Here’s a wonderful story surrounding the history of the fabulous registration number 1 NOB. Way back in 1964 Mr Alec Linley worked as a toolmaker at the BMC car plant in Castle Bromwich who built, finished and trimmed the car bodies. This particular part of the BMC group, however, was still affectionately know as “Fishers” after Ludlow and Fisher was bought out by BMC in 1953.
At the time, just as it still is today in most companies, employees had the privilege of buying a new car through the works discount scheme and so Mr Linley bought an blue 850 cc Mini for his wife Mary Linley. Mary worked for the Department of Transport in Birmingham at the time and managed, through her boss, to pull a few strings to have the car registered with the registration number 1 NOB. DVLA are usually very sensitive about releasing number plates that can be regarded as offensive number plates but this one clearly slipped through the net.
Registration Number 1 NOB
Mary loved entering competitions and was regularly winning small items here and there, but in 1970 she entered a competition arranged by the CO-OP group to guess how many “Green Shield Stamp” were used to completely cover a Triumph Herald car. The prize was either 1 million Green Shield Stamps or the Triumph Herald car itself.
Being very competitive, Mary went and found a similar Triumph car and worked out exactly how many stamps it would take to completely cover it. Naturally, you can guess that she did indeed win the competition and decided to take the car as the prize instead of the 1 million stamps.
Now came the decision what to do with the Mini and the number plate and so it was decided to transfer the 1 NOB registration from her 6 year old Mini onto the Triumph Herald. The car was used for many years until it was eventually retired to the garage in 1982. It stayed there for 5 years until in 1987 it was removed to make room in the garage and made roadworthy again for a while but everyone lost interest in it and it sat on Mary’s drive from 1992 till New Year’s Eve 2013.
The car was taken away for restoration and as you can see from the photograph, the old dowdy brown ( and moss ) colour has been replaced with a nice old English white. If you can think of anyone who this plate would suit perfectly, then give us a call.
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