Classic & Sports Car UK – September 2019

September 2019 Classic & Sports Car 181

CALLING ALL

THE HEROES

S

ydney Charles Houghton Davis

was 52 in 1939. No age to pick a

fight. Yet for ‘Sammy’, and for so

many others, ‘The obvious thing

was to get into this war one way or

another and help with all one’s

power whatever might result.’

So he wrote in A Racing Motorist.

This was a man of skills aplenty. A veteran of

WW1, he demobbed into journalism as sports

editor of The Autocar. And sporting he was,

runner-up at Le Mans in 1925 in a Sunbeam and

winner as a Bentley Boy in 1927, having crashed

from third in ’26. The prototype Paul Frère.

His racing talents weren’t reserved for La

Sarthe, though, regularly featuring at the front

at Britain’s former military base Brooklands –

itself soon to re-enter the theatre of war.

He would have joined an anti-tank battery

until some ‘bussybody [sic] became inquisitive

about my genuine age’. Eventually a lieutenant

in the engineering section of the Royal Army

Ordnance Corps, there he linked up with his

Monte-Carlo teammate Lt Colonel Garrad.

Future Le Mans winners Tony Rolt and

Duncan Hamilton were themselves embroiled,

Rolt fighting at Calais and captured saving a

fellow soldier. Grand Prix racers W Williams

and Robert Benoist had also been running amok

in France; if the latter is familiar, the former

might tragically, unfathomably be not.

William Grover-Williams was born in Paris

to a British father and French mother, and raced

under the British flag with unmitigating distinc-

tion. When Grand Prix cars first took to the

Monaco streets in 1929 it was he on top ahead

of Rudolf Caracciola, supercharged 2.3-litre

Bugatti besting 7-litre Mercedes-Benz SSK.

He’d won the French Grand Prix in 1928 and

again in ’29, and two years later beat Nuvolari to

victory in the two-driver Belgian Grand Prix. As

his success faded his anonymity only grew.

He, too, knew he had a part to play in the war

despite nearing 40. According to Joe Saward’s

comprehensive and unstinting account, Grand

Prix Saboteurs, having initially failed to enlist

Remembering some of the racers that fought, as

Goodwood marks 75 years since the D-Day landings

WORDS JACK PHILLIPS PHOTOGRAPHY MOTORSPORT IMAGES

Williams was accepted when the rules changed.

Bugatti racer Benoist, meanwhile, had to

scamper across France in an Atalante in the face

of the Nazi invasion. A Grand Prix winner,

including all four of Europe’s rounds of the 1927

World Championship and at Le Mans in 1937

with Jean-Pierre Wimille, his prowess behind

the wheel helped him escape capture.

As Benoist became a leading figure of the

French Resistance, with some untraceable and

easily deniable assistance from Ettore Bugatti,

Williams joined the SOE and was despatched

home to Paris. The pair formed the Chestnut

network, reporting to London and hampering

the occupation – without arousing suspicion,

despite racing around together in a Bugatti.

Williams was caught in 1943 by the Sicher-

heitsdienst, or SD, at Benoist’s house and would

see out his days in ever increasing severity of

interrogation. He took his secrets to his grave at

Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Benoist continued his silent heroic work in

the shadows unabated, escaping the clutches

Left: Williams races away

to his greatest triumph in a

Bugatti T35B, winning the

1929 Monaco Grand Prix

and becoming its inaugural

victor. Beside (4) is

Philippe ‘Phi-Phi’ Étancelin

in a T35C. The field also

featured Rudolf Caracciola

and René Dreyfus