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Question:
When did car registration begin in Scotland?
Answer: a registration system for motor vehicles was implemented
under the 1903 Motor Car Act. In Scotland registration was a function
of county councils and town councils of the larger burghs (Aberdeen,
Dundee, Edinburgh, and Glasgow). From 1904 registers were kept of
all motorcars and motorcycles, and licences were to be issued to
drivers (although no driving test was initially required). Number
plates had to be attached to the front and rear of each vehicle,
and these carried a combination of letters and numbers, which identified
the county or burgh of registration. In Scotland all registration
numbers included the letters G, S or V. Why do you want to know?
Well, I’ve
just bought some old Scottish licence plates from E-Bay, and one
of them (XA3Z) is valuable because it apparently belonged to Sir
Richard Destard of Destarton, the celebrated Edwardian inventor
and early car enthusiast from Fife, on whom the cartoon character
Dick Dastardly was based. How can I tell if the plate is genuine?
Answer: by tracking down the appropriate register and tracing the
registration. Your first port of call should be Philip Riden, How
to Trace the History of Your Car: a guide to motor vehicle registration
records in Great Britain, Ireland, the Isle of Man And The Channel
Islands (Cardiff, 1998), which includes a list of car registration
marks with their locations, and makes a pretty good stab at locating
where the surviving vehicle registers have ended up.
Aren’t
they all with the DVLA then?
Answer: I’m afraid not. The fate of motor vehicle registers
is a good example of how changes in legislation and local government
reorganisation are often bad news for historical records. In 1919
vehicle registration in the UK was supervised by the newly formed
Ministry of Transport, but the administration of the system was
left in the hands of county and burgh authorities. Record keeping
changed. Separate registers for motorcycles were abolished and in
addition to the bound registers, local authorities were now to keep
a record card for each registration mark, and a file on each vehicle.
Although this made vehicle identification easier, the triplication
of record keeping led to local variations in how records were kept.
The 1969 Vehicle and Driving Licences Act set up the centralised
(and computerised) Driving and Vehicle Licensing Centre (DVLC) in
Swansea, South Wales. The transition to national registration was
supposed to have been completed by 1975, but local record keeping
continued in some areas until March 1978. The transition period
coincided with the reorganisation of local authorities and this
was to have a serious effect on the preservation of the historical
registers and other records. Local registration offices had been
instructed by the Department of the Environment to transfer their
surviving vehicle files to the DVLC in Swansea and to transfer registers
to local archive services. At that time, however, there were few
Scottish local archives, and attempts by Scottish archivists in
the 1970s and 1980s to locate registration records met with varying
degrees of success. Some managed to acquire them directly from local
vehicle taxation offices, but in many cases the survival of records
from former counties and burghs was depressingly poor. Some registration
offices may have destroyed records when they were abolished. Other
records appear to have been transferred to Scottish police forces
and some of these were destroyed in the 1980s. Some records passed
into private hands, either directly from local taxation offices
when they closed, or via police forces, when these disposed of records
in the 1980s. The Scottish Archive Network (SCAN) recently set out
to update the list of surviving records in Riden’s guide and
found that the records of 21 county authorities are held either
entirely or in part by local authority archives, libraries or museums.
Records relating to 17 counties, and to the burghs of Aberdeen,
Edinburgh, Glasgow, Greenock, Motherwell & Wishaw and Paisley,
have been acquired by the Kithead Trust, a body initially set up
to care for bus company records. Significant destructions are known
or assumed to have been carried out of records for registration
authorities in the counties of Ayr, Clackmannan, Lanark, Nairn,
Peebles, Perth, Stirling, and the burghs of Coatbridge and Kirkcaldy.
For further details, see the entries on Vehicle Registration records
in the SCAN Knowledge Base (www.scan.org.uk).
If I track
down the relevant register, what sort of information will it contain?
Answer: If the vehicle licensing register for a county or burgh
does survive, it may contain quite a lot of useful information about
the vehicle and its owners, but it may contain very little. The
problem is that, after the Roads Act of 1920, some authorities kept
registers faithfully, while others merely listed the registration
number without any other details (putting more efforts into keeping
the card record system). The registers themselves are usually quite
bulky. Where information has been entered consistently and competently,
there may be the name and address of the car owner, the type of
vehicle, and subsequent changes in registration. A bonus may come
in the form of letters from vehicle owners or other paperwork attached
to the relevant page in the register.
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