What’s in a number? by Michael Benton

As Shakespeare famously wrote for Juliet: “What's in a name? that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” I beg the question then, “What’s in a number? that which we call a classic car with any other number would be the same”. Or would it? In this country the number plate is the most important and quickly identifiable part of a vehicle’s identity and in most cases it may be the only way we have of identifying a once cherished classic vehicle. If like me you don’t have immediate recall of chassis and engine numbers, no doubt you can remember the registration numbers of important cars that you once owned. Amongst the other useless information I keep in my brain are some of my old car numbers. For instance I have instant recall of my first ‘old car’ registration - CG 2958, which was on a 1933 Austin Seven saloon I bought 54 years ago! Lately though I think my brain is reaching maximum capacity, as I wouldn’t bet a tenner on the perfect recall of the cars sitting on my drive at home.

My latest MG is a 1938 VA 1½ litre, which has the registration NVS 737. This is a replacement number and unfortunately I have of the original registration. However the MG Car Club has an active SVW registrar that records chassis numbers and no doubt if I trawled their data base I could find the number. If the proliferation of ‘friends reunited’ columns in classic car magazines is anything to go by, there are quite a few people like me, who would like to know the whereabouts of classic vehicles they once owned. The reason I mention this is that recently I have been reacquainted with a few of my previously owned classic cars including my very first old car, the Austin mentioned previously. It now has a new number but the original is recorded. This has reaffirmed to me what an important part of a cars history the registration number is. I have also recently located two more, a Rolls Royce 20hp and a Daimler 30hp that had retained their original numbers and all three cars are looking beautiful. These recent encounters raised in my mind the thorny problem of whether or not a classic vehicle’s registration number should permanently remain with it. There are always exceptions of course, for instance with seriously important (and seriously expensive) or very famous classic and racing vehicles, history invariably follows them around and most cars of this type are well know and well documented. In these circumstances perhaps the original registration number of lesser importance. As with works of art, the provenance of a classic vehicle may be the majority its value.

A fairly recent case in point is of the very un-extraordinary Jaguar that was used by John Thaw in the Inspector Morse TV series. This is not unusual 2.4 litre Mk2 model in Regency Red registered 248 RPA. Carlton TV purchased the car specifically for the series and it remained in the ownership of Carlton until the series was brought to a close with the death of Morse. In November 2000 at the end of filming, it was raffled and the lucky winner quickly sold the car privately. It was later sold at auction for £53,200 and a ‘nut & bolt’ restoration costing over £100,000 carried out. To buy a similar car without this history today would be a fraction of this price. In fact a fellow Durnovaria member has a beautiful example which I would compare to the very best, but is the the Morse car worth over four times as much? Without the number, what would the car be worth? Without the car, what would the number be worth? No doubt much less than the £153,000 it has cost the new owner and they will now never be separated. I am told it was Aristotle who once wrote "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts" and perhaps that’s true in this case.

Unlike the Morse 248 RPA, the first Scottish registration number ‘S1' had been separated from its 1903 car some time back and I suppose it was fair game on the open market. Registration number ‘S1’ was auctioned by Bonhams’ in 2008 at the Goodwood Revival sale for a world record price of nearly £400,000. This beat the previous record for the registration ‘M1’ by almost £70,000. What was being sold in lot 197 was a retention certificate form V778 issued by the DVLA with the ethereal right to use the number on a vehicle and nothing else. The only purpose I can think of for buying a number without its car attached must be to somehow enhance the status of the driver not the car. We assume that the new owner of S1 must think a lot of himself to spend getting on for half a million on a vehicle number - perhaps he should look out for PEN 1S. This sort of money makes the Morse Jaguar look somewhat of a bargain, at least there was a usable car attached. The practise of buying a number to hide the true age of a modern vehicle or to make up the owner’s name or initials such as 130 BBY (Bobby) which I spotted a few years back on a Bentley, has always left me cold and the point of it escapes me. However it’s a free world and as Sam Weller once said - ‘everyone to his own taste, the old woman said as she kissed the cow’.

Like many enthusiasts of ‘ordinary’ classic vehicles, I have over the years had cars pass through my ownership the registration numbers of which are now probably worth more than the car to which it was attached. Amany others, I have owned AUL 10, KP 181, and CG 2958, CJO 928, CPE 397 and - (do I really keep these numbers in my head?). I sold these cars many years ago, but I mention them, as they are particularly relevant to my story. I have to admit that in the past I have been once guilty of the ‘crime’ of selling a registration number. I still feel slightly guilty (but sort of justified) about the sale of this particular number, CJO 928. It resided on a quite ordinary 1950s black Austin A35 saloon with no particular history. The car was in reasonably sound condition having been subject to a re-paint and a non-original engine transplant. It went like the ‘clappers’ being capable of speeds far exceeding this driver’s ability to keep it under control. When the novelty wore off I advertised the car for sale at £1,000 or near offer, complete with its CJO 928 number plate. I had no offers at that price and the car remained unsold for several months. Not wanting to lose on the deal I reluctantly made the decision to sell the number CJO 928 to Elite Registrations for £800. Elite in turn sold it on to a Christopher James Oliphant for his BMW. Now with its new allocated number I offered it up for sale once again but at £800 – it sold almost immediately, making a grand total of £1,600. This of course reverses Aristotle’s adage, as in this particular case the whole was worth less that the sum of the parts.

On the other hand I had spent over two years hard work and a lot of money on restoring a lovely little 1928 Austin Seven ‘Chummy’. I must say when finished it looked a picture in kingfisher blue and I was very proud that I had recreated it from the proverbial ‘box of bits’ that it once was. The bits came with that vital original registration log book and document from DVLA allowing use of its original number KP 181 which had been with it since it first rolled out of the showroom door. I found the remains of KP 181 on the premises of a local Dairy in Smallfield where it had seen service as a milk delivery vehicle during and after the war. The car had quite a lot of local history being previously registered to ‘Lord’ John Sangers Circus who over-wintered their animals at Burstow, just a stone’s throw from where I ‘disinterred’ its constituent bits. At that time you would not have been at all surprised to meet Circus elephants being exercised in the village and it has been recorded that the elephants were also used for ploughing land in the area, now I would like to see a photo of that! Eventually after a few years of fun driving around in a car that was not much longer than its owner in prone position, I decided that I needed another car with a bit more legroom. Not wanting to separate the car from its original number I sold the car complete with its KP 181 plate to a dealer for what seemed a more than fair price at the time. Sometime later though I pondered on whether the number had stayed with the car, I suspected not and no doubt that’s why I was offered such a good price! Perhaps I should have not been so precious and sold the number myself. At least I would have profited from all my hard work. A couple of years ago whilst browsing for information about my old classics, I spotted my Austin Chummy registration number KP 181 for sale with Elite Registrations for £12,500! I guess the car itself was worth about the same, even with an aged-related DVLA new number.

Being of a ‘certain age’ my preferred viewing on TV is period drama/mystery old black & white British movies, or anything that might feature old cars. Put me in front of a TV showing Poirot, Miss Marple or an episode of Heartbeat or Foyle’s War or ‘Talking Pictures TV’ on channel 81 and I’m a happy bunny. I do admit though to driving Sarah round the bend in the process as I reel of a string of old car makes & names and stopping the film and rewinding as they come in and out of shot. Some years ago during the original screening of the vet series ‘All Creatures Great and Small’, I watched an old Morris saloon driven by the character James Herriot rattling along the lanes of the Yorkshire Dales bearing the number of what I thought was CPE 397. This sighting baffled me as at the time I owned CPE 397 on a 1935 15 HP Daimler Coupé. I began to wonder if I had been mistaken, this being well before the days of ‘stop and rewind’ and the moment had passed. I had often thought about this incident until a few years later when the episode was rerun. Sure enough the number on James Herriot’s Morris was most definitely CPE 397. By the time of the rerun I had sold the car so I didn’t pursue the matter any further. However, a while ago I was flicking across the TV channels whilst testing and installing my newly acquired toy – a USB digital TV attachment for my computer, when quite by chance the very same episode was once again being screened on ITV3. Using my newly acquired skills of ‘rewind, pause & capture’ I was able to freeze the image on my computer for posterity. However I am still no nearer to solving the mystery and I would really like to know how this came about. I subsequently sold the Daimler to a tour operator from Italy, who was setting up a business of classic car tours in in Scotland for enthusiast in Italy. I don’t think the venture got far, but I have tour brochure featuring the car, but what an Italian would make of driving around Scotland on the wrong side of the road, using its rather temperamental pre-select gearbox with ‘Fluid Flywheel” I dread to think.

What has also prompted me to raise the question of registration number selling, a while back during a re-run of ‘Poirot’ on ITV3, amongst the many vintage cars I spotted around the set was AUL 10, attached to the 1934 Austin 10 Cabriolet that I once owned. Nearly 40 years after my ownership I was pleased to see that it still had its original registration number. With a deft ‘rewind, pause & capture’ I was able to also record this moment on disc for posterity. I found AUL 10 back in 1969, still scarred with the shrapnel marks that it had received when nearby Plymouth had been bombed during the War. It was a proverbial barn find and hadn’t been driven since it was laid up at the start of hostilities in 1940. Superficially it looked good, so after the usual petrol, oil and tyre check I jumped in and drove it the 100 miles back to Weymouth – as you did in those days. A move to Surrey from Dorset put a halt to the restoration and the car had to be sold and I hadn’t seen it since then. I was particularly pleased to see it still in use and the current owner having fun with it. As humble as that car may be, there is a lot of social history attached to it and I find this fascinating and a big part of the joy of ownership of an old vehicle. The new owners had made a splendid job of the restoration, but since the Poirot episode the number has been sold and now resides on a 2017 2268cc Diesel Mitsubishi in brown – what a travesty!

A 1959 MGA 1500 I once owned, like a great many of its stable mates was an American import. Sadly there was no USA history, but I sold it with a large file of UK documentation and it will now keep its non- transferable number. Rather sensibly the DVLA allocated it the age-related number of NSU 768, which I quite liked and it suited the car. I expect there is an owner of an NSU car somewhere that would like that number, however a fellow MGOC doctor member at a club meeting pointed out to me that NSU is the common medical acronym for Non Specific Urethritis ‘the clap’ to you and me! Well it did go like the clappers! My previous very original UK model MGA had a lot of well-documented history with it, being a UK special build one-off originally registered DOO 99. The car managed to keep it’s number up until just a few years before I bought it. Had the number still been with the car, might I have been tempted to sell it?

As classic vehicle owners we may find ourselves being faced with the proposition of selling a valuable registration and the dilemma of selling an original registration number that has been on our vehicle from new. Should it be kept as an integral part of a car’s history and not be sold under any circumstances? Even though the sale of the number could help pay for the vehicle’s restoration. Also I guess, everyone has their price, even me – especially if it’s £400,000! Registration number 25 O was sold for £518,000 to a Ferrari trader in 2014 by DVLA. I suppose if you owned a Ferrari 250 GTO like the one that sold in 2018 for £40 million, then half a million for a number plate must seem like pocket money!

It may be amusing to see these numbers on vehicles, but for my part I am interested in registration numbers only as an integral part of a vehicle’s history. I take pleasure in being able to recognise and identify cars that I have known or once owned. I guess it would be a lot easier if the decision had been made for us by DVLA not to allow historic numbers to be bought and sold. However as they make many billions of pounds out of the sale of registration numbers themselves, the practise is hardly likely to be stopped. DVLA sales have raised more than £2 billion for Treasury coffers by selling off un issued registrations. As I said everyone has a price – even Governments!

Sadly many classic and vintage cars and motorbikes have now lost their original numbers forever to the fad of de-aging and personalisation of modern vehicles. So getting back to my original question - what’s in a number? Do you think that as classic vehicle enthusiasts we have the right to buy and sell our ‘property’ as we like and it’s just a bit of fun and nobody else’s concern but our own and to hell with original numbers? Or do you think that classic registrations should be non-transferable as I do and that buying personal number plates is waste money and a complete load of old BOL 10X?

Drive safely,

PS: if anyone has for sale:

I might be interested if the price is right!

NVS 737 & owner 25 O - DVLA’s £518,000 number plate

More photos on the next page -