Hanged on a legal quibble

Who killed Lord Haw-Haw? It was I, said Hartley Shawcross. I was the attorney general who led his prosecution personally under the Treason Act, even though my constitutional expert advised me that we did not have a case in law, and one of my predecessors in office had confessed himself ‘incredulous’ at its being brought at all against someone who was not, and had never been, a British subject.

It was I, said Frederick Tucker. I was the high court judge who heard the case even though six years earlier I had described the accused as ‘a traitor’, and should thus have considered myself ineligible. It was I who, instead of leaving it to the jury to decide, in the course of it ruled that the possession of a British passport in itself brought allegiance to the Crown. I did this even though it was known that the accused had lied to obtain it, an act for which the maximum penalty at the time was £2.

So what was the offence of William Joyce, called Lord Haw-Haw, this American-born German citizen and graduate of Birkbeck College, that brought him to a British gallows? In the 1930s he had been a London street fighter and fascist, but there were many such, the Daily Mail trilling in 1934, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts.’ He had also been an Eng. Lit. lecturer, and, like many another, had seduced one of his students (though she was only 16, and looked alarmingly like the young Margaret Thatcher).

But then in the early 1940s Joyce had discovered another talent, this time as a broadcaster. He proved such a success at this that the BBC, which had been relying on 10 daily hours of organ music by a Scotsman, had to rejig its schedules to compete. They brought on George Formby and Vera Lynn against a man who was attracting nine million listeners, two thirds of its potential audience.