Part One: Lord Haw-Haw: Hitler's Favorite Anglo Propagandist

Robert sits down with Pádraig O Ruairc to learn about a bastard from across the pond who threw his lot in with Hitler during WW2. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. And folks, on a normal week, basically every other week of the year, I read a story about a terrible person that I have researched and written and spent a lot of time on to one of our guests, who is generally a comedian, or an academic, or somebody who we thought would be fun to horrify for roughly two to three hours. This week, we're doing a little bit of a different thing. For one thing, my producer Sophie is not here, as she is currently engaged in moving, and that's a whole nightmarish hell. And the other thing that's different, the biggest thing that's different, is that this is going to be a

• 0:47Robert Evans?

  reverse Behind the Bastards, where a guest is going to read me a story that they have written, based on research they've done from a piece of shit in history. And I'd like to welcome a guest, well, the guest host to this episode, someone that you will have seen on It Could Happen Here, if you're a regular listener of that podcast, Patrick O'Rourke. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for coming on and for doing the hard work of making an episode for me this week.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  No problem. Thanks for having me. And Jesus, yeah, it took, like, just finding the time to write these things. Like, I think we discussed this idea first in, like, February, March, but I only just got it finished.

• 1:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you can, we were connected through our mutual friend Jake Hanrahan, and you came on the show to talk about the Irish far-right on It Could Happen Here, which was a great episode. And yeah, you pitched around that same time, this, and it's obviously, like, it's my whole job. So I do, I can, I find the time to do it every week. I have to. When it's like a side thing you're doing, it takes a long time to write 10,000 words about a shitty person.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  I still have to turn up to work for my, my government paymasters. But yeah, there you go.

• 1:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Well, who are we learning about this week?

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Uh, well, Roberts, as you know, the original plan for this episode was to cover Andrew Windsor, or as he's now known, the alleged rapist formerly known as Prince.

• 2:05Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  But seeing as how women who annoyed the British monarchy occasionally die in suspicious traffic accidents, we would have been putting Sophie's life in danger, and that is why she has gone into hiding.

• 2:16Robert Evans?

  Uh huh. That's right. Yes, to protect her from the British royal family.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  And as, as we all know, there's nothing the British royal family and its armed forces love doing more than murdering Irishmen. So my next was underlying two, and I thought, I thought it would be safer if we covered a dead bastard instead of Andrew Saxon Coburn. But we will, of course, you'll get around to Prince Andrew someday. Anyway, Roberts.

• 2:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he is, he is on the list, especially with all this juicy new Epstein stuff that's leaked.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Oh, I totally believe him. He's innocent of everything. Um, so Roberts, I know you've heard of this guy because you mentioned him before on a previous podcast, but I was wondering how much do you know or can you recall about William Joyce?

• 3:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you're talking about Lord Ha Ha, right? That is, is the name he's probably better, certainly better known to Americans by. Um, I read about him for the first time in like one of the first World War II history books I read when I was in May, probably couldn't have been much further than fifth or sixth grade. And it was, it was, there was a chapter that talked about him and it talked about, there was kind of a, a woman in Japan who was sort of the Japanese equivalent of these like radio, like pro fascist radio stars who would tell allied soldiers, basically, you're all gonna get killed over here, you know, disobey your orders, whatnot, like it's hopeless to try to fight us, that sort of thing. So that's, that's kind of my, it's a very surface level knowledge of the guy. I'm aware that he was like the British equivalent of, and I'm spacing on the name of the, of, I think

• 3:48Robert Evans?

  of the, the, the woman based in Tokyo who was doing the same thing over in the Pacific Theater. But yeah, that's, that's what I know about him.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  That's, that's the guy. Well, this guy has fascinating backstory, terrible personal life, and I think he's great A bastard material.

• 4:06Speaker 02

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• 5:43Speaker 01

  So look, we'll jump into it. William Joyce was born, well, fuck Roberts, we're off to a bad start here because no one knows for certain when or where this asshole was born.

• 5:53Robert Evans?

  I love those ones.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. We do know who his parents were, though. William Joyce was the eldest son of Michael Joyce from Mayo in the west of Ireland and an Englishwoman named Gertrude Brooke, but who was better known as Queenie.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Michael Joyce, unlike most Irish immigrants to the USA in the late 1800s, was not a starving peasant. He came from a wealthy farming family and he had gone to America to seek his fortune rather than evade starvation. In the 1880s, he established a successful construction company in Brooklyn and he had enough money to make frequent trips back home to Ireland.

• 6:30Robert Evans?

  Oh, wow. That is a very rare situation for somebody who moves from Ireland to the US in the 1800s.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  He's doing well. So on one such trip to Galway, he meets and falls in love with Gertrude or Queenie. So true love blossomed, but there were two small problems, racism and religious bigotry, because back then the Irish were still considered primeval savages by the English establishment. James Flute, professor of history at Oxford, declared that the Irish were, quote, "more like squalid apes than human beings."

• 7:06Robert Evans?

  That's a good British.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  I lived there for a while. I could I could kind of do the upper class one and the working class, but nothing in between. Anyway, another English academic, John Bedeau, held that the racial inferiority of the Irish made us genetically inclined to criminality, which was evident by studying the skulls and phrenology of Irish.

• 7:28Robert Evans?

  That sounds scientific. Sure.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Who had, who had, quote, "a negro appearance."

• 7:35Robert Evans?

  Oh, boy.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:36Robert Evans?

  Oh, wow.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. There's still institutions in Ireland where they have the heads of like Gaelic speakers, the skulls, and we've given back like the Pacific Islanders, but they're kind of like, no, we're holding on to the Irish ones. So some of them have only just come back. But anyway, further complicating matters for these Star Cross lovers, apart from the different nationalities, was the fact that Michael Joyce was a Catholic whilst his fiance was Protestant. Now, such mixed marriages were controversial at the time, though nobody in Ireland today, well, in southern Ireland at least, gives a shit about it. So, Michael and Gertrude's engagement was so controversial that her parents refused to attend their nineteen oh five New York wedding.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Instead, Queenie's parents sent her brother Gilbert, a lawyer, to the ceremony to quote, "See that the thing was done right." Now, there have been many biographies of Joyce, but the best is probably by Colin Holmes, an English academic, who suggests that Joyce was born out of wedlock two years before the marriage, and that is the reason why her family only sent one person to the wedding, who was a lawyer.

• 8:42Robert Evans?

  Wow, wow, that's such a bitchy move.

• 8:47Robert Evans?

  Just sending your lawyer to their.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  And he's a family member as well, so they don't even have to pay him. Anyway, so throughout his life, Joyce repeatedly claimed to be born in different years and in different places, probably.

• 9:01Robert Evans?

  Sure, ah, classic bastard, yeah.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, William Joyce was born sometime between nineteen oh three and nineteen oh six in either America or Ireland. As a boy, he was baptized in his father's religion of Catholicism. William Joyce's mother wanted to name him William Brooke Joyce, following in the Protestant Irish tradition of co-joining both parents' surnames, but Joyce's Catholic father forbid it because, like his son, he was a gigantic asshole. In nineteen thirteen, Michael Joyce used his American wealth to buy a pub in his home place of Mayo, but the business failed after Michael Joyce killed one of his best customers. One of his regulars got really drunk one night, and Michael, instead of looking after

• 9:48Speaker 01

  him, simply threw him out of the pub when he ran out of money. This man's body was found lying against the pub wall the next morning.

• 9:55Robert Evans?

  Jesus.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, he had died of hypothermia whilst sheltering against the gable end of the building, trying to get shelter from the wind and the rain. This resulted in all the locals successfully boycotting the bar and the Joyce's were forced to sell it.

• 10:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, like a really good bar keeper here today who knows their locals, who like wait till the end of their shift and will actually drive them home, you know.

• 10:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  So, and I've seen that happen, but anyway. So, the family moved to Galway City, where Michael Joyce again invests in real estate. Robert, have you ever been to Galway?

• 10:31Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, I love it. It's, uh, it's, it's, I mean, I think it's probably the prettiest city I've been to in Ireland. Uh, I, I, it's, it's my second favorite after. I really like Dublin. Um, but yeah, I, I love Galway.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Galway is a great place. It's an incredible party town and Steve Earl wrote a great song about it called Galway Girl.

• 10:48Robert Evans?

  He did. He sure did.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, but don't listeners confuse it with the Ed Sheeran song of the same name, which is shit.

• 10:54Robert Evans?

  No, no, don't.

• 10:57Robert Evans?

  But do listen to Steve Earl.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Galway has long been famous as one of the last bastions of indigenous Gaelic Irish culture. And that is exactly why young William Joyce hates Galway, because he hates everything Irish. He wants nothing more throughout his whole life than to be British, which as Madonna discovered is very complicated if you're actually an American.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  William Joyce was the eldest of four children. He was six years older than his brother Quentin, who was the next eldest sibling. So unsurprisingly, for many years, William was spoiled as a mama's boy. Queenie always felt out of place in Irish-American enclaves in Brooklyn and later in Ireland. And while her husband Michael was working, uh, Queenie was left alone with baby William and doted on him, telling him, "You are the sugar in my tea. Without you, there is no British Empire and"

• 11:54Robert Evans?

  Wow.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  "You will be a great man someday." So Robert, I've sent you a pic, if you can find it there of, we have a picture of Joyce at school.

• 12:04Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Um, uh, how, what's, what's the vibe of this kid? If you can bring it up.

• 12:10Robert Evans?

  He looks like a little shit. Like, I'm gonna be honest with you. Like, he's got his, he's got his arms crossed in a way children seldom do.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and like the, the only two other people in the group photo who have their arms crossed are the teacher and the teacher's kid who's sitting at his feet.

• 12:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:26Robert Evans?

  He looks very unpleasant. He looks like he's judging you. Like, he, he looks like, like, I wanna say to him, like, you're not better than me, you little piece of shit. You're just a kid. Like, get, what, what the fuck are you looking at me for that?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:37Robert Evans?

  That way.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Well, I remember without him, there will be no British Empire. So there you go. Um, so.

• 12:43Robert Evans?

  That's another reason to fight this kid.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  From an early age, Joyce was noted for being intelligent and precocious. He was a keen chess player and boxer who showed a talent for languages, but he was also a loner. So he came up with a plan to make friends. His dad rented a property to the cops as a police station. And William snuck in one day, stole a gun and brought it to school. Just a normal kid thing to do.

• 13:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's that'll make you friends.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  So it's totally fine. He doesn't shoot anybody. All the other boys in school think the gun is super cool, but they still think that Joyce, who's brought it in, is a massive dork. Um, so Joyce's parents had enrolled him in a Catholic school. And this may surprise listeners, but the Catholic Church in Ireland in the early nineteen hundreds was one hundred percent supportive of British rule. Since the time of the American Revolution, Catholic bishops had condemned every single Irish rebellion against the British. So in return for their loyalty, the British government allowed the Catholic Church to run almost all of the elementary schools in Ireland. This not only.

• 13:49Robert Evans?

  That ended well.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. That's where we're going. This not only allowed Catholic priests to ensure the spiritual indoctrination and brainwashing of Irish children. It also gave Catholic priests political power and social status required to ensure a nationwide conveyor belt of children who they could rape and abuse without legal consequence.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  In the early twentieth century, the British government and the Catholic Church implemented a form of cultural genocide to try and destroy any sense of Irish identity their pupils had and to replace this with a sense of Britishness. Children in Catholic-run Irish primary schools had to recite a poem each morning which ran, I thank the goodness and the grace which on my birth had smiled and made me in these Christian days a happy English child. Each year, all elementary schools in Ireland celebrated Empire Day on the twenty fourth of May, when pupils were taught that the British Empire is one big happy family of nations.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Like your own families, there is a father and a mother and children. In Britain, the parents are the English and the children are the Scots, Irish and Welsh. If the Scots, Irish or Welsh ever went their own way, then God will be very disappointed.

• 15:10Robert Evans?

  Now, let's see, that doesn't even make sense with families, because the whole point of a family is that eventually the children or adults go their own way and get married on their own, right? The whole point of a family is that the kids are always underneath the parents' thumbs. You know, that's just, that's not even how family really worked back then.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  The analogy also fails because families inevitably end up rowing with each other quite a lot.

• 15:30Robert Evans?

  Right, constantly, yes. The worst fights are between family members. Also, only one family member inherits at this point in time, I don't know.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Which is the parent, which is not how it's supposed to work. Anyway, children were then taught the slogan of Empire Day, which was, "One king, one flag, one fleet, one empire." Remind you of anything, Robert?

• 15:51Robert Evans?

  Uh, yeah, one people, one nation, one Volk.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. That's it.

• 15:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, one Führer, sorry, yeah.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  So, the Catholic priests running these schools, when they weren't busy abusing Irish children, loved nothing more than to beat the shit out of Irish kids who actually had the audacity to speak Gaelic, their native language. So this is similar, Robert, to what happened to First Nations kids in, in Canada.

• 16:18Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  But it wasn't as extreme here, because even though the English establishment considered us racially inferior, at least we were white. So, anyway, young William Joyce just fucking loves all the British imperialism that he is getting in school. And he loved school and education until one day, he asked the priest if his Protestant mother would go to heaven when she died. And of course, the priest says, "No, your mother is going straight to hell, where she will burn in eternal torment forever with all the other Protestants." Because that's just how the Catholic Church rolls.

• 16:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. It's, uh, it's funny, I had a similar, I grew up Episcopalian, and I had a similar talk with a, a, a youth group leader about that, where I was asking him about like, different fig, like Gandhi and stuff, and he was like, "Oh no, they're all, everyone else is going to hell." Like, everyone who was not the specific kind of Christian that we are is going straight to hell forever.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, at least, at least the Mormons are nice enough to rebaptize the dead and try and help.

• 17:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, right, you, you baptize Anne Frank decades after her death, like a normal person.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Other, other things we could, we could criticize the Mormons, but at least they think they're well-intentioned. Anyway.

• 17:31Robert Evans?

  It is, when you think about it, it's nicer than some of the other things.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  So Joyce gets super pissed when the priest who's teaching him throws eternal shade on his Protestant mum. So up to this point, he had been a model student, but from then on, he says, fuck homework, and he starts spending all his spare time on politics. And it was an interesting time in Irish politics. So at this time, all of Ireland, north and south, was still part of the UK. But after centuries of colonialism, ordinary Irish people were getting tired of being repeatedly fucked over and exploited by an English political elite. So after the outbreak-

• 18:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that would get on your nerves.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, after the outbreak of World War One, a broad popular front of Irish Republicans, whose politics are very different to those of American Republicans. And these Irish Republicans start planning a rebellion against the English king, who of course was then distracted from Irish affairs temporarily by throwing millions of British soldiers at German machine guns in the hope of defeating his cousin and bastard pod's alumni Kaiser Wilhelm the Second.

• 18:36Robert Evans?

  Ah, yeah.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:38Robert Evans?

  Always good when he comes up.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Who was horny for his mother's hands, if your research is correct.

• 18:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, weird hand fetish.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Uh, so anyway, the rebellion is known here as the nineteen sixteen Rising. It's largely confined to Dublin. But Galway, where William Joyce lived, was one of the few places outside the capital where there was fighting. We don't need to go into all the details on the rebellion here. Um, basically, the Irish rebels wanted to break free of Britain, establish an independent republic, launch the rebellion in April nineteen sixteen, fought the British army, managed to hold out for a week before being defeated. And Margaret Kiljoy did a whole series on this rebellion for cool people who did cool stuff. So if you want to learn more about it, you can, you can start there.

• 19:22Robert Evans?

  Um, yeah.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  So anyway, this rebellion freaks young William Joyce out. And the following year, when the Bolshevik revolution happens in Russia, he goes way down the conspiracy rabbit hole. And he's convinced that both the Russian revolution and the rebellion in Ireland are part of a secret global Irish, German, Jewish, Bolshevik plot to destroy the British Empire.

• 19:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Yep. So Joyce hits on a new plan to make himself popular at school. Instead of bringing another gun to class, that didn't work too well the first time. He decides to tell his classmates about all his favorite new conspiracy theories.

• 20:01Robert Evans?

  Oh, boy.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, one of his schoolmates, Owen Keenan, recalled, quote, "He was a morose and lonely little fellow. For all his brightness, there was something missing in young Willie. He would give impromptu speeches in the playground, warning us about the growing dangers of Bolshevism. But, Robert, do you know who won't make impromptu speeches in the playground, warning their playmates about Bolshevism?"

• 20:24Robert Evans?

  Some of our sponsors might. I'm not going to categorically say not, but, but, you know, some of them are fine with it.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  I was going to say the Irish Republican Army. Yes, that's right.

• 20:36Robert Evans?

  Oh, well, yes, no. Yeah.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, the good old IRA, because in 1917, the IRA, despite being almost entirely Catholic, were actually very supportive of Soviet Russia. Robert, remember those 16 pounds of diamonds Zarina and her daughters had sold into their bodices? And they accidentally turned into bulletproof vests during the execution in the basement in E. Katrinenburg. Well, when the Bolsheviks got the diamonds off the corpses, some of them ended up hidden in the chimney of a senior IRA leader in Dublin named Harry Boland after a secret financial, yeah, a secret financial deal between the Soviet Union and the IRA. But that's a long story. We don't have time to go into here.

• 21:17Robert Evans?

  No.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  What we do have time for is ads.

• 21:21Robert Evans?

  That's right.

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• 22:52Robert Evans?

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• 23:03Robert Evans?

  Coming back, I gotta say, you have to imagine, that guy has to have, on at least one occasion, have had people over, gotten a little bit too drunk, and taken the diamonds out. Right? You gotta be like, you gotta see this shit, man. You gotta, come on, come on, come on. Have another shot, and I gotta show you something fucking nuts.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Well, he ended up being shot in 1922, so he didn't live long enough to enjoy the diamonds. But his family had them for years. And then in like the 1950s, the Irish Prime Minister, Raymond de Valera, like quietly gave them back to Russia. Just both countries were like, maybe we shouldn't mention this.

• 23:38Robert Evans?

  These probably shouldn't be here.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  So anyway, after World War I, there is general election in the UK, which Ireland was then still officially part of. And Sinn Féin, the Irish Republican Rebel Party, won a majority of 73 of the 105 Irish seats in the British Parliament. These 73 Irish Republican members of Parliament decided to set up their own assembly in Dublin, and at it declared independence from Britain. The British, of course, immediately declared this democratically-elected Irish government illegal, and Britain's colonial police force in Ireland, the Royal Irish Constabulary, or RIC, were mobilized to suppress Irish democracy.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  The IRA in turn responded with a guerrilla campaign against them, resulting in the Irish War of Independence, which lasted from 1919 to 1921.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  So in early nineteen twenty, conspiracy nerd William Joyce witnessed the British shooting dead an IRA volunteer as part of this conflict in Galway, and it thrilled him. And Joyce immediately volunteered to assist the British forces in any way he could.

• 24:51Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Now, traditionally, British rule in Ireland had been maintained not by the British Army, but by this Irish police force or British police force in Ireland, the Royal Irish Constabulary, or R I C. It was largely staffed by Irishmen recruited to keep their fellow natives in line. The R I C basically becomes the model for colonial policing across the British Empire, from India to Palestine to Kenya. And Irishmen in the R I C were generally happy to keep oppressing their fellow Irishmen, until the IRA began shooting them dead in large numbers, thus prompting hundreds of Irishmen to resign from the force. Now, this poses a problem for the British government.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  If they sent the British Army in as the main force fighting the Republicans, they will be admitting that the IRA were a real army and that there was a real war happening. The British line, however, was that the IRA were just a small criminal gang having regular shootouts with the Irish cops. So in response, the British government invented the black and tan.

• 25:56Robert Evans?

  Ah, yes.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  Now, Robert, this will surprise some of your listeners, but the phrase black and tan can refer to several different things. So listeners in L A will know they have a local uniform club for gay men called the Black and Tan Society.

• 26:13Robert Evans?

  Different thing.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Different thing. Most Americans will know a cocktail of the same name they drink along with disgusting green beer on St Patrick's Day. But in Ireland, the phrase has a different meaning. If you ever walk into a real Irish bar in Ireland and order a black and tan, or an Irish carbon for that matter, you are very likely, you have seen this happen, you are very likely to get the shit kicked out of you.

• 26:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, not good, not a good move.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is because the drink, the cocktail, the black and tan, is named after the largely English mercenaries recruited into the R I C during the War of Independence, who gained a fairly well-deserved reputation for committing war crimes against the Irish, including torture, murder, arson, and rape. So anyway, back to our bastard William Joyce. He sees the

• 27:01Robert Evans?

  Pretty good song about fighting them.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, check out Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge version of that song. It's brilliant.

• 27:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it is.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  So anyway, back to our bastard William Joyce. He sees the tans coming to Ireland in nineteen twenty and he is cheering them on. Now, some pro-British loyalists in Ireland, um, uh, like Joyce do join the Black and Tans. Uh, but remember this kid is something around fifteen years old at the time, so he's too young to officially become a cop. So instead Joyce ingratiates himself with members of the R I C and the Black and Tans by volunteering to run errands for them, buying their cigarettes in shops at a time when Irish shopkeepers refused to serve British troops. That kind of thing, real low level stuff. Um, Joyce also passed on whatever scraps of information about IRA activity

• 27:53Speaker 01

  that he could gather from loose talk around the town and he would give this to his British pals. He also volunteered as an identifier for R I C patrols, travelling in their motor convoys to point out the homes of IRA members and sympathisers which were then raided. They needed him because remember, a lot of the new R I C recruits were Englishmen who didn't have a clue where they were going or who they were looking for. Some members of the R I C saw Joyce as their teenage mascot, others found Joyce a nuisance. And one Irish R I C constable later recalled, quote, "He was one of our greatest embarrassments. His trouble was fanatical patriotism to England and a burning wish to fight the rebels.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  He often tried to smuggle himself into our lorries. We laughed at him, but if he was killed or wounded, it would have caused our patrol a lot of trouble." According to Douglas, yeah. According to Douglas, yeah, it's just, it's a war zone. I think I'll jump on this Humvee and take a ride around and point out the houses of the insurgents. Let's see how that works.

• 28:58Robert Evans?

  That's not gonna piss anybody off.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  No, uh, according to Douglas V Duff, an English Black and Tan from Dorchester, Joyce eventually became such an annoyance that when they found him stowed away one day on their patrol boat, they threw him into the middle of Galway Harbour and he had to swim back to shore.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Joyce.

• 29:16Robert Evans?

  It's not a warm harbour.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, not a warm harbour. It's mostly filled with bottles of Buckfast now, if you know Galway.

• 29:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Anyway.

• 29:23Robert Evans?

  Ah.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Buckfast. Joyce overcame the this setback to ingratiate himself with an even worse group of British paramilitary police, the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary, more commonly known here in Ireland as the OXs. Now, the OXs were similar to the Tans or the Black and Tans, but instead of being recruited from ordinary low-ranking ex-British soldiers, they were only recruited from ex-officers. So they're a bit like an elite kind of special forces unit.

• 29:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  The OXs were a much more effective fighting force. They were much more extreme in their methods, more ruthless, more violent and determined than the Tans. To quote one of the IRA's most famous leaders of that era, Tom Barry, quote, "There were good and bad men amongst the Tans, but the OXs were bastards to a man."

• 30:19Robert Evans?

  Short and sweet.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Not a man who makes these words. When D Company of the OXs arrived in Galway, Joyce immediately volunteered to help them with the same kind of low-level intelligence work that he had done for the Tans. D Company were one of the worst OX units. In a notorious incident in November nineteen twenty, they shot dead Eileen Quinn, a twenty-four-year-old woman who was seven months pregnant. Quinn had been sitting on a wall outside her home, breastfeeding her nine-month-old child, when the OXs drove up to the house and shot her dead at point-blank range without warning. D Company specialised in abducting IRA members and sympathisers and torturing and murdering them before mutilating their bodies and burying

• 31:04Speaker 01

  them in bogs. The same month that they shot Eileen Quinn dead, D Company captured brothers Harry and Patrick Lochnan, who were both members of the IRA. The Lochnan brothers were tied to the back of a British Army lorry and forced to run behind it as it travelled at speed. When they inevitably fell exhausted, the van continued to drive, dragging the men along the road surface until they were dead.

• 31:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  The OXs then carved their unit insignia into the flesh of Patrick Lochnan's chest and cut off two of Harry's fingers to keep as souvenirs. Eventually, they set fire to the body and dumped them in a lake. Uh. So very reminiscent of kind of stuff that was done to the Vietcong um by US.

• 31:48Robert Evans?

  The Vietcong, I mean, it's reminiscent of of stuff you've seen in in the American, like in Texas, where I come from, there was a very famous case of a young gay man who was killed by being dragged behind a car, stuff like that. Um. And you hear, I mean, like the, I'm thinking of the barcut in Ukraine, which, you know, would do these, it it wasn't so much dragging people to death, but it was like throwing them in na- naked into freezing snowbanks, activists and killing them that way. Like, I think there's a lot of things that makes me think of.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's it's incredible what what people are capable of. But anyway, uh, you and I, for some reason, find it fascinating to read about this.

• 32:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  D Company also abducted and murdered Michael Tolan, a physically disabled IRA intelligence officer, who uh they castrated and shot dead before burying his body in a bog. D Company's best-known victim was one of the few Catholic priests who actually supported the IRA, Father Michael Griffin. Father Griffin was abducted from his home, shot dead and buried in the bog west of Galway city. Now, later rumors would claim, and you'll still find this online, that William Joyce, as a local young boy, had played a role in luring Father Griffin out of his home. But there is no reliable historical evidence to support this. Uh. But these murders will give you, the listener, the an idea of the kind of people Joyce is now

• 33:09Speaker 01

  working for.

• 33:10Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  So as the war drags on into nineteen twenty-one, Joyce came to the attention of Captain William Keating, head of British Army Intelligence in Galway. Now, Keating probably knew Joyce personally, as both of his sons attended the same school as Joyce. Keating decided to recruit Joyce as a courier. So by now, he's not a British soldier. He's not an official member of the British Army, but he is on their pay payroll and working for the army was seen as being more respectable than doing errands for a paramilitary police force.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  So the Irish War of Independence ends on the 11th of July 1921. About 2,300 people were killed in the conflict. Now, that may not seem like much, but remember, Ireland is a very small country with a small population. So to put that in perspective and think of what you know about the north of Ireland, northern Ireland, and how vicious the conflict was there. The Irish War of Independence saw 2,300 people killed in just three years compared to 3,700 people dying in the troubles in the north over 30 years. So it's a much more condensed version of the conflict.

• 34:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, higher intensity conflict, yeah.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Whilst the ceasefire was holding, the IRA were still gathering intelligence. Joyce was on their radar before this. Now, they had known all along that he was a British loyalist, but he was by far wasn't, you know, the only British loyalist who was, who was around. And but they didn't know how involved he was in assisting the British forces until they intercepted a British cipher code being sent to him in the mail. At this point, the IRA sanctioned Joyce's execution as an enemy agent, but they could not kill him because it would have been a breach of the ceasefire and it would have interfered with the political negotiations which were then ongoing. Joyce discovered that the IRA were on to him, but for the moment, they couldn't lay

• 35:10Speaker 01

  a finger on him, and he really revels in this. He decides to rub the IRA's faces in it, so he starts openly associating with the British forces in Galway, who were kind of like his, you know, protection unit. There's going to be no more disguises or cloak and dagger shit, he's just letting it all hang out in the open. So, one day, Michael Staines, who's a senior IRA leader and a member of the rebel Irish government, was walking through Galway when he encountered William Joyce. Quote, "William Joyce was quite a young fellow, about 16 years of age. I saw him with some members of the RIC Auxiliary Division, and as I went by, he passed some jeering remarks and actually spat at me.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  There was an IRA volunteer with me who wanted to shoot Joyce there and then." So he's got some balls, this kid.

• 36:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Uh, Staines um was one of the liaison officers between the IRA and the British military during the ceasefire, and he was unsurprisingly super pissed about this, and he marched straight into the office of uh British Divisional Commissioner Cruz, who was commanding that unit we talked about, the Company of the Aussies, and Staines let him know in no uncertain terms that the IRA were on to Joyce and that he was fucked if the ceasefire did not hold. Joyce knew the IRA uh could not do shit to him for as long as peace talks were ongoing, and he basically thinks that it's all going to work out fine for him. But in December of nineteen twenty one, a section of the rebel Irish government reached a peace deal with the British.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Now, this is complex, but all you need to know um is that the treaty they agreed on in late nineteen twenty one, early nineteen twenty two divided Ireland into the two parts it's in now. The north of Ireland or Northern Ireland, to give it its official name, which would stay part of the UK, was the southern part of Ireland, was going to get partial independence, kind of on the same basis that Canada had within the British Empire at the time, something called dominion status.

• 37:13Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  So, under this peace deal, which of course didn't uh deliver a lasting peace in Ireland, that's another story, the British pulled all their troops out of the south of Ireland and moved them either back to Britain or up to the north. The first to withdraw were the units that William Joyce had been most closely associated with uh the in the R I C. So now Joyce is in trouble. His R I C bodyguards are leaving Galway, and the IRA will soon be in total control of the city once the British Army finishes its evacuation. And at this point, William Joyce is forced to stop spitting at the leaders of the IRA, and he goes into hiding.

• 37:53Robert Evans?

  Uh, yeah.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Not so cocky, are you now, Joyce? Just when it looks like Joyce is fucked, fate steps in and saves him. And this, I think, is one of the interesting things about him. This is going to happen a few times in his life, or either a person or circumstances change at the last second to his benefit. And in 1921, his savior was Captain Keating, who had recruited Joyce as courier for the British Army. Keating arranged for Joyce to be enlisted in the Worcestershire Regiment and transferred to England, thus saving him from the otherwise certain fate of being assassinated by the IRA for being a British intelligence agent. But, Robert, do you know who won't assassinate British intelligence agents?

• 38:39Robert Evans?

  I mean, I would hope our podcast sponsors would be capable of doing that. You know, that's certainly something we ask each of them. Could you kill James Bond theoretically, like if he tried to interfere with your operations? And they all say yes, but could they be lying to me? It's possible.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Possibly, because I would have thought, would a British intelligence agent lie to you? Never. I would have thought that unlike the IRA, they all support King Sausage Fingers himself, Charles III of England, and his weird brother Andrew, who definitely has not done anything untoward in Jeffrey Epstein's company.

• 39:14Robert Evans?

  No, no, he's just stopping the prince for no reason.

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• 40:50Robert Evans?

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• 41:01Robert Evans?

  And we're back.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  So I wonder how Coolzone Media's lawyers feel about that last ad pivot. Anyway.

• 41:09Robert Evans?

  I feel like it's pretty safe these days.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't enjoy the First Amendment rights and legal terms you have, so I'd be more careful in, in Ireland. Anyway, although I suspect Prince Andrew won't be leaving the jurisdiction of, of Britain anytime soon.

• 41:25Robert Evans?

  If we have one right in the United States, it's talking shit about the British Royal Family.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  So.

• 41:34Robert Evans?

  Kind of foundational.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  So in early 1922, young William Joyce is safe from the IRA. He's living in a British Army barracks in England, but by now the British, of course, have no real use for him. He had a purpose when he was in Ireland, but now that the British have done a deal with a faction of the Irish rebels, their focus is on their other imperialist projects in Egypt, in India, in Palestine, where Joyce would of course have been useless. So he was probably underage, he was definitely physically unfit, and he had never fired a gun in combat. So within a few months, he gets kicked out of the British Army. Now, William Joyce enrolled in.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Burke Beck College in London, where he joined the college branch of the British Conservative and Unionist Party, also known as the Tory Party, and he was hoping that he would find his political soulmates there. Instead, he was disappointed that they weren't supportive enough of the Irish loyalist cause, and he was disappointed because they didn't express the same interest in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Irish affairs that he did.

• 42:45Robert Evans?

  That's a shame.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  So, political disappointments aside, he managed to graduate with a degree in English. He toyed with the idea of studying for a master's in history, but never put the required effort into securing a place at university. When asked about this failure later in life, he fabricated the excuse that, quote, "some thieving Jew had stolen his research." Next, he applied for a job in the British government's Foreign Office, and when this application was rejected, he again used the excuse that the Jews were responsible.

• 43:16Robert Evans?

  Sure. No, yeah, keep, keep going back to that well, buddy.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Joyce eventually got a job as a high school teacher, teaching English in England, a country where everybody already spoke the language. I'm reminded of Ralph Wiggum in The Simpsons, "Me fail English? That's impossible."

• 43:35Robert Evans?

  [laughing]

• 43:37Speaker 01

  At the time that he was working as a teacher, his conservative, anti-Semitic politics were becoming even more extreme, and he kept ranting on about how a supposed Jewish Communist cabal were responsible for the creation of the IRA and for all his misfortunes in Ireland. But again, this was in England, where despite ruling us, very few of the people, except for the most hardcore Conservatives, really knew or cared anything about Ireland, so he was largely ignored. But things were soon to change for young Willie. In late 1922, an Italian asshole named Mussolini put fascism on the world stage, and in early 1923, these British fanboys formed England's first fascist group.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  On the sixth of May nineteen twenty-three, Miss Rotha Linton Orman, the daughter of British Army war hero Major Charles Orman, decided to found the British Fascist. She previously helped found the Girl Scouts and had been a suffragette and an ambulance driver during World War One.

• 44:43Robert Evans?

  Man.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, she placed a series of six adverts in the Duke of Northumberland's newspaper, The Patriot, which was infamous for peddling conspiracy theories and xenophobia. I've sent you a picture of her, Robert. It's worth looking up just to get an idea of her vibe and her energy.

• 45:00Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, she definitely looks like, she definitely looks like someone who would both be a suffragette and also a fascist activist. Like, she's put together in that way.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's worth Googling her picture of her and finding out more about her fascinating person. But anyway, the British Fascist campaigns to protect Britain from communism, socialism, Irish republicanism, anarchism, trade unionism, atheism, and free love. So they probably weren't...

• 45:31Robert Evans?

  All the isms, geez.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  All the isms.

• 45:33Robert Evans?

  Every one of them.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  They probably weren't much fun at parties.

• 45:38Robert Evans?

  No.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Linton Orman claimed the moral, spiritual, and fundamental objects of British and Italian fascists are identical. Those joining the British Fascist were required to swear an oath to uphold His Majesty, gracious King George, his heirs and successors, and to render every service in the struggle against all treacherous revolutionary movements now working for the destruction of the monarchy and the British Empire. In the early years, there was a significant crossover in membership between the British Fascist and the British Conservative Party. The group's primary activity was to act as bodyguards for conservative

• 46:21Speaker 01

  politicians and to protect conservative meetings from interference by left-wing hecklers.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Joyce joined the British Fascisti in London shortly after their formation and he was soon promoted to commander of I squad. On the 24th of October 1924, Joyce led the members of his unit to the constituency of Lambeth North, where they had been tasked with acting as an honour guard for an election rally for the local Conservative candidate. The meeting was disrupted by a group of anti-fascist protesters, one of whom attacked Joyce, slashing his face from the right corner of his mouth, so he's right here with a straight razor.

• 47:03Robert Evans?

  Ah, see, I can already see the problem, which is that, you know, great instincts, but if you just slash someone in the face, you're gonna wind up making them look cool. Like, if you just give someone a facial scar, you're gonna wind up making them look cooler.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you have, I sent you an image there, or people can Google it, you've probably seen it before, Robert.

• 47:21Robert Evans?

  Ah, that's a great scar. Shit, ah, yeah, no, that's the scar they all wanna have, too.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Right up to the ear. Yeah, because this is the thing that, like, the SS and German military guys love fencing without masks and they want the schramma, the scar, whereas Joyce gets it.

• 47:37Robert Evans?

  The dueling scar. You couldn't buy a better scar than that, if you went to a fancy dueling college, yeah.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  It's like a fucking James Bond villain scar, like.

• 47:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly, it's like a fake scar.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Anyway, Joyce was left with a prominent facial scar for the rest of his life. And he would claim that a male Jewish communist had attacked him. However, his first wife Hazel later told his biographer Colin Holmes, it wasn't the Jewish communist who disfigured him, he was knifed by an Irish woman. Now, unfortunately, we don't know who this hero Irish woman was, and I think it was probably Jake Hanrahan's great-grandmother. Once again, Joyce was blaming Jews for all his problems. But the anti-fascist protesters had mostly been Irish Republican sympathizers, who, according to press reports, interrupted the meeting by singing Irish rebel songs and

• 48:30Speaker 01

  heckling before attempting to storm the platform and seize the British flag. Protesters appeared to have been aware of Joyce's presence and his previous work as a spy for the British in Ireland. A reporter for the Lambeth Free Press described the scene. The tumult was terrific and the speaker could not be heard. A few young men began to sing Come Back to Erin. A couple of men apparently came to blows and the crowd surged forward. The excitement was tremendous and from out of the crowd there suddenly emerged a young Stuart with blood streaming from a nasty gash in the cheek. Mister William Joyce of Allison Grove Dulwich was led to the rear and was supposedly taken to Lambeth Infirmary for treatment. It is stated that he was slashed with a razor.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  So Joyce's assailant was most likely a member of Comanmáin, who were the IRA's female counterpart and whoever she was, she was not the only Irish woman in the twenties to try and assassinate a fascist leader, leaving them with a permanent scar. The other was Violet Gibson, who in April nineteen twenty six, attempted to assassinate Mussolini by shooting him in the head at a public rally. At the last microsecond Mussolini turned his head and survived minus a small part of the bridge of his nose which he succeeded in shooting off. Mussolini appeared in public, wearing a prominent bandage on his face for several weeks afterwards. History does not repeat itself, but it does tend to rhyme a lot.

• 49:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that, oh boy, probably the less said about that, the better.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  Time is a flat circle, Robert. Anyway, William Joyce was hospitalized for several weeks recovering from his facial wound, but he was troubled by the possibility that he might miss the Armistice Day commemorations on the eleventh of November, which commemorated the British War Dead of World War One. From the nineteen twenties, this event had always been hugely popular with the British far right and today this tradition is still maintained by the neo-Nazi group, the National Front, which still holds a march to the Senatath in London every Remembrance Sunday.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  On the eleventh of November nineteen twenty four, Joyce snuck out of hospital without being medically discharged so that he could attend the ceremony, but he was still so weak from his injuries that the IRA had inflicted on him that he collapsed. He was given first aid by a fellow fascist at the ceremony named Hazel Barr, who was to become the future Mrs William Joyce.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Joyce got a job teaching at a school in Chelsea in London. The pair married in nineteen twenty seven and she soon became pregnant. The same year, he began an illicit sexual relationship with one of his pupils named Mary Ogilvy. The age of consent in Britain at the time was sixteen and the pair claimed their relationship didn't begin until she turned sixteen, which I'm not entirely sure is true, but I have no way of proving or disproving it completely. At this time Joyce was between twenty one and twenty five years of age. So I reckon it's borderline whether you can accurately call him a paedophile or not. I say paedophile, you say pedophile, potato, potato.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  But look, whether or not we can technically call Joyce paedophile, the relationship is pretty creepy on Joyce's part. He's barely back from his honeymoon, he's cheating on his pregnant wife with a teenage schoolgirl who's probably a decade younger than him. So at the very least, it's an abuse of power from an authority figure of a vulnerable minor in their care.

• 52:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  So anyway, Joyce's wife appears to have been unaware of the affair and she gave birth to their first daughter, named after her mother Hazel. And a few years later, the couple had a second daughter. The dismarital and domestic drama aside, Joyce was still an active member of the British Fascistty into the late nineteen twenties, but he drifted away when the movement began to flounder in the early nineteen thirties. The movement had always been bankrolled by Rotha Linton Orman's wealthy mother, who immediately cut off finances for her daughter when she heard lurid rumours about her daughter's morphine habit and involvement in alcohol-fuelled orgies at their country mansion.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Cut off financially, Orman grew increasingly dependent on alcohol and drugs and died within a year at Santa Brigada under Canary Islands, just forty years of age. So for the second time in his life, Joyce was politically adrift, having been failed by his political Messiah. The first political leader to fail Joyce had been his childhood hero, Sir Edward Carson, the Irish loyalist leader who had led the pro-British movement against the IRA and any form of Irish independence. Incidentally, Carson was also the barrister who led the prosecution of Oscar Wilde for sodomy.

• 53:24Robert Evans?

  Oh, good.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, there you are. He's ticking all the boxes. However, Carson had failed Joyce when he signed up to an agreement with the British in the early 1920s, and that saw southern Ireland, as we mentioned, begin to break away from England and effectively abandoning pro-British families like the Joyce's in the south of Ireland. So now, a decade later, he'd been failed again by the founder, Linton Orman, who had died in obscurity instead of delivering a fascist Britain. So in the early 1930s, Joyce was once more politically adrift when a new political savior loomed into view. That is where we are going to end it for today. What do you think so far, Robert?

• 54:09Robert Evans?

  Boy, packed a lot of bastardery into this episode already. I'm excited to see where he goes from here.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  This is something people don't talk about. Everyone rushes straight to World War II, but I think this is fascinating.

• 54:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah. No, no, why, this guy was a piece of shit. Wasn't just a piece of shit for opportunistic reasons. He was a dedicated piece of shit. He worked at being a piece. You don't want to, you can't take that away from him, you know? That's not fair. He put in the hours to be a piece of shit, you know? This isn't, he didn't just start late in his career. I'm a believer in honoring hard work.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  He's bringing guns to school and spitting at IRA leaders in his teens, like, yeah, he's, he's, he's a piece of work. So, Robert, another thing that's a piece of work are your pluggables. What do you have to plug?

• 54:55Robert Evans?

  Oh, you're asking my pluggables. I mean, if you're here, you listen to my podcast, so you know basically where to find me. What about yours?

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Well, I have a book out. It is called Burn Them Out. It is a history of fascism and far-right in Ireland. That's the title. And it is published by Bloomsbury Head of Zeus. So if you just Google Burn Them Out, Irish fascism, it should come up. And you can buy that online or in all good bookshops and some bad ones.

• 55:25Robert Evans?

  Excellent. Well, find it at a good bookshop or a bad one, you know? I'm assuming you get money either way.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not sure if I still get money if people shoplift it, but I assume I do.

• 55:34Robert Evans?

  No. Yeah, yeah. I mean, one way or the other, the book has moved, right?

• 55:38Speaker 01

  The book has moved. Somebody has read it. Yeah.

• 55:41Robert Evans?

  All right, everybody. This has been Behind the Bastards. We will be back on Thursday with part two of this story. Until then, have a nice time.

• 55:53Speaker 06

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedi.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/behindthebastards.

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