1 Pound

The Oriental Bank Corporation began as the Bank of Western India in 1842, rechartered and renamed in 1845 as it expanded aggressively across British colonial trade routes — Ceylon, India, Mauritius, China. This Colombo-payable pound note falls in the earliest years of that rebranded operation, when the bank was still establishing correspondent relationships and branch authority across the Indian Ocean network.

Batho & Bingley were a minor London security printer of the period, nowhere near as dominant as Perkins Bacon or De La Rue. Their work on colonial bank notes is uncommon enough that attribution is sometimes disputed when margins are trimmed.