Regplates Reunites A Plate After 50 years
Reg Plates ArticleRegplates Reunites A Plate After 50 years
A GRANDMOTHER has been reunited with her beloved Mini number plate 50 years after she bought the original.
Hilary Badhams, 67, fell in love with her first car, a green and white Austin Mini and nicknamed it the ‘Green Pea’ after it arrived with an ‘800 PEA’ number plate in 1967.
The retired headteacher even met her husband, Dennis, 69, when the engineer repaired the car in 1972, and the pair were engaged just a fortnight later.
The car was then sold in 1973 to be replaced by a newer model and the number plate disappeared with it.
Since then Hilary has owned six Minis but none lived up to her original “pride and joy”.
Hilary, from Alfreton, Derbyshire, who has one son and two grandchildren, said: “I bought the car in 1967. I learned to drive in it, and took my test in it after I put on the ‘L’ plates.”
“It was great fun to drive, and was one of those iconic 60s Minis which are so photogenic and nostalgic.
“It was a 1964 model, so it was lacking in a lot of the things we’d take for granted now.
“It didn’t have any indicators, and I had to manually roll down the windows and stick my arm out when I wanted to turn a corner.
“It didn’t have a radio, it didn’t have heaters and it didn’t have air conditioning, but it was in absolutely perfect condition.”
The car took on even more significance in Hilary’s life when it overheated in 1972 and her friend Hazel called on her brother to fix it.
Hilary said: “My friend Hazel brought her ‘little’ brother, all 6ft 3ins of him, to come and fix it. He came round to my house the next day to repair it properly.
“We just hit it off straight away, it was love at first sight. I’ve never known anything like it.
“Within two weeks we were engaged, and 12 weeks after that first meeting we were husband and wife.
“Pea brought us together. If it hadn’t of been for that car, I might never have met my soul mate.”
Hilary let the car go to replace it with bigger model and regretted seeing the 800 PEA plate go. So, when she bought her latest MINI Cooper earlier this year, Hilary decided to hunt for the reg.
To her delight she unearthed it for sale online.
She said: “Dennis mentioned the plate in an out-of-hand comment, and that got me looking for it online at Regplates.com.
“To my amazement, they had it available. I just had to have it. It cost us £1,200, which was a reasonable prize for a private plate.
“I’m so happy to have a new Green Pea. I’m never letting go of the plate again, it’s going to stay with me forever.”
https://www.thesun.co.uk/motors/3737577/grandmother-reunited-with-iconic-number-plate-from-her-original-60s-mini-50-years-after-she-bought-it/
How close a series of letters or numbers are to a real name of word: if the match quality is high (and the numbers and letters are very convincing in making a popular word), the value of the registration plate will be higher. This means that a match like 5IMON, for the name Simon, will be worth a lot more than a more obscure set of letters and numbers that are not as convincing a match, such as S17 MMM for the name Sam.
The style of the plate: this means establishing if it is a new-style plate, an older-style format or if it is dateless or Irish, for instance. Other options are that it is a prefix-style plate or a suffix-style plate. New-style number plates, which have been produced since 2001, tend to be the least valuable because they are a bit less appealing to some collectors, plus the rule about not having plates that are newer than your car can also come into play, putting people off from buying a newer-style plate for their older car. Prefix-style number plates, which were in production between 1983 and 2001 can be more popular as more vehicles are entitled to have those licence numbers, and they may have fewer characters in total. Suffix-style plates, issued from 1963 to 1983 are relatively rare, which means they can attract higher prices than prefix-style plates and newer designs. Dateless number plates, also known as cherished number plates, were produced between 1903 and 1963 and are nearly always the most valuable number plate configurations; they have fewer digits and their dateless nature means that people can hide the age of their car. Irish number plates are similar to dateless number plates, especially because they don’t have a year identifier. They also tend to be cheaper than other types of vehicle registration plates.
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