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The Grand Prix Saboteurs
Independent, The (London), Mar 5, 2007 by David Tremayne
The best grand prix racing stories are not always those that get told. The Grand Prix Saboteurs, "the extraordinary untold story of the Grand Prix drivers who became British secret agents in World War II" came frighteningly close to remaining in that province. It was only author Joe Saward's unwavering determination to tell the tale that enabled it finally to see the light of a publishing day.
Saward invested 18 years of research into this epic, and thus we learn much more about the motor racing careers of two of its central characters - English-born Willie Grover-Williams, the man who won the first ever Monaco GP in 1929; and the Frenchman Robert Benoist who, had such a thing existed in 1927, would have been that season's World Champion.
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The outcome is a fascinating and long overdue insight into an underwritten era of motor sport history. But it is significantly more than that, for it also embraces the Second World War and the events that led both to work for Maurice Buckmaster's shadowy Special Operations Executive in France against the occupying Germans and, ultimately, to their grisly fates.
Saward's forensic investigation into a complex true story that is a combination of sporting endeavour and world conflict, puts flesh on the bones of long departed ghosts and rattles along with all the drama and pace of a John le Carre thriller. It does not shrink from putting accepted wisdom into fresh perspective. The British resistance heroine Violette Szabo may not have been fully deserving of all the praise heaped upon her posthumously, while Benoist's own treacherous brother, Maurice, is also judged simply by the truth.
The book has "movie" written all through it, and is an important addition to the libraries of any grand prix aficionados, who will find themselves in thrall to the courage of men such as Grover- Williams and Benoist, and women such as Szabo, Denise Bloch and Andree Borrel, who resisted with equal zeal. Saward tells the stories of these disparate characters with commendable honesty and no unnecessary embellishment, content to let the facts he has unearthed speak for themselves. This they do with great poignancy and eloquence.
As a social document, and a tribute to the oft-unsung members of SOE, The Grand Prix Saboteurs stands as a monument to those who chose to stand and fight, and, when their time came, to pay the ultimate price for their passionate belief in freedom.
Copyright 2007 Independent Newspapers UK Limited
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