©Lin Yangchen


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As the war neared its end, millions of coconut definitives remained in mint condition in London, India, Kuala Lumpur and Sydney (Cockburn 1989, comm. 2021). They were perfect for pan-Malaya use, since they carried the king's portrait instead of a specific state sultan. Several months before the Japanese surrender, the Crown Agents tasked De La Rue with an sas mission: to secretly overprint the stamps with the letters bma malaya, and prepare them for beach landings (Cockburn 1998).

The Japanese surrender on 12 September 1945 at the Municipal Building, Singapore. Signing the document is the Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia Command, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Louis Mountbatten, who subsequently assumed direct command of the British Military Administration. Source: Imperial War Museum.

The British were late, arriving in Malaya almost three weeks after the Japanese surrender. It was only because of false rumours of immediate British return that the nationalistic Kesatuan Rakyat Indonesia Semenanjung in Kuala Lumpur did not declare independence (Cheah 2003), an act that would probably have killed the coconut definitive.

Malaya was a mess (Donnison 1956). Murder was “extremely common”, far more than the hundreds of reported cases. Things got so bad that police barricaded themselves in their stations for safety. Piracy was so rampant along the west coast of the peninsula that even ships in harbour were not safe. Public infrastructure was dilapidated, and malnutrition and malaria had spread.

The stamp situation was no less chaotic. To begin with, the stamps that had been overprinted in London before the surrender were misplaced in transit from Ceylon, forcing Malaya's Chief Civil Affairs Officer Major-General Sir Ralph Hone to order post offices to reopen anyway and accept unstamped mail (letter forwarded to Gibbons Stamp Monthly in January 1967). He said it helped locals keep in touch with their loved ones in difficult times.

It did not help that the postage rates had changed. The pre-war 8-cent grey had become obsolete overnight because of Universal Postal Union colour rules. This austere and stately monochrome black-on-grey overprint essay produced in Kuala Lumpur is unique among bma stamps. There exist only 100 to 200 copies, the rest of the excruciatingly precisely recorded 783,599 copies (Chum Futt Yew comm.) having been destroyed by the post office. A few of the stamps made it onto philatelic covers (Cockburn 1998).

Shortly after the resumption of stamped mail, the United Nations was born. This pair of stamps bears the UN slogan cancellation from London in 1945, centred on a regular circular date stamp with the historic year.

Poor Die I (left) and Die II prints suffering from plate wear and/or ink that was too thick or too thin and/or unfavourable physicochemical interaction with the paper coating. The 10 cents has a shifted vignette causing a clash of background lines.

A photomicrograph of another copy of the 3¢ shows yellow and blue pigment particles. It is possible but by no means certain that those two colours could have been mixed to make green (Lin 2022a). 20× plan apochromatic objective, transmitted Köhler illumination.

These stamps may be Kuala Lumpur or Australian overprintings that evaded London's quality control, exhibiting some of the largest shifts ever observed in BMA overprints, with both horizontal and vertical dislocation. Morris (2017) noted that the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, which overprinted stamps there, "prided themselves on not wasting a single stamp". Overprint creep has most notably been highlighted in the 5c (e.g. Chum 2015), but those are very minor fractional displacements compared to these. The setting of the overprint plate is uncertain, but the spacing of individual overprints within a sheet is known to be uneven, at least along the horizontal dimension, as appears on blocks of stamps from the former collection of Dr. Abdul Majid Dato Kassim. See overprint flaws for problems with individual letters.

It is a mystery why the Die I print of the 2 cents exists at all and where it originated (Malaya Study Group 1993), since pre-war Die II plates were presumably available. Could logistical complications have somehow necessitated the manufacture of a separate 2c duty plate? Peter Cockburn (comm. 2017) speculates that the single working plate was damaged, necessitating the use of the pre-war 2-cent duty plate. The key plate of the stamp on the left is slightly lighter than its duty plate, while the converse is true for the stamp on the right. The medallion rims are darkened by overlapping lines, creating organic nuances of colour, like the skin and flesh of a juicy orange, that are only possible in a Die I print.

The 2 cents Die I in a jumble of Die II's. Some denominations were overprinted with red ink, which proved troublesome at the beginning.

Symmetry in a registered letter from Singapore to Scotland. Chang (2019b) chronicles the postal history of bma.

Even postmarks were sometimes messed up, with misspelt snigapore double-ring cancellations appearing from 14 March to 11 April 1947 (Chua 1987). The author occasionally makes the same error on the keyboard when he types too fast. Another, less famous, bma postmark spelling error, datoh kremat, was reported by Peters (1991b). Back then, the person making the glyphs on the die would have been looking at laterally inverted glyph shapes and a reversed sequence of glyphs. That, and the similar picket-fence appearance of i and n, probably confused him.

It was perhaps because of wartime neglect and damage that this circular datestamp was missing its month slug, here filled in with pencil. I spotted this on a hinge in a large old leatherbound accounts book an elderly dealer used as a stamp album. He peeled the stamp off and let me have it for $2. Financial transaction aside, it symbolized the passing of stewardship of history from one generation to the next. A year later, he died.

Postmarked on Christmas Island, which was administered from Singapore from 1946 to 1958. This stamp also contains the straits settlements plate flaw, conveniently revealed here by the shifted overprint.

The military administration lasted less than a year. Even before the civilian government actually took over, philatelic dealers and investors began panic buying over speculation that the stamps may be withdrawn from circulation (The Straits Times, 14 January 1946). As it turned out, bma stamps were still being issued in 1950 (Peter Cockburn comm. 2021) and used as late as 1957 (Chang 2010), including revenue use until at least 1954 (Cockburn 2014).

Holley (2019) recounts that when he first saw the bma malaya stamps he found it curious that they seemed to have been overprinted by the British Medical Association. That’s probably it on this stamp.

References


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