Since both Bahrain and Kuwait had a substantial population and aviation base, the British Authorities early on deemed it appropriate to have Indian stamps overprinted "BAHRAIN" / "KUWAIT". Qatar, on the other hand had a relative small population in the 1940s and so it was deemed, by the British authorities not to require its own Indian Stamps overprinted "QATAR".
So it was that until 1948 Qatar used Indian Stamps overprinted BAHRAIN, however, the lack of a post office meant that generally the mail would be transferred by 'hand of shipment' to Bahrain or through the Gulf Petroleum Company aircraft onto another location for subsequent mailing.
On the appointment of a Political Resident in Qatar changed all that, with it came a means of mailing directly from Qatar. Initially the stamps sold were the BAHRAIN overprinted ones, however this was quickly frowned upon by the locals, and so value only surcharged stamps were quickly brought in.
By 1957 with the change of the Indian Rupee to a decimal format, required a further change to the overprint, giving rise to the stamps shown below.
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Perhaps, less known is the variations in these stamps. As shown on the image above, both the 15 NP and the 40 NP have know variations. The latter a subtle colour change, while the former has a number of known differences, two of which are highlighted in the image below.
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One of the best sources of information regarding the British Stamps overprint is the GB Overprints Society, which runs a web site detailing all sorts of information. However, possibly not complete as I shall describe.
Around 1960-61 the QE II Wilding series of stamps were re-issued with the Multiple Crown watermark. However, the GB Overprints Society website omits the 9 NP stamps (shown with a red border in the image below) from the list of re-issued stamps, while it is clearly available with the multiple crown watermark, and even with the multiple crown water mark and QATAR overprint. The same being true for the variants of the 15 NP and the 40NP, both of which do exits as for the 9 NP.
The stamps with a black diagonal line through them were not issued with the QATAR overprint.
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