Today, National Numbers is going full number plate nerd with a brand new blog series.
From funny stories to interesting releases, we’ll head back in time and regale you with our favourite tales from the world of UK number plates. We’ll explore reg from different areas of the country and find the very best number plate news and trivia for you to enjoy, covering the hilarious, the peculiar, and everything in between.
For the first blog of the series, we’re exploring an innocent number plate release that took a weird turn for the people of Dorset. With upset car owners and residents registering vehicles in other areas, what better place to start?
But first, some context.
Number plate formats from the 20th century
Let’s start at the beginning with A 1 - one of the first number plates registered in the UK. It was released in 1903 under the Motor Car Act, where it was made mandatory for every vehicle to have a registration mark displayed in a prominent position.
The first UK number plates used the first letter(s) to denote the geographical area they were issued, which is still the case for most reg, including new style or millennium registrations. With these, the first two letters of the reg denote the area it was registered, and they’re known as the memory tag, age identifier, or area code.
Prefix numbers also include a memory tag, with the final two letters indicating the area of registration. Suffix plates follow suit but with the area identifier being the last two letters of the first three letter sequence.
Every county for themselves
In the early days of UK number plates, there were very limited vehicles on the roads, especially when compared to the 40 million+ of today. The number by the end of 1904 was around the 23,000 mark, with most counties only having a hundred or two hundred vehicles in total.
And while there was no central governing body in charge of number plates, like we have today with the DVLA, each county was designated an area identifier. For Dorset, this was BF, which led to some issues with local motorists.
Bloody fools of Dorset
At the turn of the 20th century, and well into modern day for that matter, a popular phrase in Dorset was “bloody fool”. In 1904, Dorset registrations started with the letters “BF”, which many locals felt offended by as some of them took it to stand for “bloody fool”.
In fact, lots of Dorset motorists started registering their vehicles outside of the county as a result, which meant that the Dorset Automobile Association lost out on sales. So, in November of 1904, the Local Government Board received a barrage requests to change the letters, so locals weren’t insulting themselves on the roads.
They obliged, and in England, since the newest number plate combination was FT, which was linked to Tynemouth (just up the road from National Numbers), the next step in the sequence was… FU.
FU to the people of Dorset
As you can imagine, FU wasn’t greeted with much enthusiasm, but FV was only available to cars registered in Scotland, and FW wasn’t a preferred option either for unknown reasons.
So, the people of Dorset ended up with FX in 1904, just before Christmas. What a Christmas present to receive! For the less than 150 people in the county with a driver’s license, that is.
Around 80 Dorset motorists made the switch from BF to FX in the coming months, but it wasn’t mandatory to do so until 1921, when all BFs had to be re-registered with updated registration marks.
Most of those who kept their BF number plates wore them as badges of honour up until that year, particularly those from the Blandford Forum area, for obvious reasons.
In 1991, the DVLA issued the first BF registration since the 1920s, and BF 50 went at auction for £6,400 plus VAT and fees. This might sound a lot, but to find a reg of this significance now would set you back tens of thousands of pounds.
Buy private number plates with National Numbers
At National Numbers, we have a range of BF number plates available to buy, including BF 2 for just shy of £99,000 before fees.
While that one’s maybe slightly out of most people’s price ranges, you can check out the rest of our BF registrations here to find something a bit more suitable. You can also find a number plate that suits you without breaking the bank by using out private number plate builder.
Alternatively, you can give our sales team a call on 01642 363738 and they’ll find a personalised registration that matches your requirements.
