000 licensed radio sets. He disparages British war aims, takes precise potshots at slum conditions, colonial policies, commiserates with war-discomforted Britons at home. As the Socialist Forward recently warned: "He blandly takes the British public by the ear and turns its startled gaze on the examples of incompetence and even criminal injustice of our politicians," singling out facts which "a smug press has succeeded in keeping out of the headlines."

Actually, Lord Haw-Haw is no better informed than any one of several other English speakers on the German radio. The difference is that he has been ridiculed to fame. The Daily Express's Jonah Barrington dubbed him Haw-Haw last September. BBC comics lost no time ribbing him in rhyme. He became a character in a revue, was impersonated at Mayfair affairs. Trying to figure out his real identity became a national British pastime. He was spotted as (among others): 1) a German professor who once preached Naziism in Scotland; 2) Norman Baillie-Stewart, famed ex-Seaforth Highlander once clapped in the Tower of London for betraying military secrets (and now thought to be Scotty, propagandist and master of ceremonies on the twice-weekly Cabaret in English on the Nazi radio); 3) Henry William Wicks, onetime London insurance man now living in Germany with his Nazi-minded wife. Listeners got into learned dispute over his accent. It was aristocratic, public-school, phony. Novelist Rose Macaulay pronounced it "a slight provincial accent (Manchester?)."

Last week it appeared that all guesses were wild. Lord Haw-Haw, according to the latest (and only official) identification, was born in the U. S. As the latest story goes, the Sunday Pictorial last December interviewed a woman in the tiny village of Waldron, Sussex. She was sure Lord Haw-Haw was her ex-husband, William Joyce. To make doubly sure, she tuned him in one night when her small daughters were in the room. The eldest child paled. "That's W. J., isn't it?" she asked.

If Haw-Haw was, indeed, W. J., his was a once-familiar voice in Britain. Though Joyce was born in the U. S., of an Irish father and a Yorkshire mother, he was taken to England as a boy. He went to London University, was a star language student, tutored for some years, took up with Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists in 1933. He became Mosley's speechifying director of propaganda. In 1937, he was kicked out, formed Britain's National Socialist League. As a memento of one Fascist brawl in Great Britain, Joyce carries the scar of a razor slash from mouth to right ear. The British Catholic Herald, after considerable inquiry among Joyce's former associates, stated flatly: "Lord Haw-Haw is William Joyce." The Herald further reported that Joyce had been brought up a Catholic, but that he has since been "entirely dominated by his anti-Semitic passion."

An effective way to de-monocle Lord Haw-Haw for his British following would be to make him out a foreign-born, low-degree scamp like Joyce. Last week British officials, presumably after investigation of their own, assured the press that Joyce was, indeed, the man. At week's end His Lordship had not acknowledged the identification.

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