OPENING a family history exhibition in Stanhope at the beginning of July, we’d bumped for the first time in 40-odd years into Dorothy Morton – then as now the proud owner of the car registration 32 CUP.

“The registration plate’s worth an awful lot more than the car is,” said Dorothy, who’s 90 and lives near Bishop Auckland.

Doubtless it is so. Last week it was reported that the impoverished pollisses of West Mercia are hoping to raise £250,000 by offloading AB 1.

Distant memory further suggests that a chap in Blackhall Rocks owned everything from 1 UP to 7 UP, the last particularly coveted by the folk who made fizzy pop.

Before further playing the numbers game, a little quiz. Readers are invited to recall the North-East locations which in the 60s and 70s issued plates with the letters BB, DN, HN, TN, XG, UP, PT, AJ and X. Answers at the foot of the column.

THEN there was EF, a West Hartlepool registration until 1974 when West was subsumed by big brother and EF given a free transfer to the Boro. It prompts a splendid little story from former Echo photographer Ian Wright.

Back in 1964, developing as photographers then did, Ian was a promising (and precocious) 19-year-old who’d just passed what journalists call the proficiency test.

Recently laid off from the North Road railway workshops, Ian’s father and grandfather pooled their redundancy to buy him a reward.

That it was Jaguar 3.4, British racing green with wire wheels and wooden steering wheel – bought from Reuben Raw, a Middleton Tyas farmer – suggests that the redundancy pay-out was pretty canny.

The registration was HEF 272, the grey silk and mohair suit (Ian recalls) was from Jackson the Tailor, the button-down shirt from Cecil Gee and the knitted tie and Chelsea boots from Amos Atkinson (who appear not to have been any relation.)

Ian has long lived in Las Vegas, where the other day he registered his latest Jag. Money paid, he was asked if he had any preference for a number plate – “specials” made by the lads at Folsom state penitentiary, where Johnny Cash from time to time recorded.

He looked through what was available and was amazed to come across HEF 272, now nostalgically touring Nevada. “It’s a millions-to-one coincidence,” says Ian. “Perhaps Hartlepool and Folsom should be twinned.”

*Ian also attaches one of his early black-and-white photographs. There’s little explanation and even less connection but since it appears to be of the wondrous Miss Marianne Faithfull, perhaps there’ll be room for that one, too.

ABOUT to become President of the Supreme Court, Baroness Hale of Richmond – Brenda to her friends – is by every account a friendly and down-to-earth soul who slips comfortably into return visits to these parts.

That was also the clear impression from the BBC Radio 4 Profile programme, in which a former Law Lord recalled the proud Yorkshire girl singing Ilkley Moor in a “coquettish, almost flirtatious” voice.

“Kind of a Justin Bieber to law students, an absolute star,” someone said at the start of the programme.

Particularly, however, we were taken by the recollection of Claire Pitt, Lady Hale’s best friend at Richmond High School for Girls, that Britain’s future top judge was a childhood Cliff Richard fan.

“I always regarded that as something I could blackmail her with,” said Claire, who also remembered a trip to see Cliff at the Globe in Stockton.

“Did she scream,” asked Mark Coles, the presenter, perceptively.

“I think she screamed, yeah.”

Yeah.

I AM an inattentive president, until recent events elsewhere perhaps the world’s worst. The Wensleydale Writers’ Group, with whom I essay that office, notes occasional appearances graciously.

They prosper. Group reports in the Darlington and Stockton Times no longer end “New members welcome” because there is nowhere for them to sit; the anthology Wensleydale in Words is on its third reprint, the Herriot Hospice a substantial beneficiary.

Writers cramped, they seek a bigger venue.

I turned up last Wednesday, Friends Meeting House in Leyburn, members urged to write something for Ripon’s inaugural poetry festival in mid-October. There are three age groups. “I think we can safely be assumed to be the Over 16s,” said Lesley Chapman, the chairwoman.

Another member had, 15 years ago, submitted a poem about a hare to Countryman magazine. Hare today, they said they’d let her know.

This month they’ve not only published it but sent her a tenner for her trouble. There may be money in the writing business, after all.

THERE are potential pitfalls, too. Last week’s slightly vinegary thoughts on fish and chips stirred not a ripple among the cod-and-six brigade but an email from a grammarian.

We’d described forkfuls. “Surely,” writes the Rev David Kinch from Darlington, “it was the forks that were full, not the fuls. The word might more correctly be forksful, might it not?”

It’s with true Christian charity that David supposes it might have been the printers to blame – sadly, the inky trade no longer labours hereabouts – and perhaps with an absence of it that I dispute his argument.

Assuming “forkful” to be a legitimate compound noun – a well-filled fork – would not the trifurcate and equally legitimate plural be forkfuls?

Blight or prong? Views welcomed.

LAST week’s column also recalled the hanging at Durham Jail in 1908 of Hamsterley shopkeeper Matthew James Dodds – the deed executed, we supposed, by Pierrepoint father and son.

Brian Thompson in Rookhope clearly knows the ropes rather better. “It would have been Henry and Thomas Pierrepoint, father and uncle of the renowned Albert, who would only have been about five years old at the time.

“Henry was executioner from 1901-10 and Thomas from 1906-46. Albert continued the family profession from 1932-56.”

Crimes against carefulness continued. Last Thursday’s Backtrack column talked about King Kong when – as Ian Wilkinson points out – it really should have said Hong Kong. The Wensleydale Writers had best not ape their president.

A FINAL thought on the perils and pitfalls of the written word. An invitation has arrived to the open day this Saturday at the Mithril Brewery at Aldbrough St John, between Richmond and Darlington. Additional attractions are clearly identified: “Hot dog sausages made with Mithril ale and our resident band.”

Should jazz things up nicely.

….and finally, those vehicle registrations. BB was Newcastle, DN York, HN Darlington, TN Newcastle, XG Middlesbrough, UP Durham County, PT Durham City, AJ North Riding (later Middlesbrough) and X marked the spot for Northumberland.