5 Dollars - Charles Vyner Brooke

Pick 21 was printed in London by Bradbury Wilkinson during the Japanese occupation of Sarawak — meaning these notes were produced by the Allied-aligned government-in-exile, not by the Brooke administration operating freely in Kuching. Charles Vyner Brooke, the third and last White Rajah, had fled before the Japanese invasion of December 1941, and the 1944–45 date range places this issue firmly in that liminal period when Sarawak's legitimate government existed largely on paper.

Notes dated from this window were prepared in anticipation of liberation and reissued upon reoccupation in 1945. Within two years, Vyner Brooke's controversial cession of Sarawak to the British Crown in 1946 rendered the entire Brooke currency series obsolete permanently.