Monday 2nd August 1943

The Gestapo arrested two-time winner of the French Grand Prix, William Grover-Williams, a British secret agent who raced as ‘W Williams’, in France. Following the Nazi occupation of France in World War II, Grover-Williams fled to England where he joined the Royal Army Service Corps. Due to his fluency in French and English he was recruited into the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to foster the French Resistance. He recruited fellow racing driver Robert Benoist and together they worked in the Paris region to build up a successful circuit of operatives, forming sabotage cells and reception committees for Allied parachute operations. Grover-Williams was executed at Sachsenhausen concentration camp in the spring of 1945 along with Francis Suttill, another important SOE network leader. However, there is a theory that Grover-Williams may have survived the war, and lived on under an assumed identity as “Georges Tambal” who allegedly lived with Grover-Williams’ widow for many years.