1 Dollar Small frame

The British North Borneo Company held one of the last functioning chartered company administrations in the world when this note was printed — a relic of Victorian-era commercial colonialism still exercising sovereign currency powers well into the twentieth century. Waterlow & Sons produced the plates in London, though the notes circulated across a territory governed more like a corporate estate than a Crown colony.

The "small frame" designation distinguishes this from the earlier large-frame issues of the same denomination — a reduction reflecting revised printing economics rather than any monetary policy change. The Company's administration ended abruptly in 1941 with the Japanese invasion.