Catalog
20 Dollars Barclay's Bank
| Issuer | Barclays Bank (Dominion, Colonial and Overseas) |
|---|---|
| Year | 1937-1940 |
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| Shape | Rectangular |
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| Obverse description | At left, an oval guilloche vignette bearing the denomination TWENTY DOLLARS in letterpress. At right, the supported Royal Arms of the United Kingdom as a heraldic vignette. A large underprint guilloché rosette at centre carries the denomination TWENTY DOLLARS in bold letterpress. The upper field carries the full bank title, promise-to-pay legend, and place of issue DEMERARA BRITISH GUIANA; the lower margin bears two manuscript signatures above the titles ACCOUNTANT and MANAGER. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | The reverse is printed in dark brown on a pale rose guilloché underprint. At centre, the supported Royal Arms vignette is flanked symmetrically on each side by a large ornate guilloché rosette enclosing the numeral 20, the whole composition framed by a fine-line geometric border. The bank title and charter inscriptions appear in bold letterpress above and below the central arms. |
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Barclays Bank (Dominion, Colonial and Overseas) — the entity created out of the 1925 merger that absorbed Colonial Bank, the Anglo-Egyptian Bank, and the National Bank of South Africa — issued this note under a commercial banking licence rather than central bank authority, a now-vanished arrangement that allowed private banks to put their own paper into colonial circulation. By the late 1930s that privilege was increasingly under pressure from governments building out their own currency boards.
Bradbury Wilkinson's New Malden works handled much of the Empire's private and semi-official note printing during this period. The P#S105 prefix signals a special issue — catalogued outside the main national sequence precisely because a private bank, not a sovereign authority, signed the paper.