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A life-long interest in personal plates

Rod Lomax is the Publicity Officer for the Registration Numbers Club. He said "My interest in vehicle number plates started, I suppose, when I was a boy. As so many youngsters used to do before modern technology was invented, I collected car numbers in the fifties. It was a great thrill in those days to be the first to spot a new series and being brought up in Bury, Lancashire with the EN series was especially exciting as so many of them made names - BEN, KEN, LEN etc."

"My first car was a Hillman Imp way back in 1964 which was registered UEN 524. I remember visiting the Bury Motor Vehicle Taxation office looking to obtain a much better number, but of course, this procedure had just finished round about that time and I was dismissed with a derisory wave of the hand. Being an apprentice at that time and running a car left me with no spare cash with which to purchase a cherished number, even at sixties prices."

"Twenty years passed by, marriage, a mortgage and all the other things associated with modern living, and it wasn't until 1984 that my interest in cherished plates was once again fired up. I had just bought a 3 litre V6 Ford Capri - a superb car, automatic transmission, lovely smooth performance and happened to notice 59 JRL for sale. I'd just started my own advertising agency after being made redundant from the multi-national I worked for and thought that this number would really add to promoting my own business."

"In the following years I searched for a matching number to grace my wife, Alison's car - her initials of AML unfortunately clashing with Aston Martin Lagonda - every one we saw for sale was extortionately priced. In 1989 I was lucky to see NEN 555 for sale... the only relevance being that it was, of course, a Bury plate where both of us had been brought up and it was a nice number. This was duly purchased and transferred to her Ford Sierra."

"1991 saw me purchase J5 JRL to add to the collection. As this was before the advent of retention certificates, I purchased a Jawa scooter to register the number to. I remember it arrived in a large flat packed box and was a self assembly job."

"In 1997 the 'R' prefixes came out and I had always promised myself that I would try to purchase R10 MAX. I called and called and called again, but it was four days before I finally got through to the DVLA call centre. As you will probably have guessed, the number had already gone - to this day I'm not sure whether it had been sold or had been held back for a future Classic sale. I was disappointed, but bought R40 MAX and R70 MAX as the next best thing. With an open '4' the first does look like LOMAX. These two are currently on retention certificates. I may eventually sell R70 MAX though as I'm running out of vehicles."

"The final (to date anyway) part of the story ends with me realising that a '5' and an 'S' are very similar and to make up a pair with 59 JRL, I managed to buy S9 JRL which currently resides on a Peugeot 106 1.5 litre diesel... a pool car used by both my wife and her mother."

"I'm always on the look out for other good JRL numbers but they seem to be few and far between. On a recent holiday in Cornwall (where the RL series belongs) I spotted J509 JRL on a parked vehicle... a coincidence you might think, but only one of many that have happened since I started on my collection almost twenty years ago."