A NUMBER plate sold to raise money for Tatton Park has fetched a world record price of £331,500 at auction.

The M1 registration mark was bought by an anonymous north west-based bidder – for his six-year-old son’s birthday.

Officials at auctioneers Bonhams and Tatton Park were stunned by the final selling price for the unique plate, which quickly reached and overtook the previous world record.

And they were even more amazed to learn that the owner is a boy who cannot legally drive for another 11 years.

The youngster is the son of a wealthy Cheshire businessman who refused to reveal himself and made his bids by phone.

Diplomatic Plates ‘D’ what are they?

Diplomatic plates

Since 1979 cars operated by foreign embassies, high commissions, consular staff, and various international organisations have been given plates with a distinguishing format of three numbers, one letter, three numbers. The letter is D for diplomats or X for accredited non-diplomatic staff. The first group of three numbers identifies the country or organisation to whom the plate has been issued, the second group of three numbers is a serial number, starting at 101 for diplomats (although some embassies were erroneously issued 100), 400 for non-diplomatic staff of international organisations, and 700 for consular staff. Thus, for example, 101 D 101 identifies the first plate allocated to the Afghanistan embassy, 900 X 400 is the first plate allocated to the Commonwealth Secretariat.

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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.

The first series of number plates were issued in 1903 and ran until 1932, using the series A 1 to YY 9999. The letter or pair of letters indicated the local authority in whose area the vehicle was registered, for example A – London, B – Lancashire, C – West Riding of Yorkshire. In England and Wales the letter codes were initially allocated in order of population size (by the 1901 census) whilst Scotland and Ireland had their own sequences incorporating the letters "S" and "I" respectively, which were allocated alphabetically: IA = Antrim, IB = Armagh, etc. When a licensing authority reached 9999, it was allocated another two letter mark, but there was no pattern to these subsequent allocations as they were allocated on a first come first served basis. There are three interesting anomalies where a zero has been issued – The Lord Provost of Edinburgh has S 0 and his Glasgow counterpart has G 0 while the official car of the Lord Provost of Aberdeen has RG 0. In addition the Lord Mayor of London has the registration LB 0.