On September 18, radio critic Jonah Barrington – pen name of Cyril Carr Dalmaine – was the first to brand the anonymous plummy voice he heard with the nickname “Lord Haw-Haw”. He wrote scathingly: “I imagine him having a receding chin, a questing nose, thin yellow hair brushed back, a monocle, a vacant eye, a gardenia in his buttonhole. Rather like PG Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster…” The moniker would stick when the anonymous voice was revealed as belonging to William Joyce, a scar-faced Anglo-American traitor who had begun broadcasting fascist propaganda. Over the next five years, Joyce would go on to become the scourge of the airwaves.

It is estimated that, at his peak, six million Britons regularly tuned in to his transmissions. Now, 80 years on from Joyce’s first broadcasts, we can reveal the story of how he was finally captured and brought to justice, thanks to a British soldier who was, ironically, a Jew who had fled Hitler’s Germany. Born in 1906 in New York to an Irish father and English mother, Joyce’s family moved to Ireland where, as a young man, he dabbled with working for British intelligence. He went on to study English at the University of London, became a teacher and once said: “From my earliest days, I was taught to love England and her Empire.” But by the 1920s, Joyce began to fall under the spell of fascism and in a spat with communist sympathisers, he was slashed from his earlobe to mouth leaving him with a distinctive scar across his right cheek. Joyce was soon giving speeches for the British Union of Fascists but believed its leader Sir Oswald Mosley was too moderate and formed his own pro-Nazi and anti-semitic organisation.

Anglo-American traitor William Joyce was dubbed Lord Haw-Haw

In 1939, Joyce was tipped off that he was about to be arrested and fled for Germany with his wife Margaret just a week before hostilities broke out. He was quickly recruited by the Nazis, keen to use his background to help them wage a propaganda war through the radio. Although Joyce was of ordinary stock, he had developed a nasally, upper-class English accent that the Nazis believed would give their message credibility and authenticity. At first, Joyce broadcast anonymously but, as the popularity of his evening broadcasts grew, he was introduced on German radio, complete with his Express moniker, as: “William Joyce, otherwise known as Lord Haw-Haw!” His sarcastic and sneering short-wave transmissions from Hamburg would always start with “Germany Calling” before a tirade of arguments designed to convince his British audience to surrender. The Third Reich’s head of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, would describe him as “the best horse in my stable” and Joyce was rewarded for his treachery with German citizenship.

Facist sympathiser William Joyce had a distinctive scar across his right cheek

At home, the name Haw-Haw was being used in everything from advertisements to comic routines. Many Brits, bored by the stodgy wartime BBC output, admitted they listened in not because they sympathised with Haw-Haw’s message but to have a good laugh at his haughty tone. But as the Second World War began to turn against the Nazis and British resolve hardened, Joyce’s power began to wane. As the Allies closed in on Berlin, Joyce gave a final, drunken, rambling broadcast on April 30, 1945, before signing off with a final defiant, “Heil Hitler and farewell”. Joyce and his wife then went into hiding near Flensburg, on the Danish border. A month later, on May 28, a dishevelled figure was spotted gathering firewood by two British soldiers, Captain Bertie Lickorish and Lieutenant Geoffrey Perry members of T-Force, the unit tasked with securing Germany’s scientific and industrial assets. They had begun to engage the man in conversation in English when Lieutenant Perry had a lightbulb moment. He knew Haw-Haw was rumoured to be in the area and thought he recognised the distinctive accent of the man in front of them. He asked him: “You wouldn’t, by any chance, be William Joyce would you?” Taking up the story today, his son Nick Perry, a publishing executive, says: “Joyce had such a distinctive voice and my father suddenly realised who it was.” In response to the question, Joyce reached for his pocket.

William Joyce surrounded by armed guards as he arrives on a stretcher at a hospital near Luneberg

Believing that he was going for a weapon, Lieutenant Perry shot him… in the buttocks. Nick says: “They were at close quarters and he didn’t want to mortally wound the man, he just wanted to disable him.” In fact, Joyce didn’t have a gun, he had been reaching for his papers drawn up in the fake name of Wilhelm Hansen. But when Captain Lickorish and Lieutenant Perry searched the wounded man, now sporting four holes in his buttocks, they were astonished to find another set of papers in the name of William Joyce.

Hitler: Lord Haw-Haw carried out propaganda work for the Nazi leader

There was a good measure of poetic justice in the chance capture. Lieutenant Perry had been born Horst Pinschewer in Berlin to a German Jewish family who had sent him to Britain in the 1930s to escape Nazi persecution. He had eventually been allowed up to join the Army and, following D-Day, helped liberate Belsen concentration camp. He’d then been given the job of helping set up a free radio station in Hamburg. Amazingly, just three weeks before stumbling upon Joyce, Lieutenant Perry had been broadcasting from the very chair and microphone from which Haw-Haw had given his splenetic broadcasts. Nick Perry says: “The coincidence was extraordinary and it was a supreme irony. “It was pure chance that my father ended up catching Joyce. Lord Haw-Haw might not have been caught and he might have gone on to lead an anonymous life in Germany. “People felt terribly betrayed by this man who pumped Nazi propaganda into their homes.” READ MORE: The truth of Roosevelt's ‘secret Hitler map’

Hitler: A drunk-sounding Lord Haw-Haw finished his last broadcast with a 'Heil Hitler'