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Articles - "The Car" No. 87, January 20, 1904 - "The Car" According to the defence urged by Earl Russell on behalf of the form of number-plate which he has adopted, and which was illustrated in the last issue of The Car, the omission of the hyphen between the letter A and the figure 1 was intentional on his part. He contends, in short, that it is the hyphen and not its absence that is illegal. It is perfectly true that the Local Government Board regulations did not specifically define, in so many words, that the hyphen shall be used in the case of the horizontal number-plates: but, as everyone knows by now, the hyphen is clearly marked in that "the mark and number must be arranged in conformity with the arrangements of figures issued in one or other of the alternative diagrams." It is further stated that whereas, in the alternative diagram No. 1, in which the letters are above the figures, the space between the upper and lower lines must be three quarters of an inch, in the alternative diagram No. 2 where the letters and figures are on the same line.
No. 89, February 3, 1904 - "The Car" - "Earl Russell's Number-Plate" Sir. - I notice that you admit in a somewhat ungracious paragraph that you were wrong as to the hyphen on my number-plate. I urged no defence; I simply pointed out that your comment was inaccurate. It is not perhaps wonderful that you fail to understand the regulations, since you cannot even quote them correctly. You say in your quotation "the mark and number must be arranged in conformity with the arrangements of figures issued in one or the other of the alternative diagrams." The actual words of the order are "the mark and number being arranged in conformity with the arrangements of letters and figures shown on one or other of the alternative diagrams." The hyphen is neither a figure nor a letter. Since I have already stated my reason for omitting the hyphen
your statement that this "course suggests an unprofitable
desire to take advantage of an accidental lack of definition"
should not have been made. It is quite sufficient to have displayed
your ignorance without being discourteous to a correspondent who
corrects you. - I am, Sir, your obedient servant. [So far as the misquotation is concerned, we may explain that
this was merely a typist's error, and one, moreover, which certainly
did not affect the argument to our advantage. As to a hyphen not
being a figure, the claim put forward by Lord Russell is, to say
the least, novel: the meaning of the word "figure" is
by no means invariably confined to the sense of a "numeral".
Our reference to the "unprofitable desire" had a general,
not a personal, application, for we had already encountered several
automobilists who hailed with satisfaction the "lack of definition"
to which The Car referred, and were prepared to take
advantage thereof. In Ireland the absence of a hyphen after the
letter "I" would cause obvious confusion, as may be
seen by reference to the illustration on page 345 of the present
issue, in which a car numbered "AI-15" would be read
as "AI15" if the hyphen were deleted. Action of this
kind would only result in the imposition of more stringent restrictions,
and for this reason we contended and reiterate the contention,
that such a course is unprofitable. - Ed.] Page |
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