William Grover-Williams

Shot by the Gestapo, executed at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, killed on a death march from Sachsenhausen. All of those horrific things are said to have happened to Captain Charles Frederick William Grover-Williams, Grand Prix winner, member of the wartime ultra-secret French section of Britain’s Special Operations Executive and French Resistance fighter, in 1945. The truth of the matter is nobody really knows how, when, or where he died. There is a suggestion that he turned up at his wife Yvonne’s house in Normandy after the war and lived there with her, incognito, until he was killed in a road accident in the early 1970s. According to fellow Monte Carlo Grand Prix winner, the late René Dreyfus, Grover’s family received a small package of his personal possessions in 1943, but no explanation of his death. Question: Did those things really belong to Grover-Williams?

He is obviously dead now—otherwise he would be 106 years-old—but if any Vintage Racecar reader knows what happened to Williams after World War II, put us all out of our misery and write a letter to the editor telling the story.