Stuart
The UK started with a single letter indicating a registering authority.
For example, a car bearing the registration O 1234 was registered in
Birmingham, 'O' indicating that. When the single letters were
exhausted, a second letter was added, so OA, OB, OC, OE, OF etc. were
allocated to Birmingham. There were a few anomolies, like OD being
Devon not Birmingham, anything containing an 'S' being Scottish, Great
Britain didn't use the letters I, Q and Z, I and Z being used by Ireland
and Northern Ireland, MAN being from the Isle of Man, and so on. So a
car bearing the registration OG 1234 came from Birmingham. When all the
two letter combinations were exhausted, a third letter was added and the
maximum number of numbers reduced from 4 to 3, so Birmingham started
issuing AOA, AOB, AOC etc. This continued until, using the same
example, we arrived at YOX 999. At this point, we turned it all around
and had the numbers first and the letters after. However, some
authorities were going to run out quite quickly, so a new scheme was
introduced in 1963 (although not taken up by all authorities in that
year).
Each year was allocated a suffix letter, 'A' being 1963. So you would
see AOA 123A, being identified as registered in Birmingham in 1963. The
year changed in 1967, when 'E' was used only from 1 January to 31 July.
'F' was 1 August 1967 to 31 July 1968, and so it continued, omitting the
letters 'I', 'O', 'Q', 'U', and 'Z'. Eventually, we got to 31 July
1983, when 'Y' was expired. So we changed it around again, and had a
prefix year letter, starting with 'A' for 1 August 1983 to 31 July 1984.
We are still on that scheme, and the current year letter prefix is 'R'.
However, since computerisation, the second and third letters no,longer
identify the issuing authority. Not sure what will happen on 31 July
2004 ...
Anyway, the plates you have dates from the period August 71-July 72, so
weren't original Tiger plates. They would have been issued by whichever
local authority was allocated WN - I no longer have a reference source.
Colin Mills
B9473407, formerly HKR 180D (1966)registered in Switzerland.
Stuart Brennan wrote:
In the parts room at a United many years back, I purchased
two used (I
think) British number plates for decorative purposes.
Since my Tiger
requires only a rear plate (a lucky quirk of the
Massachusetts
registration system), I put one of the British ones on the
front. A
recent article in British Marque Car Club News decoded some
of the
info on the plates.
I have DWN 741K and AWN 222K. The article said that the
first letter
signifies the year of issue (A for '63, D for '66) and the
next two
letters signify the city or region. Does anyone know what
region WN
represents? And is there anything else to be decoded?
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