Even in the early days, people recognised the significance and enjoyment brought by owning a prestigious or personalised number plate and often kept them within the family for many years. Their significance is often highly personalised to their owners. Some like to have a registration that originated in their local area, some are attracted to owning their own initials and others enjoy the fun of a word based registration mark.

It had been expected to sell for between £15,000 and £25,000 but the first Manx vehicle registration plate ever to be issued was eventually sold last week for £100,000. It is, says auctioneer Murray Keefe, a valuable piece of Manx history.

“It was the first Isle of Man number plate and people do like to have number 1. At the auction we had 4 telephone lines wanting to bid on the number plate and quite a few bidding in the room so I was not surprised it made so much money knowing that some of the plates in the United Kingdom make substantially more than that.

On the 28 December 2001 the Department of Transport released this press release

\"Motorists in Great Britain will be able to display national flags and symbols on their number-plates, Minister for Transport John Spellar announced today.

Mr Spellar said:

\"The Government has decided to legislate to allow the voluntary display of national flags and symbols on vehicle number plates. It is what the people of England, Scotland and Wales have asked for and strengthens their feeling of national identity. "

The UK’s most expensive number plate to date is the F1 registration number purchased by a British businessman for £440,625 in 2008, though that’s just small change compared to the £7m spent by Abu Dhabi-based Saeed Khouri on the 1 number plate – officially the largest sum of money ever spent on a registration number.

Eric Morecambes Cherished Number Rescued!

Eric Morecambe’s 1971 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow has been spared from the scrapheap at the last minute.

Peter Yates, who runs a wedding car firm in Morecambe, spotted the car in a Shrewsbury junkyard just 24 hours before it was due to be dismantled.

He said finding the car – which had the number plate EM100 when Morecambe owned it – was a ‘miracle’.

The car was owned by the comic from 1971 and 1974 – as shown by the original order note – and Yates says it still smells of cigar smoke.

How the car came to be in a scrapheap is unknown. Seven years ago the car, including the personalised number plate, sold for £36,000 at auction.