These photos are from my dad’s trip to Le Mans in 1959, with his friend Bill Greenstreet. The photos relating to the race are in the Motorsport section – this page is everything else from the trip.
They didn’t take the direct route – they dipped into Belgium, folllowed by Reims and Chartres before getting to Le Mans, and on the way back they went to Arromanches.
One item worthy of note – for the three years that they went to Le Mans, and on the way back from Monaco in 1962, my dad and Bill stayed at a hotel called La Calandre. Back in 2013 I received an email from a chap called Paul McCue with information about the significance of the hotel – it was an important “letter box’” during WW2 for a section of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), and was used by one of their most successful and courageous agents, Andre Dubois. The owners, the Braults, were eventually arrested by the Germans. Dubois’s daughter is still alive – he was executed by the Germans.
I doubt my dad had any idea about that – his main memory of the place seemed to be a rather lovely waitress…
