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First Day Covers

This section is for the many first day covers of Barbados. As I don't have all of them (yet!) this is a labour of love so please bear with me as I try to upload every image I can of every first day cover that has been issued.

Some of the earlier covers are a little hard to get but I am fairly confident you will see a good selection from George VI onwards.

In terms of the covers themselves, as you will see, many of the early covers, pre 1960's, are plain covers.

This was the default for early Barbados covers with a few exceptions. Amongst those exceptions are the 1937 Coronation covers, as these were much sought after worldwide and cover producers went to great lengths to create attractive designs which could be used with this omnibus issue.

From the early 1960's onwards we see more illustrated covers appearing and by the mid 1970's these are the predominant type of cover, with plain covers only appearing in rare circumstances, such as the St Vincent Relief Fund overprint in May 1979, where there would have been no time to create something for the issue.

To this day, when a new cover is issued in Barbados, there is generally only one type of cover design, that issued by the Philatelic Bureau.

The team there spend an extraordinary amount of time working on cover design and accompanying notes, meaning theirs is, by default, the best cover. To the best of my knowledge, there are no independently produced FDC's for Barbados.

So, choose your reign and decade below and enjoy the images!

Queen Elizabeth II 2010-19

Queen Elizabeth II 2020-21

Republic of Barbados 2022 onwards