New Registrar of the Ex-Police Register

Having owned my first Morris Minor since 2012, I decided to add to the collection in August 2024 when I agreed to buy a 1968 ex-Metropolitan police car, SYT 669F, named Nina. She has been in the family for around 10 years, owned by my father-in-law, Dave Morris, and previous to this, by my husband, Tom Morris.

I immediately fell in love with police car ownership and the attention Nina got wherever we went, so in February this year, when another car came up for sale from the same first batch of Metropolitan Minor police cars, SYT 645F, I managed to bid on and win this one too.

This second police car, known as Bobby has since been moved on again, and is now awaiting a full restoration by new owner and good friend, Matt Tomkins.

Wanting to fully immerse myself in all things police cars, I set about looking for info and history on these cars, but came up short. I thought if there’s nothing published already, why don’t I do my own research?

In my job as Certificate Officer at the British Motor Museum, I use original factory records held in our archive to produce Heritage Certificates for classic cars. I therefore took it upon myself to scour the handwritten ledgers and take down the details of all the police cars I could find.

My research covers all Morris Minor police cars from 1968 until the end of production. While I’m aware there were earlier cars with Stockport Constabulary’s 2-door saloons finished with the distinctive Chevron livery, I’m yet to find the records for these.

From this research I have been able to compare differences in each year of production between colours. While the majority were bermuda blue and police white saloons, this was certainly not always the case! I have also been able to work out how many two-doors, four-doors and travellers in each colour went to what destinations.

While attending this years national rally in Nina, with Bobby also taken by new owner Matt, I thoroughly enjoyed talking police cars all weekend and where possible, tried to get us all parked together. It was great to also meet up with a third ‘SYT’ plated car, with Jed Bennett in SYT 712F. We also managed to get a group of us together to have a go around the arena on the Sunday.

After speaking to previous ex-Police Register registrars, Simon and Angie Mitchell, I expressed an interest in taking over as registrar to relieve them of one of their many duties, and I’m pleased that they were more than happy to pass this responsibility over to me.

I will hopefully soon be given all the relevant paperwork collated by Simon and Angie over the years, and I look forward to moving the register forward and meeting police car owners while in this role.

Minor Matters | September / October 2025