Determining Census and Contract number.
| When i bought my C8 i was wondering what the original cencus number and fabrication of the truck was.
The
story that came with the truck, and what was noted on the Belgian
papers was that it was fabricated in 1943, a short investigation told
us that that was strange but not impossible.
The official start for
fabrication of the C8 GS was february 1944, but some were build in
august 1943 for trial by the British army.
Unfortunatly the official
records of Morris Commercial did not survive the war as they were
destroyed by an air raid at the end of the war, so determination is
difficult.
However, we found a date plate in a box of rubbish
parts that belongs to the truck that gave us a contract number and
chassis number.
As the chassis number matches the chassis number on the truck it belongs definitly to the truck.
This plate gave us the MCC Contract No. 23/6450.
Thanks
to Ivor Ramsden we learned that Contract S6450 was for 4000 C8 GS
trucks with Censu numbers between Z5809758 and Z5813757.
This means
you can determine the likely census number, however there might be some
room as the correlation between numbers is not exact.
Doing an exact
match the original census number for my truck would be Z5810800,
however further investigantion and comparing with other trucks made it
that there can be a variation of as many as 300.
The RLC museum
might have the keycards for the C8's, there were once part of the
inventory of the Beverly museum but moved to the RLC museum.
Unfortunatly
the Chilwell book does not give production dates, there might be a
change that the Bovington Tank Museum have the contract card.
We have contacted them and they were not able to help us but directed us to the Royal Logistic Corps Archive, hopefully they will be able to help us.
Through
comparisation we learned that it is very likely that the numbers
weren't painted on the trucks in chassis number sequence as was the
case earlier in the war.
This seems to have changed somewhere in 1943.
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