Cornish Registered Sevens

Being a Cornish lad and always having a love of Austin Sevens, I’m always looking out for Sevens with a Cornwall registration mark.  Searching through the excellent A7CA Chassis Register it’s interesting to see the Cornish cars listed.

Our Cornish number plates in this period had the letters AF, CV and RL in them.    Once these letters were used up to ??9999 the registrations letters were then prefixed with an A.  So A??1 - A??999. So the run of numbers started with AF1 - AF9999; then RL1 - RL9999 and next was CV1 - CV9999.

The first 3 letter 3 number type plate in Cornwall with AAF1 was issued in March 1934.  When all the A prefixed variations were used it went on to B then C, D then E and so on.

Opal.1The chart shows all the known Cornish registered Seven’s on the register.  AF8050 is the first listed, registered on 28/12/1923.  Was this car an early demonstrator or was it a Christmas present for some one? 

The last two on the list are well known cars down here ERL557 is a Club member's Opal and ERL573 is a Ruby MK2 outside of our Club; both have owned and enjoyed these Sevens for many years.  Interestingly these two were registered on the same day 2/1/1939 so at least 16 cars were new to the road that day.  Those were the days that January 1st was the time to have a “New” car.

 

AD Chum.1

 

A few other cars are also in our Club, the AD Chummy RL6545, the RP Saloon CV9998 and Ruby MK2 CCV304. 

 

RP.1

 

 

 

 

 

Cornish7sRuby2.1

 

 

 

 

 

Cornish 7s Ruby1.1

 

 

 

 

At sometime in the past my family has also owned 1933 RP Saloon CV8081 and the 1938 Ruby MK2 ECV468.  With all these cars being 80 years, or older, what stories they could tell!

 

 

 

Cornish7sRegister.1
Table compiled from the A7CA Surviving Chassis Register www.http://a7ca.org/chassis-register/

 

This article, by John Doyle, originally appeared in Seven Focus, January 2018 pp8-10.

UPDATE:  The AD Chummy RL6545 was sold in late 2019 and is no longer in Cornwall.


Back