大象传媒

Contributed by Andy Whysall, Broadcast Journalist, 大象传媒 Cumbria.
Once secret MI5 files might provide an answer to how a Cumbrian woman escaped the hangman's noose at the end of the Second World War - even though she'd made her wartime living by broadcasting to Britain for the Nazis.

Margaret Joyce - born Margaret Cairns White in Carlisle - was the wife of the notorious William Joyce or Lord Haw-Haw. She was brought up in Nelson Street in Denton Holme and worked as a typist. She was a dedicated fascist and used to preach fascism to the crowds around Carlisle market cross. She married Joyce in 1936 after a rather strange whirlwind romance.

The couple's story has recently been retold by journalist Nigel Farndale, who ploughed through a mass of newly declassified MI5 files to learn that William Joyce - once a leading light of Oswald Mosley's fascist Blackshirts relayed information on the party and its activities to MI5.

In 1939 the couple fled with their highly developed Nazi sympathies to Germany; they were faced with a choice between there or the neutral Irish Free State. Both of them broadcast Nazi propaganda from Berlin to Britain. William Joyce was the better known of the two, making nightly broadcasts often purportedly containing information given to the Germans by a (non-existent) massive network of spies working in Britain. But Margaret also stepped to the microphone and in her turn became known as Lady Haw-Haw. German records show she earned almost as much as her notorious husband in her broadcasting career.

After the surrender of Germany, the Joyces went into hiding under assumed names - ironically in a woodland cottage near Flensburg, now one of Carlisle's twin towns. The pair were captured - separately - and were kept apart right to the end. William went on trial in London and ultimately hanged for treason. Nigel Farndale explains how the Government set out to change the six-hundred-year-old Treason Act to ensure that Joyce became a customer of hangman Albert Pierrepoint.

The problem was that Joyce might never really have been a British subject. He had been born American of Irish parentage, obtaining a British passport in 1934, then in 1940 taking German citizenship. But he had lied about his place of birth to get that British passport. Farndale says the trial judge took it upon himself to decide that, whatever nationality he was, being a British passport holder Joyce must have had an allegiance to Britain in the period he held it, before becoming officially German. Joyce was quickly found guilty and hanged. The historian AJP Taylor pointed out: the usual punishment for making a false statement to obtain a passport was a 拢2 fine.

But as far as Margaret was concerned, there was no doubt about her nationality early in the war when she had begun broadcasting. She was British. So why did she not go on trial and hang with her husband? Farndale says the evidence now seems to point to Joyce having done a deal with the secret intelligence services: his wife's life and freedom in exchange for his neck. The leverage? The national scandal that could have ensued from him - one of the most hated figures in Nazi Germany - making it known in his trial that he had been a good friend of a high-ranking member of MI5 and that he had secretly been feeding back information on fascists in Britain.

So Margaret never faced any charges. She drank herself to death in London in 1972.

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