Licensed to Thrill with QPlate
John Caruso learns that behind every great story is a paper trail. Behind Q513, there are three.
I own a pair of Salvatore Ferragamo shoes that have lasted longer than some marriages; a vinyl collection that stops around 1986; a 1970s Bialetti cafetière; and a few other collectables I’ve spent
a portion of my life accumulating. It isn’t what they are, but what they represent. It took a number plate to make me realise I’d been thinking too small.
The Queensland registration plate Q513 was first issued in Brisbane in 1921. Three digits allocated once and never again. If you’d shown it to me on the street a month ago, I’d have glanced at it and kept walking. That would have been my loss, because Q513 is carrying more documented history than anything sitting in my home, and it’s been doing so for over a century.
Let’s start in June 1940. A private motor yacht called Sundowner is leaving Ramsgate Harbour under its owner’s command. The owner is sixty-six years old, retired, and has refused to hand his vessel over to the Royal Navy. He will sail it himself with a crew of his eldest son and an eighteen-year-old Sea Scout. Their destination is Dunkirk, where the British Expeditionary Force is pinned on the beaches under Luftwaffe attack, waiting for anything that floats.
The owner’s name is Charles Herbert Lightoller. He crosses the Channel under Stuka dive-bomber attack. Sundowner was built to carry twenty-one people in comfort. Lightoller brings home 130 servicemen, packed below decks and on the gunwales, distributed under his direction with the calm authority of a man who has, on at least one previous occasion, been required to think clearly under conditions that would undo most people.
That previous occasion was April 1912 when Lightoller was the Second Officer of RMS Titanic. He commanded the port-side lifeboats, enforced the loading with a discipline that did not waver: women and children first, no exceptions, no argument. When the time came to leave, he was among the last. He ended up on the upturned keel of Collapsible B, and spent what remained of the night organising the men around him to balance their weight as the waterlogged hull threatened to roll. His steadiness kept people alive and he was eventually pulled from the water and survived. His sworn testimony at both the British and American inquiries that followed remains the most detailed first-hand officer’s account of that night.
One man: Titanic, 1912; Dunkirk, 1940. The kind of CV that makes the rest of us feel we haven’t been trying hard enough. Now here’s where plate Q513 comes in, and where the story gets local: Charles Lightoller had a second cousin in Brisbane. Dr Harry Martin Lightoller was a physician who had emigrated from Lancashire, settled his family in Albion, and made a respectable life practising medicine in a city still finding its feet. When Queensland’s Department of Main Roads began issuing its first numbered motor vehicle plates in 1921, Dr Lightoller’s wife made a decision that was, for the era, remarkable.
Maria Theresa ‘Minnie’ Lightoller, sixty-five years old, née Haly, a woman of independent means, registered a motor vehicle in her own name. Not her husband’s name. Not her son William Claude’s name, though he was a practising Brisbane solicitor – hers alone. The plate she received was Q513.
In 1921 Brisbane, female motorists existed but were far from the norm. A married woman registering a vehicle entirely in her own name was unusual for the time, reflecting both her standing in Brisbane society and a certain confidence that, it turns out, ran in the family. Dr Lightoller died in September of that same year. Whether Q513 was one of their last shared household decisions or Maria’s first as a surviving spouse, the record doesn’t say. The plate, however, is unambiguous: registered to Mrs M. Lightoller, of Highlands, Albion.
Maria brings her own lineage. In the late 1840s, her father Charles Robert Haly founded Taabinga Station, a heritage-listed working cattle property and vineyard that stands as one of Queensland’s oldest continuously occupied stations. He also was in the first sitting of Queensland’s Parliament, representing the Burnett district as a founding member of the first Queensland Legislative Assembly when the colony separated from New South Wales in 1860. Strong lineage to licence plate.
“Q513 isn’t just a plate; it’s a statement about the registrant and who got to drive,” explains Ryan Bartholomew, Director of Q Plate Sales and the man who now holds Q513.
The business Ryan runs is the largest curated holder of three-digit Queensland heritage plates in the country, and he’s spent what he acknowledges is a disproportionate amount of time in archives making sure the stories attached to his inventory stack up.
Q513’s provenance has been cross-checked across Queensland Births, Deaths and Marriages, the original List of Motor Owners in Queensland held by the State Library, Find A Grave records at Toowong Cemetery, and genealogical research tracing the Lightoller line back through Lancashire.
“You don’t expect a 1920s Brisbane plate to put you one cousin away from the Titanic and Dunkirk, but the Lightoller name does,” he says.
I know what it means when an object has a verified paper trail, or I thought I did. A good pair of shoes with history, a vinyl pressing from the right year, a cafetière earning its place on the stovetop since the 1970s. That’s the scale I’d been operating.
Q513 is something else entirely, a documented thread running from a registration address in Albion back through Lancashire to two brothers in Chorley, forward to the Titanic, across the Channel to Dunkirk, and further still to the first sitting of a Queensland Parliament. The documentation isn’t a bonus here. It is the thing.
Sundowner is preserved today at the Ramsgate Maritime Museum in Kent, flying the Cross of St George with the arms of Dunkirk in the canton. She is very well looked after. Q513, three digits, first issued in 1921, now held by Q Plate Sales as an officially certified Queensland heritage plate, carries that same story on this side of the world. And now, thanks to Q Plate Sales, it could be yours. Every number has a story, this is just one from the collection.
Here’s another important number: 0477 004 933 to talk to Ryan and his team, or try 18 July when you can meet Ryan and discover what else is in the collection at Noosa Concours on Hastings Street. I’m pretty sure he has a licence to thrill.
