Yesterday I showed some photographs my grandfather took. In one, his caption was of the car’s licence plate rather than his human subjects (namely his wife and daughter) and Robin asked if there were any explanation for his behavior. The short answer is no, but going through the photo album I see he’s done it several times, starting with this one of my grandmother in JO 24. It’s been beautifully polished by him (the tin of polish is on the running board) and it has an open sun roof. The picture was taken at Thame, near Oxford, in the late nineteen-twenties.
Though he died when I was only three, even I know some of his licence plate numbers. Once in the ’70s, while I was waiting for a bus on Highgate Hill in London, JO 24 zoomed past. By then it had got itself hitched to a brand-new maroon Rolls Royce.
Later they moved to a very grand house at Diss, in Norfolk. Here, at Norwich market, is his car sometime in the mid-thirties, standing next to his brother-in-law’s model (that’s my mother, by the way, almost blocking Tom’s car).
My grandfather had retired at forty-five. When my mother was about ten he took my grandmother and the two children on a year-long world tour. They returned to England because of the Munich crisis, otherwise I wonder whether the children would have ever gone to school again. He made this observation during their sojourn in Australia: 
‘No number plates on front in Queensland’. Nothing about Bonnie and Clyde (that’s who it looks like they were passing), just the essentials of local auto regulation.
They spent some time in the town of Warwick in Queensland — I would call this house a bungalow, except I don’t think is quite — where he photographed his two children in the back of the Chevrolet he’d bought for the journey, good old 257 760.
There are more. People clearly had a different feeling about cars back then. My grandfather was an electrical engineer and I think he loved technology in a way most of us don’t any more. My daughter asked me what our licence number is the other day and I didn’t know, though I think it’s got a D in it.
A Bad Guide 
My father was a pilot before he became my father. My mother can recite the number of his airplane registration–it was written under the wing and she would always be watching for which was his airplane. Eventually he decided he could afford an airplane or a wife but not both.
Not a bungalow, I think – it looks like a Queenslander. We lived in one on a hillside in Brisbane. We’d wake in the morning with sunlight coming up between the floorboards – having reflected from the slope beneath the house.
I do love Australia, not many people realise how beautiful it is. I’m going to have to look up the Queenslander. Until LanguageHat’s post I didn’t know about the California bungalows in Australia .
We thought most of the trees in Brisbane were feeble compared to the utter magnificence of the gum trees in South Australia. But the jacarandas along the Brisbane river were pretty good.
Once in the ’70s, while I was waiting for a bus on Highgate Hill in London, JO 24 zoomed past. By then it had got itself hitched to a brand-new maroon Rolls Royce.
Oh, you do plate-recycling in Britain too? Here it’s become a business, probably a good one for the government. People childish enough can buy specific plate numbers. I believe the most expensive plates would be say “1” (a taxi if I’m not mistaken), “2” (maybe another taxi), etc. In all cases a plate with just numbers (normally up to 9999). But some want their initials, like the first of our vice-prime ministers (we apparently can afford to have three of them, plus a useless president and an even more useless vice-president), namely the right honourable Rashid B., whose black BMW (or is it a Mercedes now?) has “BR 22” on its plate. It is said that Martian of Chinese origin would look for numbers with 8. It can’t be true: who would bother to have eights instead of sixes or sevens in the number written at the front and at the back of your car?
They don’t do it in Norway (or France?), but in Britain it’s been a big business (private enterprise, not gov’t) since the ‘sixties.
I’m sure AJP 1 would cost thousands of pounds, but I’m more the kind of road hog who likes to keep his plates good and dirty in case I pass a speed camera.