5 Dollars Barclay's Bank

Barclays Bank (Dominion, Colonial and Overseas) — the DCO branding adopted in 1925 after the merger of Colonial Bank, Anglo-Egyptian Bank, and National Bank of South Africa — issued this note under a private banking authority rather than a colonial government mandate. That distinction mattered: DCO notes circulated on the bank's own credit, backed by its London reserves, in territories where no central bank yet existed.

Bradbury Wilkinson printed the DCO series from their New Malden works through the late interwar period. By 1937, political pressure to replace private bank currency with state-controlled issue was already building across British colonial territories — within two decades, most of the markets this note served would have their own currency boards.