X4538?
A few weeks ago, together with Clive, we carried out an exercise of 'what ifs' on the number found in this location. When it was found originally I had thought that it was X3414 which coincided with the number of a tender document related to an aircraft, a Venom which was still on the drawing boards.
This is an image scan taken 5 years ago, as you can see, it's very faint. The tip of the black arrow is pointing directly at the letter X. Mathematicians amongst us might recognise that style of X. (Slightly above and to the right of the main box you can see a circle, it contains the three numbers 250, it's an example of the many instances to be found on the page.) We are barely able to make out X 453 and the last number is very difficult to get into focus. To address this we just used the 0 to 9 possibility range. One number that cropped up was X4538. It turned out to belong to an address 12, Moseley Street as you can see in the image below:
A note, the sketch is a little out because according to more modern map information, number 12 is actually right on the corner of Moseley street and High Street. Two sisters, Misses I and A Heath, occupied the home and they operated a B&B/Guesthouse there during the 40s. Coincidentally, this house was just a few doors away from the SA Secretary of the CPA who lived in High Street. You can check the number on Trove, "The Advertiser" 12 October 1940 page 3. There are other entries into the 1950s for that address.
We checked other number combinations and found a car dealer n the city which supposedly had that number but it was actually C 4538 and not X4538.
For those interested, here's an older marked-up image of the code page that shows numerous examples of micro writing both in the open spaces and within some of the letters.
