Lord Haw Haw

'Germany calling. Germany calling'. A generation can utter those words in nasal tones, recalling a frighteningly memorable sound; although my dad suggests people here just used to laugh at the utterances.

The voice belonged to a chap known as Lord Haw-Haw who appeared on English-language propaganda broadcasts from his Hamburg base. His goal was to demoralise; and in a frightened world where information was in short supply; and anxiety plentiful, it's easy to see how the broadcasts alarmed. They were notably transmitted, via 78s, on the huge Radio Luxembourg frequency.

Jonah Barrington in the Daily Express is said to have created the Haw Haw name: 'He speaks English of the haw-haw, dammit-get-out-of-my-way-variety'; so one can see that the term originally was applied to a host of such broadcasters, but latterly to the most famous.

William Joyce was born in the United States and brought up in Ireland. As a Fascist, he fled to become a key broadcaster in English.

He was captured by British forces in Germany, in a wood on the Denmark border, just as the War ended, and hanged for treason in Wandsworth on 3 January 1946. The prosecution had argued that, having lied about his nationality to obtain a British passport, he owed allegiance to the king.