by Stephen Wade
Joyce was captured by two soldiers, Captain Lickorish and Lieutenant Perry, near Flensburg on the Danish frontier. Even then Joyce was projecting a false identity. He had a German passport and was stated to be called Hansen. At first he spoke French, but then English, and his voice was so distinctive to the English ear that the officers knew it was Lord Haw Haw. He reached into his pocket and, as the officers suspected he had a gun, was shot in the thigh. As he dropped he said he was Fritz Hansen.
Joyce had given various conflicting accounts of his life and birth over the years, and when he appeared in court, the defence had to argue that he was not a British citizen and so could not be tried for treason. The statute in question was created in 1351 and the important wording there with regard to treason is in these statements: ‘Compassing or imagining the King’s death,’ and ‘Adhering to the King’s enemies in his realm. Giving them aid and comfort elsewhere.’
What darkened the waters of the case even more was Joyce’s letter, written to the officers’ training corps at London University, in which he said: ‘I am in no way connected with the United States of America, against which, as against all other nations, I am prepared to draw the sword in British interests. As a young man of pure British descent, I have always been desirous of devoting what little capabilities and energies I may possess to the country which I love so dearly …’
We can imagine the difficulty with which Sir Hartley Shawcross in the Central Criminal Court asked the jury to forget all previous knowledge and formed opinions of Joyce so that the case could be heard fairly. He said to the jury: ‘… Some of us formed feelings of dislike and detestation at what he was doing … and some of us heard that he had been arrested and brought to trial. If any of you had any feelings of that kind about this man, I ask you, as I know you will, to cast them entirely from your minds.’ He was asking the impossible. The man had been a celebrity – someone to joke about and imitate while at work or in the canteen.
Joyce’s passport was issued, renewed in 1939, and then his quick departure was bound to go against him. A document was made available that showed he had more than likely arranged for the employment in Germany before leaving. Nevertheless, he was forthright in his denial of having been a traitor. He wrote: ‘I know that I have been denounced as a traitor and I resent the accusation as I conceive myself to have been guilty of no underhand or deceitful act against Britain, although I am able to understand the resentment that my broadcasts have, in many quarters, aroused.’
He was sentenced to death, by Mr Justice Tucker, and then his appeal was heard before the Lord Chancellor, Lord Jowitt and four other lords. The verdict was succinct:
An alien who has been resident in but has left the realm may be convicted of high treason in respect of an act done by him outside the realm if at the time of the commission of the act he was still enjoying the protection from the Crown as to require of him continuance of his allegiance. The possession of a British passport affords such protection.
The fact is that, to the world in judgement of him, Joyce appeared to want to be under the protection of several states. The decision was made after discussion of the distinction that ‘protection’ was the protection of British law, not a de facto protection, ‘such as might be enjoyed by a person who possessed a forged passport until the fraud was discovered.’ Of the five judges, only Lord Porter was in support of a reprieve.
Joyce’s wife, Margaret Cairns Joyce, came for a short visit to the condemned man, and was then returned to an internment camp in Germany, and then later released to live in Cologne, where she was subject to an appraisal by the de-Nazification Board. His brother, Quintin, also visited, and wife and brother saw him separately.
Joyce was a ‘celebrity’ prisoner of course. A man who had been a media star was clearly expert at rhetoric and was never short of the right words for the occasion. He made one last statement for his public:
In death, as in this life, I defy the Jews who caused this last war, and I defy the power of darkness which they represent. I warn the British people against the crushing imperialism of the Soviet Union. May Britain be great once again and in the hour of the greatest danger in the west may the Swastika be raised from the dust, crowned with the historic words ‘You have conquered nevertheless.’ I am proud to die for my ideals; and I am sorry for the sons of Britain who have died without knowing why.
He was hanged on 3 January 1946 in Wandsworth, by Albert Pierrepoint and Alex Riley. A crowd of 250 people had gathered outside and the usual notice was then posted, stating that the death sentence had been carried out, and the inquest returned the verdict of ‘Death by judicial execution.’ But behind that plain statement there was a horrific story. Back in 1924 Joyce had been attacked by a gang at Lambeth baths in Battersea and a razor had cut him deeply across one cheek. It took a hospital stay of two weeks before he could walk out into life again, and he did so with a massive scar across the face. He had been given twenty-six stitches. When it came to the time when Albert Pierrepoint had to hang the man, the scar burst open and blood spilled onto the prison floor. He was buried, according to custom, beneath the stone floor of Wandsworth. The corpse was thrown on top of another body, a murderer. It is interesting that in Pierrepoint’s autobiography, there is no mention of Joyce.
History is all about perspectives and stances taken on the past: a feature written in 2005 concerned Joyce’s daughter, Heather. On the day her father was hanged, she went to teach English at a convent school in St Leonard’s on Sea. She went with her students to watch a war film and everyone was laughing. When interviewed in 2005, the report states, Heather said she could not recall that film but, ‘That day is burned in her memory. She was carrying a secret, burying it so deep inside her that, when she started to talk about it years later, it dominated the rest of her life.’
Joyce’s spell in gaol and at execution still created a stir after his death. The appeal hearing was discussed at length in the press, and one writer, Lennox Russell, writing a year after the hanging, pointed out the odd sequence of events leading to the quashing of the appeal: he noted that the appeal was dismissed on 19 December, and that a plea to the Home Secretary was then rejected on 2 January (the day before he hanged). On the same day, Lord Porter’s disagreement about the appeal court decision was reported. Russell wrote: ‘Was the Home Secretary in possession of them [the documents relating to the appeal] when he rejected the pleas for mercy? Or had he before him no statement of the views of the final court of appeal, or only some statement other than the one published?’
Russell had spotted something very odd. He added, putting the issue very clearly: ‘The case was one … in which it was peculiarly desirable that there should be no possible ground for any suggestion that the accused had not been given the benefit of any doubt.’ He saw a problem in procedure, and people reading between the lines must have wondered whether there were reasons, expressed by Lord Porter, for clemency, which had not been aired publicly, and certainly not in the press reports. The execution, some argued, had been totally contrived.
One coda to the Joyce story which is interesting is the fact that it was he who coined the phrase ‘The Iron Curtain.’ In one of his addresses, called Views of the News, he had said, ‘The Iron Curtain of Bolshevism has come down across Europe.’ This was broadcast from Hamburg in April 1945. Many things in his life had been odd, accidental and puzzling. Even his nickname was created by a writer called Jonah Barrington, and it was supposed to be given to Norman Baillie-Stewart, another broadcaster from Germany. He then gave the name to Joyce after being sent to the Tower for treason.
CHAPTER 8
A Spy and a Rogue in the War
The two notorious prisoners figuring here present two real extremes: the first comes across almost as a figure from a semi-comic adventure story, but at the time he was a real threat to home security. The second is an incredible story of a conman and killer.
What were the internal security forces to do about Germans in Ireland in 1939�
�40? The place was clearly seething with Republicans who would stop at nothing to find willing allies in the fight against the Brits. There were Germans there, and in quite large numbers, some pretending to hunt for butterflies or to stand in awe looking at the magnificent beauty of the cliffs of Moher or the Dingle. They didn’t want to be, in the words of Noel Cowards’ song, Beastly to the German, who might be genuinely spending time in Ireland for study or for holidays; but then, it became clear that there was skulduggery afoot and that something had to be done. After all, they were up against spies who lifted weights, loved philosophy and even – Heaven forbid – enjoyed a romantic novel.
Military intelligence scrutiny of neutral Ireland in 1941 was becoming far more intensive, after a period of tolerance and observation, waiting for developments. One event, a parachute drop into Ireland in March 1941, was to be sensational, and not a little entertaining. That is because the German spy in question was undeniably a ‘character’. This was Gunther Schutz. The Irish Section of MI5 was dealing with a mass of paperwork at the time, following all kinds of leads and reports, but they did manage to have the man arrested almost immediately.
Schutz was not the smartest pencil in the box. After the drop, he managed to have his suitcase radio found, and had not succeeded in hiding it anywhere. He was found wandering around near the village of New Ross, County Waterford, by two policemen. His radio and a roll of notes were found in his case, and he said he was Hans Marschner. In the notes made on him by army intelligence, we have some details that add to the impression that he specialised in dramatic failure: ‘It was a lovely night, and the clouds and distant mountain flooded in moonlight made the most beautiful sight he had ever seen. Then houses and trees began to rush upwards against him, and he landed, stunned with nose bleeding, in a field.’
The next stage after his arrest was to subject him to interrogation, and the man for that job was Richard Hayes, recently attached to the Irish Secret Service, who had drafted in his kids to help unravel the German Abwehr code.
Schutz tried desperately to be someone else. After ‘Marschner’ he told the tale of his being a South African living in London who liked flying and parachuting for a hobby. He must have thought that his German and vaguely English intonation sounded like a South African accent. In fact, the address he gave in London was indeed a place used by Abwehr agents. This safe house, at Webster Gardens, was under surveillance. It had to stay apparently ‘safe’ though, and the front was preserved, something crucially important as a very important agent known as Rainbow had been located there, and it was learned that Schutz had made contact with him. In fact, the man who landed in the Irish field had lived for some time, posing as a student in London, attending the Commercial School in Ealing. He had a talent for study and would have done very well there. He had already done missions in Spain and at the Abwehr base in Hamburg. The man who on the surface assumed shambolic was perhaps a major player.
Schutz’s presence in Ireland now became much more important for MI5. The real clue as to why he was an important arrest was in the fact that he had a microscope – meaning that he was able to access a new type of coding that used microdot patterns. The question was, how best to watch this man and make the most of his presence in Ireland? The answer was in Mountjoy prison in Dublin, because that was where the German internees were held, and it seemed virtually certain that Schutz would be able to attempt some kind of communication there.
There had to be German spies in the establishment at Mountjoy in Dublin as well. From September 1939, it had been recognised that the Abwehr and the IRA would be potentially a very dangerous alliance. There had even been links between the Abwehr and Welsh nationalist extremists. Warning signs about the types of espionage legends that were created by the Germans were available, as in the case of a man called Ernst Weber-Drohl who was arrested in Ireland and so he was released by the court, having insisted that he was not a member of the Nazi party. His narrative was that he had been a fairground entertainer, known to the crowds as ‘Atlas the Strong’ and was a minor celebrity.
Schutz was placed in Mountjoy and watched closely, having been given a seven-year sentence and put first in the gaol at Sligo, and later interrogated and thoroughly searched at Arbour Hill prison, Dublin. He had the habit of reading magazines and novels clearly in genres meant for feminine reading; Just a Girl seemed to be his favourite, and that was almost certainly the code book for his operations. This was a book by Charles Garvice, a novelist of the Edwardian years who had a major hit with Valentine Vox, an equally romantic work of torrid affairs and secret desires. He was in some ways the quintessential spy – even having liquid for secret writing in his clothing-pads when thoroughly searched. But Just a Girl was to turn out to be very ironic, in his prison escape. In your average prison community, a guy reading such popular literature would be in danger of receiving unwanted sexual approaches, but in Schutz’s case the approaches were more standard undercover brainwork. The system of microdots worked on a basis of him picking a certain page to encode that would link to a specified day of each month.
Prison work and the basic security measures enforced in a prison regime involves a keen sensitivity to any matter pertaining to clothes and dress, as in the instances of such things as prison drama productions where wigs and disguise might be worn. For obvious reasons, sanction for such things would have to be very carefully considered and then, should clothing be granted, the vigilance needed to check for misuse would be very acute. The very idea of a prisoner wearing a wig, for theatricals or even Christmas festivities, is enough to give a prison governor sleepless nights and nervous twitches. But the governor in 1942 allowed the prisoner the purchase of a set of women’s clothes, supposedly to take home to his sister.
He was having a hard time generally, mixing with the lags, thugs and wastrels known in the city as gurriers and gutter types. He hated being treated like a con and he would request some distinctly literary and very high-culture reading, such as a complete Shakespeare and Dante’s Divine Comedy. One hardened old gaolbird robbed him of his watch and another, a tough nut called Anderson, threatened him and abused him whenever he could. He had to find a way out of the place. One ex-con is on record as saying, ‘That German fella read more love books than my missis.’
But in 1942 he had managed to acquire a saw and he cut through bars, made it to the outer wall along with a Dutch prisoner called Van Loon, who was caught in the grounds before he made it to the wall. The escape was organised by some IRA prisoners, and amazingly, Schutz spun a tale about the women’s clothes to the governor, saying they would be a gift to take back home to his fiancée after the war. It is hard to imagine the scuttling figure of a man in drag running through the streets of Dublin, jumping at every shadow, particularly as he was moving alongside the Royal Canal in areas where the ladies of the night were seen at their trade. We could speculate on whether or not he could have coped with the subtleties of the English language if approached by a potential customer who thought he really was a Dublin woman looking for some business.
However it was done and he went into the city after scaling the wall; the fact was that Schutz escaped and the intrepid spy was housed with Irish politician and soldier, Cathal Bruha’s widow, Caitlin. Schutz had even been given detailed maps of the city and information on known safe houses. He had the sheer hutzpah to write a letter from the Bruha house to Caitlin’s daughter, who was also interned, and true to form as a dashing but stunningly feckless type, he wrote, ‘How I do miss you every evening when the paper comes, I mean the crosswords, without your assistance it is a hell of a job, I can assure you.’
There was a wanted poster out for him, ‘Hans Marschner’, issued by the Garda, with a substantial £500 (worth over £14,000 today) reward, and there is a small photo of him: a dapper, well-groomed man of about thirty who could easily have been a film star on a Wills cigarette card. He is described as ‘5ft 9ins, complexion pale, hair dark brown, scar between eyes and on left cheek. Speaks English well
.’
But he was recaptured there and then taken to Arbour Hill gaol. Most of the German spies were returned to their homeland in 1947 after a spell in an internment camp in Athlone. It can only be assumed that he spent most of his war years reading the great writers, doing crosswords with the women internees and ordering more books by the inimitable Charles Garvice, a writer who, in spite of his phenomenal success in romance, has not the smallest mention in The Oxford Companion to English Literature.
The second story is the tale of a consummate, many-sided crook who made his own impact on the war – and on his victims.
He was the quick-change artist of fraud, the epitome of Shakespeare’s line that ‘one man in his time plays many parts’. He was a one-man danger zone for everyone who met him, a ladies’ man with the manner of a cultured gentleman and the morality of a death-camp torturer. By 1946 he was to be a multiple murder, but in the war years, he committed fraud and deception more than any other crook. His name was Neville George Clevely Heath, a man who always had money, savoir-faire and grudging admiration, but was destined for the death cell where he was desperate to leave his last few pounds to his young brother.
In the course of the war, Heath was to be an officer, commissioned in the South African Air Force, and a dozen other people, largely because being in a uniform attracted him like a toy shop window for a child. On the surface, he was that stereotype, the plausible rogue, but deep down there was the personality of a psychopath – but one who acted the role of fatal charmer.
This glittering career of fraud and murder began early, but so did the dark, evil killing instinct. He was only just prevented from raping a girl at a party when he was in his teens, something that amazed his family; his mother said of him, ‘Like most boys, he was always bright and full of fun and though he knew lots of girls and might keep changing them, he has never had any trouble with them as far as I know.’ But this was the boy who put his hand over the mouth of a girl at a party and tried to ravish her.