Madam, - I would not wish to amplify or prolong any difference between Professor O'Halpin (December 11th) and myself over the question of my William Joyce biography. I believe passionately in diversity of opinion, upon which fruitful debate, and even knowledge, depends as my dear mother always said: "It would be a poor world if we were all the same."
I am also grateful to be corrected about any errors of fact, as correction is the route to self-improvement. But as yours is a newspaper of record, I would just like to clarify a point about research sources in this endeavour.
Professor O'Halpin states that people would be best advised to turn to Peter Martland's book, Lord Haw-Haw: The English Voice of Nazi Germany. Mr Martland's book is an excellent resource for anyone wishing to be informed about documents available in the British National Archive pertaining to William Joyce, but the text is based purely upon official British Intelligence records. I, too, have used the British National Archive, but I have had recourse to much wider sources which were not in Mr Martland's remit.
These include: the National Archives of Ireland (which hold the papers on Michael Joyce's properties in Connacht), the Irish Military Archives, the Beckett papers at Sheffield University, the Sheffield archives on A.K. Chesterton and John Angus Macnab, the family of Angus Macnab, the Imperial War Museum, the Quentin Joyce family archive, the family archive of Joyce's lawyer, Derek Curtis-Bennett, the full canon of prison letters from William Joyce to his wife, Margaret, (unpublished and privately held by Michael and Doreen Forman), unpublished papers and memoirs made available by the Friends of Oswald Mosley, the archives of the Diocese of Brooklyn in New York, and interviews and correspondence with more than one hundred people in Ireland, England and Germany who had some contact with William Joyce: in addition, support from William's daughter Heather, from William's nephew and step-nephew, from the family of Frank Joyce, William's brother, from Geoffrey Perry, the Jewish-British soldier who arrested Lord Haw-Haw, and most valuably, the collaboration of James Clark, who worked with William Joyce in Berlin, and on a couple of occasions deputised for Joyce as "Lord Haw-Haw", and whose mother, Dorothy Eckersley, helped to get William hired by the Rundfunk in 1939.
A man's life is wider and more complex than that which British Intelligence says about him, and it is from this complexity of sources that I have drawn my research. - Yours, etc.,
MARY KENNY, Kildare Street, Dublin 2.