5 Dollars

The Board of Commissioners of Currency, Malaya was established in 1897 as a joint currency authority for the Federated and Unfederated Malay States, the Straits Settlements, and later Brunei and British Borneo — a rare colonial arrangement in which a single board issued currency across multiple jurisdictions without a central bank behind it. This 1940 issue came off Waterlow & Sons' presses less than two years before the Japanese invasion of Malaya in December 1941, which meant substantial quantities of notes in the supply chain were either captured, hastily destroyed, or abandoned during the rapid British retreat.

Huckerby's tenure as Chairman coincided with that collapse. Notes surviving from this series with clean signatures and intact paper are scarcer than the pick number implies.