Hello John, much ta for the lift offer
All being well we've got a van from work earmarked for us that weekend. Mind you, we said that last year only to have it whipped from under us at half past two on the Friday afternoon, leaving me to throw my tent in a rucksack & walk to Jean's. Watch this space......
Right then Bob, you may wish you'd never asked how a 1960 vehicle could have a number like 860 W by the time this life-long number plate buff has finished waffling on, but if we're all sitting comfortably, I'll begin....
Number plates were first issued in the UK in December 1903, in the format "A 1234" or "AA 1234". (contury to popular opinion, A 1 was not the very first plate to be issued, but that's another story) These single-letter-first & double-Letter-first formats were able to keep pace with rising vehicle registrations until some areas began reaching the high nine-thousand ranges early in the 1930s. These plates could only go as high as "AA 9999" so what was a county to do when it got there?
They introduced a third letter to produce AAA 123-format, that's what. The first such appering in March 1933. By the end of the '30s, most of the more populus areas had gone over to three-letter-three-number plates. Twenty years or so later, several areas were soon on the point of reaching AAA 999 in their series, so in mid 1953, some areas were given clearance to reverse their plates to give 123 AAA format, with other areas following as & when.
Such was the rise of popular motoring in the '50s & '60s, it took some areas such as Middlesex & Surrey to name but two, a scant ten years to reach 999 AAA, compared to the twenty years it had taken to exhaust the AAA 123 format. This put the local councils(No DVLA back then) in a right old tizzy as to what to do when the reverse format plates ran out, & so sat down to think.. Meanwhile time was running out in some areas, & so they began to issue 1234 AA format plates from about 1960 onwards. For some other very populus areas, even the reverse four-number, two-letter format was not enough to tide them over, & so seven areas reached absulute desparation point & began issuing the very last format of plates then avalible, the very rare single-letter-last plate such as this Scootacar had. Remember, there were only 9,999 possible plates left to issue in this last-ditch format.
Only seven Counties had to issue single-letter-last plates, being Staffordshire (E), Essex (F), Liverpool (K), Manchester (N), Derby (R), Leeds (U) & Sheffield (W) Then, in Febuary 1963 came the long-awaited salvation in the form of the year-letter, which allowed these seven counties to breath easy once again, being blanket-issued by all counties from January 1965 onwards regardless of if any county had actully ran out of non-year-letter plates or not.
Rather famously, a lot of Scottish areas had never even got as far as issuing AAA 123-format plates by January 1965, therefore all those unissued three-letter, three-number Scotish plates were to gain a new lease of life from August 1983 onwards, as "Age-Related" plates for all those old cars which had lost their original number somehow.
Then in about 2006, some areas had even started to run out of these Scottish age-related plates, and so the DVLA now delves into the large stock of "reversed" 123 AAA format plates whic several counties never originally issued. These new AR plates can always be identified by always having an "X" as it's first letter. When you get your Inter registered, it will have a plate reading "123
XAA".
But I digress. As can be seen, number plate formates through the ages went full circle, as in; A 1234, AA 1234, AAA 123, 123 AAA, 1234 AA & finally 1234 A before the new AAA 123A series of 1963. There really isn't very many single-letter-last plates left any more, and even fewer still on the original vehicle it was issued to. I've been hunting such a plate for my own collection for years now but with no joy. Therefore if anyone has an ORIGINAL single-letter-last plate from one of the above-mentioned areas cluttering up their shed, I am in the market for it. Best price paid....
