Madam, – Joe Joyce’s reminiscences of Bertie Smyllie’s Irishman’s Diary of June 23rd 1945, (“Why Lord Haw Haw deserved a peerage”, June 23rd) inadvertently referred to William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) as “Liam from Galway”.
Joyce was born in Brooklyn, New York City in 1906. The family came to Galway some years later where the young Joyce was educated. As staunch unionists and Black and Tan informers, the Joyces were forced out of Ireland by the IRA and went to England where William Joyce joined Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists as director of propaganda.
In 1939 Joyce and his wife Margaret fled to Germany and in 1940 he became a naturalised German.
Joyce was executed in London in 1946 for treason and died unrepentant.
In 1976, controversially, his body was exhumed and re-interred in Bohermore County Galway. – Yours, etc,