Claims To Have Tried To Kill Joyce

Northern Advocate, 20 December 1945, Page 6

Claims To Have Tried To Kill Joyce

(Rec. 3 p.m.) LONDON, Dec. 19. When the case against Walter Purdy, a Royal Navy junior engineer, for high treason was resumed at Old Bailey today, Mr J. P. Edey, K.C., for the defence said Purdy while in Germany plotted against the life of William Joyce, whom he loathed.

The Germans subjected Purdy to illtreatment, the marks of which he still bore.

Purdy, in evidence, said he joined the Ilford branch of the British Union of Fascists in 1934 when he was 16 and remained a member for only one month. He tried to escape from camps to which he was sent in Germany so that he could have another “crack” at the enemy. Purdy said he sent letters to a woman in London intending that they should reach Scotland Yard. The letters included a weather code in the form of a poem which was meant for the R.A.F. He also claimed to have helped Allied airmen by making oscillations on a radio set in a flat in Berlin where he lived for a time. Purdy referred to two attempts which he declared he made, to kill Joyce. On one occasion a suitcase packed with hand grenades was left under the seat of a railway carriage in which Joyce was travelling, but the mechanism failed. .

Purdy denied that he gave the Germans information about a tunnel or secret radio at a war prisoners camp. He declared that the Germans kept him in solitary confinement and tortured him after a preliminary courtmartial at which he was charged on 11 counts of sabotage and communicating with the enemy by means of radio, and attempted murder. He was sentenced to death at the final court-martial.