John Lennon (The Beatles) once gave Brian Jones (The Rollings Stones) a car. The license plate was DD 666. Does anyone know what the DD stands for??
Did England even have vanity plates available back then?
I don’t think we’ve ever had true vanity plates, where you can choose any sequence of letters (as long as it doesn’t spell something offensive, I guess). However, we’ve had many different formats of registration number over the years, some permutations of which happen to spell out meaningful phrases. You can buy these numbers form private owners, or more recently brand new from the licensing authority, and transfer them to your vehicle. There’s great demand for them and the good ones are mind-blowingly expensive, tens of thousands of pounds. DD 666 would have been a very old plate even in the sixties, which John Lennon presumably bought from a dealer.
Here’s an educated guess.
Before the central licensing system in the UK (the Driver & Vehicle Licensing Agency) was established in 1965 number plates (license plates in the US) were allocated by a local authority. Looking at the various formats of number plates over the years I’m reasonably sure the plate DD 666 was issued before 1932.
DD represents an area code within the UK. These letters currently indicate a vehicle bought new and licensed in the Chester area of Deeside in the north west of England. The law in the UK requires motor vehicles to display the issued plate on both front and rear, unlike some US states which allow novelty plates at the front. Therefore, unless the area code has changed in the interim, DD 666 was the 666th set of plates issued under the DD code by Chester local authority sometime prior to 1932.
It is entirely possible the Rolls Royce was registered with different plates and those plates were transferred to that vehicle sometime before Lennon acquired it.
Tangential to the OP is the gift of the Rolls Royce from Lennon to Jones. Scanning a couple of Stones biographies, the only reference I can find with Brian Jones and Rolls Royce in the same paragraph is this:
He (Jones) took me with him to to meet her (Anita Pallenberg) at Heathrow’, Dave Thomson says. 'We drove out there in the Rolls Royce Silver Cloud Brian had just bought from George Harrison.
from Philip Norman’s The Stones (Elm Tree Books, 1984). The passage refers to a date sometime in 1965 or 1966. Of course, this is not to argue that Lennon never gifted Jones with such a car. Most rock stars had at least three, if I recall correctly. If I can lay my hands on a Brian Jones biography (it’s around here somewhere) I may be able to elaborate.
Anna Wohlin’s memoir (published as The Murder of Brian Jones and The Wild and Wicked World of Brian Jones) doesn’t mention the car, although Jones speaks once of buying a Rolls Royce.
John Lennon had his own famous flower power decorated Rolls, which is now at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York.
Imagine!
Update: I understand that Sotheby’s auctioned Lennon’s Rolls Royce in 1985.