Mary Kenny
Dedicated Followers of Fascism
Fascist in the Family: The Tragedy of John Beckett MP
By Francis Beckett
Routledge 388pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Searching for Lord Haw-Haw: The Political Lives of William Joyce
By Colin Holmes
Routledge 494pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
A partnership of Beckett and Joyce might suggest an alliance between two of Ireland’s greatest writers, but in this case the individuals in question are John Beckett and William Joyce. Ejected from Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF), they together formed the National Socialist League in 1937, a farcical enterprise that, deservedly, swiftly fizzled out. Beckett thought Joyce too far gone in his mad anti-Semitism – you can say that again – and yet Beckett retained a certain loyalty to the man who became notorious during the Second World War as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, sending him a kindly letter just before his execution for treason in 1946.
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