About Us

At A Glance

Hills Numberplates was incorporated in 1927 and trades primarily as a manufacturer of number plate components, ready-made registration plates and the latest number plate production systems. We are the acknowledged market leader in the UK in size, technology and innovation with our head office based in Birmingham, the manufacturing heart of the UK.

Our modern facilities boast computerised production lines driven by a fully integrated order entry system, providing the capacity to produce over 8 million plates per annum. We supply leading high volume vehicle retailers, automotive manufacturers, the automotive aftermarket and government contracts.

The company has consistently developed its capabilities to provide customers with high quality services and products whilst continuing to invest in the future. This has resulted in Hills holding a portfolio of worldwide patents, standards and awards for both number plate construction, manufacturing and quality systems.

The key to Hills long history and success has been empowering its loyal workforce to manufacture excellence and deliver first class customer service, which has maintained and enabled growth in our business in both domestic and global markets.

Detailed History

A simple invention has transformed the manufacture of car number plates and built one of Britain’s most prosperous small businesses.

Poetic justice and a romantic public require a history of struggle behind successful business enterprises. The implication is that a golden spoon destroys incentive. That this is nonsense is proved by one of the country’s most successful small firms, HILLS (Patents) Ltd. Its founder and managing director, Mr. Kenneth John Garle, has never known poverty, has never been an employee. But he was born with an inventive turn of mind, an abundance of energy and, no less important, an eager response to a challenge.

The first challenge came at the age of 19. He had passed through Clifton College and the City and Guilds Engineering College and was ripe, as his mother said, “For a lesson on how hard the world can be”. She persuaded his father to give him £50 to start a business. In those Edwardian days £50 went a long way and young Garle, in partnership with another youth took an office in Regent Street and launched into the still new and exciting motor car trade. The venture prospered and was soon exporting more cars than it sold at home. Its catalogue (a copy still exists) contained names that are still famous, like Rolls Royce, and many that are no more than landmarks in the history of motoring. By 1914 the little company was making an annual profit of £2,000.

The First World War put an end to these activities and in August 1914 Kenneth Garle took a commission in the Army. When the war ended, he found the motor trade much less attractive and looked around for another job. The opportunity arose through a bet. He wanted number plates for a car and grumbled at a delay of three days. Half-jokingly he said “I’ll bet I could make a pair in three hours”. In fulfilment of his wager, he had some loose aluminium letters cast for him with spigots on the back; he fastened these to a pierced metal plate and won his bet by completing a pair of number plates in fifteen minutes.

It was obvious that this idea of using separate letters and figures had great possibilities. It could replace the cumbersome casting process and speed up enormously the rate of delivery. The aluminium letters were shown to several garage proprietors whose reaction was very encouraging. Mr. Garle thereupon ordered a complete range of alphabet and numerals. At that time he was living in a mews flat over a garage. He rented the garage for £60 a year, turned it into a workshop and was soon working at the bench alongside his staff of three, producing a new type of number plate in quantities.

His friends were sceptical of this product as a potential money maker. Only a small section of the public was in the car owning class and of all motor accessories the number plate was the least likely to make repeat sales. In theory the critics were right; in practise the have been proved wrong. A highly durable product of modest price can be a financial success even when, as in this case, durability is a statutory requirement and the law is maddening in its interpretation of the term. The law relating to number plates was for a time a serious obstacle. The police, of course, had to interpret the law to the letter, and the registration and licensing provisions were precise: “that no letter or figure shall be capable of being detached from such a surface”.

Competitors were quick to make capital out of the legal weakness of the new form’s position. The chief constables in various counties were threatening the motorist with legal action and the whole weight of the law seemed to be invoked to stifle the new enterprise. Mr Garle reassured the trade by offering to stage a test case to clarify the situation. He had the Automobile Association and the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders on his side and they expressed their willingness to fight a test case for him if necessary. As it happened, he won his case without going to court, and secured amendment of the regulation as follows: “no letter or figure shall be capable of being detached from such surface, provided that is shall not be an infringement of these Regulations if the letters or figures are made separately and either welded or firmly riveted onto such surface”.

All was plain sailing for HILLS (Patents) Ltd., till 1948. In that year the firm patented an entirely new type of letter made, not of metal, but of a white plastic material under the name of Flexwyt. These letters and figures were designed with a plastic spigot instead of a metal rivet for attaching to the backing plate. As the law specified riveting or welding, another amendment became necessary, and the regulation was revised so that “every letter or figure shall be indelibly inscribed or so attached to such surface that it cannot readily be detached therefrom”.

So a chance invention, while the century was still in its teens, was to take thirty years to win full legal recognition. Conservatism up to a point is a source of strength in the law, but carried to such lengths it might easily have daunted a less buoyant innovator than K. J. Garle.

There is no doubt about the quality of his innovation. The Flexwyt letters are so pliable that they can be bent or twisted in any way and yet always return to their original shape. The spigot, which is moulded in one piece with the letter, fits into a hole pierced in the aluminium backing plate. An aluminium washer is attached and pressed home with a special tool. The washer is so slight a piece of metal that the strength of the fixing has to be seen to be believed. It is impossible to tear the letters away with the hands. The letters and digits are three dimensional and triangular in section so as to be clearly visible from any angle. They remain white indefinitely and are claimed to be much more weather resistant than any other painted or embossed letter.

The motor trade at home and abroad welcomed the Flexwyt letter because it made them independent of the factory in meeting an order for number plates. They keep a stock of backing plates and a selection of letters and figures; they buy from HILLS for a few pounds a tool for punching holes and securing the washers; and then they are equipped to supply a pair of number plates while the customer waits.

Flexwyt letters have been patented throughout the world and are being exported or made under license in 53 countries. Associated factories have been opened in France, Holland, Spain and South Africa. Mr Garle hopes to visit Istanbul shortly and add Turkey to his list. In the U.S.A. and Canada the manufacture of car number plates is a Government monopoly and those markets are closed. The making of number plates in America is a prison occupation, like sewing mail bags over here, and the car owner must have a new pair of number plates every year. HILLS do, however, sell their plastic letters in the U.S.A. for other purposes. In California, for instance, only a back number plate is required and so the front one is used for slogans such as, “I stop for blondes”, in the small English motor cycle size of Flexwyt. The export side of the business has many oddities. An order came in from a Chinese in Hong Kong specifying backing plates enamelled in bright red. He explained that the accident rate among his taxi men had been very high and he wanted a colour that would keep away the devils.

Most of the GB plates seen on cars have been supplied by HILLS. These are required in thousands for American visitors and others who have to be provided with English number plates and a GB Oval because their countries are not signatories to the International Convention.

For their export business HILLS (Patents) Ltd. have had to study motoring regulations in practically every country and adapt the size of letter accordingly. The Flexwyt letters have prospered as an export because of their light weight, ease of attachment by the user, and resistance to all climatic conditions. They are being used for street names and for public signs and notices of all kinds. A recent example is the town of Enugu in Nigeria, which is being equipped throughout with Flexwyt street names. The local authorities sent HILLS a street plan and asked then to work out a system of signposting. In Britain, too, these letters are extending their use for street name plates. The makers offer to send a free specimen name plate by post to any interested local authority.

For many purposes, notably Ministry of Transport signs in this country, the embossed enamel plate is still required, and at HILLS House, Chenies Mews, W.C.1, a large part of the production consists of embossed work in a great variety of styles and sizes, from large direction indicators for main roads to small grave labels for cemeteries. As in the case of Flexwyt, the die-pressed plates can be produced with great speed. A plate can be made in an hour and despatched at once by letter post. The embossing is done with steel dies on aluminium sheet, the plates being painted with plastic bonded enamel and then stoved in infra-red ovens. Two dies (male and female) are required for each letter and the 35 pairs of dies needed for letters A to Z and figures 1 to 0 in each different series of sizes may cost up to £1000. As the sizes range from 3/4 in. to 6in., a decision by one of the official bodies to change the style of lettering used on its signs and notices involves HILLS in considerable capital expenditure!

The possibilities of the plastic letters and the die-pressed plate are by no means exhausted by these official and semi-official contracts. The display industries are already providing opportunities and this side of the business will no doubt be developed as a service to the trade rather than to the consumer.

In its machine branch, too, the firm is expanding. In addition to the neat little tool supplied to garages and dealers for fixing Flexwyt letters, it is now making at its Staines factory a remarkable little metal cutting machine, the Hilshear, which fills a gap in the range of tools available to the artisan. Hand operated, power geared, and costing a fraction under £8, it performs tasks such as one would expect from much heavier and more expensive equipment. The Hilshear will cut through 1/4in. steel, trim as fine a strip as 1/32in. from the edge of a metal sheet and even cut a 45º bevel along the edge of a piece of plate, which is then ready without further work for butt welding. The Government, the Army and other official departments are big customers for this tool and an increasing demand from overseas has made it a priority production. The U.S.A., Canada and Switzerland, themselves leading tool designers and makers, are keen customers for the Hilshear.

In common with other small firms that have introduced original products, HILLS (Patents) Ltd. has had to train its own operatives. It is a self-made enterprise in the fullest sense of the term; even its founder, self-employed from the start, and having therefore no direct experience of other firms, has had to reply entirely upon his own skill and ideas. The two factories with more than 150 employees are therefore peculiarly his own creation. The products, the processes, and the system of administration, and even such details as the filing method are first-hand devices and expressions of a personality. HILLS is a family business and, without overdoing the paternalism, it extends this family feeling to its employees. Large organisations are the poorer, thinks Mr. Garle, because they have outgrown the dimensions of a family. But the small firm must also have the discipline that holds a family together. Only the large firm, he says, can afford to be inefficient; it is big enough to absorb mistakes which would leave the small enterprise no second chance. He quotes with pride an overheard remark that “things seem to go on just as well when he is away” and considers it a compliment, not only to himself, but also to the loyalty of his staff and not least to his co-directors, Mr. C. B. Brudenell, among whose many activities is the care of the Staines factory and Mr. J. W. Mackenzie, in charge of finance and organisation.

Part of the vigilance which the head of the family contributes to this particular family business is a flair for opportunity which keeps machines constantly busy and crafts flexible. The war provided a good example. Mr. Garle stumbled one day over a metal object in a field at Woolwich Arsenal. It turned out to be a rusty and discarded Ward lathe. New lathes were unobtainable and he jumped at the opportunity to buy this one for a few shillings. After a fortnight’s overhaul, it started to produce aircraft parts to a 2,000th of an inch precision, six days and six nights a week till the end of the war-and that for Woolwich Arsenal!