Identifying the Barbados Queen Victoria Diamond Jubilee issues is primarily a matter of determining the paper color. The design was used from 1897 thru 1898 and was printed on white paper and a blued paper. I do not have bluish paper examples for all the issues, so they won't be shown in the listing below.

If you have trouble determining the paper color on these stamps, try looking at them face down against black paper. The bluish paper issues are much less common, and will tend to have a greyish color rather than the white color of the typical issues. So if you can't tell for sure, it is likely that you have the white paper version.

Unlike modern stamps which are issued in the millions, sets like this one were issued very conservatively. The 2/6 printing was issued in a quantity of 10,080. The quantity printed is from "The Stamps of Barbados" by Edmund A. Bayley.

The stamps were printed on paper watermarked Crown CC, and although there were a couple of values that were printed in a second printing, there are blued paper varieties for all values, so it is logical to assume that the blued paper issues were printed at the same time as the normal issue.

The catalog numbers are from the 1980 Commonwealth Five Reigns Catalogue (CW), 2013 Stanley Gibbons Stamp Catalogue (SG) and the 2011 Scott catalog (ST). The description is from the Commonwealth Catalogue. Please contact Bridger & Kay to obtain a copy of this publication.

The images were saved in a larger size and at a higher resolution so you can more easily see the details used in sorting them. Please be patient if it takes a few minutes for this page to load.

This article was written to help you identify your stamps.
Please feel free to ask a question, or include a correction.