20 Dollars Barclay's Bank

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.