Georges Hamel died on the 24th of June, 1972.
It was a small funeral. Surprising, really, given that the was the most important French artist in the aviation and automotive sector, as well as a designer of cars and motorcycles including the Motobécane Superculasse.
He made a series of sketches of motorcycles and cars in 1913 during a hill climb race in Laval, the small town near Le Mans in which he was born in September 1900.
Géo Ham was an aviation enthusiast from an early age - he flew with the famed pilot Guillaumet across the Andes Cordillera in the early 1930s, and was a friend of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
He was a war correspondent in Ethiopia with the Italian Fascists and in Spain with the Franco regime. Then, during WWII he collaborated with the Vichy government. As a result, immediately after the war he was stripped of his titles and briefly imprisoned. Abandoned by most of his friends, his name all but vanished from French history. Only 19 people attended his funeral.
Sources: motomag.com, fr.wikipedia.org, it.wikipedia.org.
