10 Rupees George VI, brown

Waterlow & Sons held the Mauritius contract through much of the colonial period, and this 1937 issue arrived during a particularly constrained fiscal moment for the island — sugar prices had been depressed for years, and the colonial administration was managing tight budgets with London watching closely. The brown coloration distinguishes P#23 from the earlier green-tinted issues in the same series.

Waterlow's collapse in the wake of the 1925 Portuguese escudo forgery scandal had done lasting damage to their reputation, but they retained British colonial contracts well into the 1950s. This note predates their worst period of financial instability by about a decade.