The remarkable William Grover Williams

His real name, at least the one with which he was born on January 16th 1903, was William Charles Frederick Grover, but it seems it was as William Grover-Williams that he was murdered 42 years later.

The French connection came from his mother Hermance. He was born and grew up there too, being sent to England only in 1914 after the German invasion where he lived briefly, before moving to Monte Carlo in 1916. Taught to drive by his sister’s boyfriend, he was soon earning money as a young teenager chauffeur. Returning to Paris after the war, he became obsessed with all things mechanical, tearing an Indian motorcycle back to its constituent parts, lovingly rebuilding it just so he could dismantle it again.

By the age of 16 he was driving a Rolls-Royce for the painter Sir William Orpen, touring between his properties in Paris, one of which contained his mistress Yvonne Aupicq who, at just 21, was far closer in age to young Willy Grover than his boss. She will be returning to this story shortly.

Willy worked hard, saved money and started racing motorcycles under the name W Williams to stop his parents finding out what he was up to. By the end of 1924 still aged just 21, he’d tucked away enough to buy a Hispano-Suiza which he promptly entered into the 1925 Monte Carlo Rally. But the Hispano was no racing car and after a few fruitless hillclimbs he returned to Paris to dream of what he really wanted: a Bugatti Grand Prix car.

How a young man without a private income could possibly even have entertained such a possibility is hard to see, but as Joe Saward points out in his wonderful book ‘The Grand Prix Saboteurs’, young whatever-you-want-to-call-him was no ordinary man. ‘… A young 22 year old without a family fortune could barely dream of buying a Bugatti. And yet he did. How he did it we will probably never know.’ Already the cloak of mystery was descending.

He bought a Type 35, the pre-eminent racing car of its time, and proceeded to make remarkably little impression with it until the Grand Prix de Provence at Miramas where 43 competitors in five classes had to be whittled down to 16 finalists of which he was one. Nearly two hours and 50 laps later, Willy crossed the finish line in 3rd place, behind the victorious and soon to become Land Speed Record breaker Sir Henry Segrave, but notably ahead of one Louis Chiron who was a good enough driver to have a brand new Bugatti named after him 90 years later.

Willy returned to Paris where his friendship with Yvonne (whom he had started calling Didi) grew, especially when Sir William was back with his wife and family in Ireland. At some unspecified stage, they fell in love. But while his private life was showing promise, his professional life was not: despite being hired by Sunbeam Talbot Darracq as a factory driver for 1927, the few races he did ended up with a string of poor results, retirements capped by the cash-strapped STD shutting down its race department.

But 1928 was far better. Back behind the wheel of another Bugatti he’d gone to collect from the factory for an owner but somehow ended up acquiring for himself, he won the French Grand Prix at the Saint-Gaudens circuit at the foot of the Pyrenees. He had the fastest car and the entry wasn’t world class, but the handicapping system had removed his on paper advantage (the car that came second started over half an hour before him in a 2hr 30min race), and it was, if nothing else, a proper win in an internationally recognised race. As a result, Ettore Bugatti agreed to let him drive his factory cars.

So equipped he went to Monza in September for the Italian Grand Prix, and this time he was up against the best in the world – Nuvolari, Chiron, Varzi, Campari – with no excuses. And for the first four laps he led the lot. A slender indication of his potential it may have been, but it was there to see, at least until the Type 35C’s hard pressed 2-litre straight-eight supercharged engine quit on him.

But those who noticed would probably have not have held the memory for long as the race would soon be remembered only for the fact that 13 laps later, Emilio Materassi lost control of his Talbot, left the track and went into the crowd, killing himself and at least 20 others. To date it remains by a distance the worst accident in Grand Prix history and, in all motor racing, dwarfed only by the 1955 Le Mans disaster.

That was the end of racing for 1928 but if Willy thought he’d be secure as a works Bugatti driver in 1929, Ettore was soon to disabuse him of that notion. Times were tough, the Type 35 was a five-year-old design and the Alfa and Maserati opposition wasn’t getting any slower. He was told that if he was to race a Bugatti, he’d need to buy one. It took him until April to put together the bones of a deal that would put him behind the wheel of an already much raced 1928 Type 35B. But he painted it British Racing Green to make it clear it was very much not a works car, and headed for a novel new event to be held around the streets of Monaco.

The idea for the race came from the fertile mind of Antony Noghès, head of the Automobile Club de Monaco who, 18 years earlier, had also conceived the Monte Carlo Rally. He wanted the ACM to join what would become the FIA but was turned down on account of there being no motorsport event that actually took place entirely within the Principality. The Monaco Grand Prix was simply the solution to that problem.

It was somewhat fortunate for our hero that the date of the first Monaco Grand Prix coincided with that of the third Mille Miglia, neatly removing the need to deal with the likes of Nuvolari, Varzi and Campari. And when the ballot for the grid was drawn he’d have felt luckier too: he was placed fifth, while far and away his biggest threat – the 7-litre supercharged Mercedes-Benz SSK of Rudolf Caracciola – was 15th, last but one on the grid.

Realising he’d rarely get a better chance to make his mark, ‘W Williams’ as his entry form called him, made the most of the opportunity. Possibly knowing the roads better than most, he rocketed away from the start and by the time the cars came around again, he was leading the race.

But soon there was an enormous white menace in his mirrors. Germany’s greatest driver until Michael Schumacher had wrestled his beast of a machine through the field despite it being quite unsuited to the circuit and soon Caracciola was on his tail. Lap after lap Willy fended him off but on lap 30 the German ace was through. Our man fought back brilliantly and even got ahead again, recording the fastest lap of the race (2min 15sec) in the process, but perhaps mindful of overstretching his old engine and blowing it up as he had at Monza, eventually he let the big Benz go because, as he would have realised from the start, he didn’t need to be ahead at half distance to be leading at the finish.

All he needed was to use less fuel, not difficult in a 2.3-litre car weighing less than half that of its 7-litre rival. At the pitstops Willy splashed and dashed, while Rudolf was stuck for four minutes as they replenished his car’s enormous tank and replaced its shot rear tyres. Right there and then, the outcome of the race was decided. Willy won, with Caracciola third, over two minutes behind. Bugatti was delighted and took the young Anglo-Frenchman back under his wing, gave him a car for the French Grand Prix in June, held this time at Le Mans, which he duly won again. That autumn he married Didi. He was on top of the world.

Sadly, however, aged just 26, his best racing days were already behind him. The 1930 season yielded no notable results and several major injuries after a crash in a race near Rome, and in 1931 he recorded his final major victory, winning the Belgian Grand Prix, sharing a twin-cam Type 51 with Caberto Conelli in a ten-hour race, superbly fending off the works Alfa 8C of Nuvolari and Borzacchini. And it’s probably fair to point out it was this, and not Monaco, that really was the greatest result of his career. But that was it: though he won some local sand races near his home at La Baule, at the end of 1933, W Williams announced he would race no more. And save a brief and fruitless return in 1936, he stayed true to his word.

I’m not going to dwell on the sad coda to the life of the man who became known as William Grover-Williams, not because it’s not worth telling but, on the contrary, it is as important a story as the racing world has ever produced. It involves other staggeringly brave drivers who risked and, indeed, lost their lives defending their country and democracy against the scourge of Nazism. In time I will tell their tale and try to give it at least some of the space it deserves.

But for now suffice to say that when war broke out Willy found himself a chauffeur once more, to British army officials in Paris. When the invasion came he escaped to England via Brittany where he joined the secret Special Operations Executive (SOE) and parachuted into France in May 1942 to help coordinate resistance, report back, spy, sabotage and generally make himself as much of a nuisance for the Germans as he could. Just over a year later he was arrested in Paris by the Gestapo and after a presumably appalling interrogation sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in the north east of Germany where he was executed in March 1945, just weeks before the end of the war.

There are stories that he survived, that his alleged death was just a cover story to allow him to resume his vital work for the British Government, but there is no theory I’ve seen – and there have been plenty – that has not been thoroughly debunked. Certainly Didi never saw him again from 1942 to her death in 1973. Lovely to think otherwise though it would be, I have no doubt that Willy died at Sachsenhausen in 1945, his life snuffed out by the brutal thugs whose evil agenda he’d fought so hard and bravely to thwart. Compared to that, the fact he was also the first to win the Monaco Grand Prix seems scarcely important at all.