Europlate blog

7081 1.A   –   It is particularly odd that a British car – an Austin A40 Devon – should have been seen on French West Africa plates, as all French overseas territories were strongly wedded to cars and lorries of French manufacture.        Senegal became independent of France in 1960; this photo is estimated to have been taken in Britain during 1953, when the international identification letters for the whole territory were AOF – Afrique Occidentale Francaise. Our Austin boasts only a modest ‘F’.   Another oddity is the light background and dark digits of the plate, when normal plates were simple white on black.      At independence, a preceding ‘S’ was added to the zero or 1 codes which marked the Senegalese sector of AOF – where 1 represented Dakar.    (7081 S1.A)       Pemberton archive.

Ceylon‘s 1947-8 code CY adorns this American Mercury? Eight, photo’d in London, possibly in 1952.          NOTE: The CL international oval is of the large 300mm x 180mm (12 x 4.75″) specification, as determined by the early Conventions.            Pemberton archive

DSD 770 – The Peugeot 203 was produced from 1948 to 1960.    DS = Dar-es-Salaam, the capital of Tanganyika, issued suffix D from Sept. 1950 to Jan. 1952.   Photographed in London in the early 1950s for the  Pemberton archive.         Note the unique style employed by the British East African territories of Tanganyika, Kenya and Uganda, in the use of brackets round the code letter for each of the three administrations – EA(T), (K) and (U)….    (Nyasaland is said to have been allocated EAN, but  there is no evidence of its use – unless YOU have a photo!)

BT 2999 – 1930s Hillman Minx from Blantyre, Nyasaland.   Also using the massive 12″ I.I.P.            Pemberton 1940s archive

C Privé 4463 on a heavy US anonymous machine.    Is it a Packard??   From the 1913-1956 series, with C for Cairo.      Pemberton archive.

DS 277 CD – Greek Diplomatic series from 1930s-1952 on a circa 1949 Morris Oxford in Oxford in 1950.       The DS, here translated from the Greek, abbreviates Diplomatikos Soma – or Diplomatic Body.   Though ‘CD’ was internationally accepted, there were no French usages in the home of Homer!       Pemberton archive

T/26 4595  –  The Farsi/Dari area code letter and validity year/serial numerals of the Persian plates were changed to western characters only if the vehicle was to leave the country. This 26-dated T-Teheran out-of-state plate refers to the Persian year 1326, corresponding to our Gregorian calendar year which was from March 1947-March 1948.       The US car model is unidentified, the shot taken somewhere in England in 1948/9.      Pemberton archive

The red and white Flag plates of the Kuwaiti royal household, shot in London by John Pemberton on Aug. 6, 1956.    Plate 50 on a Cadillac

LM 7667  –  Mozambique – Lorenzo Marques, which could have used the MOC oval, but was only seen with Portugal’s  P.         A Dodge Fluid-Drive, made from 1947-9, seen in London about 1950, before the dash separators became  standard for Portugal and its overseas possessions.          Pemberton archive c1950