William Grover-Williams (b. 1903), the son of English horsebreeder, Frederick Grover, and his French wife, was brought up in Hauts-de-Seine, Hertfordshire and Monaco. Having caught the motoring bug at the end of World War One, the teenage Grover began competing in motorcycling events under the assumed name of W. Williams, to conceal his activities from his disapproving family. In 1919 he obtained a job as chauffeur for William Orpen, an Irish painter who was acting as official artist for the Paris Peace Conference, and later married Orpen's discarded mistress, Yvonne Aupicq.
During the 1920s, still using the Williams alias, Grover took up motor racing in Bugattis, and in 1928 won the French Grand Prix; the next year he went one better, winning both the French and the inaugral race in Monaco. In 1931 he added the Belgian Grand Prix to his list of honours. By the beginning of the war, however, he had dropped out of the sport. He had become known by a double-barrelled combination of his original surname and his racing alias.
"Williams" en route to victory at Monaco.
In 1940 Grover fled to England and joined the Royal Army Service Corps, but his perfect French and excellent contacts attracted the interest of SOE (Special Operations Executive), and he was sent into occupied France to help organise resistance in the Paris area. He was not alone; it was only natural that he should seek out the assistance of his pre-war friends, and amongst the other SOE agents involved in the network were two other racing drivers....
Robert Benoist (b. 1895) was the son a gamekeeper on Baron de Rothschild's Rambouillet estate, and had served as a fighter pilot in the First World War. After the war he had gravitated towards motor racing, with his most successful season coming in 1927 when he won the French, Spanish, British and Italian Grands Prix, resulting in a constructor's championship triumph for Delage.
1927 Delage
Benoist's last major race success before he retired in 1937 was winning the Le Mans 24 Hour endurance race. His co-driver in this event was Jean-Pierre Wimille (b. 1908), the son of a motoring journalist. Having made his debut in 1930, Wimille won the Algerian Grand Prix in 1934, and the French in 1936, as well as that year's Deauville Grand Prix, an accident-strewn street race in which two drivers were killed and only 3 cars finished.
Both Benoist and Wimille made their way to England after the fall of France, and joined Grover-Williams at SOE. Working with the "Prosper" (or "Physician") network of Major Francis Suttill, Grover-Williams's "Chestnut" network collected weapons drops in the Rambouillet Forest and stored them at Benoist's home at Auffargis prior to redistribution.
On the night of 10 June 1943, however, a "Prosper" operation went awry when the munitions containers exploded on landing, alerting the Germans. This was a drop at Solonge, not Rambouillet, so didn't directly involve the racing drivers, but it set in train events which led to the arrest of Suttill and the collapse of the "Prosper" operation. In August, Grover-Williams was arrested during a Gestapo raid on the house in Auffargis. Three days later, Benoist was apprehended in Paris, but managed to escape his captors by jumping from a moving vehicle, and then made his way back to England on the "underground railway".
Benoist returned to France in March 1944, when with the codename "Clergyman" he and radio operator Denise Bloch were parachuted in to work with Wimille in the Nantes area. Benoist and Bloch, however, were arrested in June. Wimille avoided capture.
- * -
William Grover-Williams was executed in Sachsenhausen concentration camp sometime in 1945, along with Francis Suttill.
Grover-Williams
- * -
Robert Benoist was killed in Buchenwald in September 1944. (His radio woman Denise Bloch, herself Jewish, was murdered in Ravensbruck in early 1945, at the same time as Violette "Carve Her Name With Pride" Szabo.) He has a small road named after him in his home village of Auffargis, and a couple of others elsewhere, including one in Le Mans.
Benoist
- * -
Jean-Pierre Wimille survived the war and returned to motor racing, winning several races for Alfa Romeo, including the 1948 French and Italian Grands Prix. During practice for the 1949 Buenos Aires Grand Prix, however, he crashed his Simca-Gordini and was killed.
Wimille
No comments:
Post a Comment