Member John Pemberton saw a Jeep in Piccadilly, London, in the 1950s, and having no camera, transcribed its Bengali/Nepali/w.h.y. script. Can one of our specialists identify that plate?
John Pemberton’s unidentified spotting.
Nepal has been suggested. A Nepali looked like this:
Surprisingly, at March 2013, no readers have ventured any more suggestions – where are those accumulated years of experience???? (VB)
Now see a good suggestion from EU 575 below….
added 30/8/2015:
J&K 6831 — The dual-plated lorry on which the writer hitch-hiked from Patna to Kathmandu in 1965, carried Nepali and Jammu & Kashmir commercial plates.
A failed photo of a Jowett Javelin in New Delhi in 1965 shows Hindi script, then most unusual. VB archive
Our specialist in the region, Cedric Sabine, observes that the script seems to be Hindi, though it is not as well transcribed as to be certain. So John Pemberton’s sighting in London all those years ago would seem to have been an Indian jeep – oddly using Hindi script, when western lettering was almost universal in the 1960s in the country. I did see a Jowett Javelin in Delhi which used Hindi, which I will illustrate in another Post. (Victor Brumby for Cedric)
Could it have been a Nepalese plate? They were always in native script.
John carefully noted a period after each letter, precisely what has been observed on many older Nepal plates (see RPW).
In that case the serial number has to be in Nepalese numerals as well. Then it’s probably not 7773 but 1113. The Nepalese “3” looks rather like our “3”. The Nepalese “1” is shaped a little like our “9”, and what John saw was probably a variant of that shape.