Monthly lifestyle magazines such as the BAJAN are a thing of the past. As a child growing up in Trinidad in the 1960’s my parents used to have a subscription to the BAJAN and The Illustrated London News.
For years we had been looking for a clean copy of the August 1978 edition of the BAJAN as it included the article: “The Day World War II Came to Bridgetown – Some recollections on the visit of the Canadian National Steamship SS Cornwallis by Reginald M Gooding who gives a schoolboy’s version of the event and the adventure it brought to him and his buddy Dick Davies“.
We had a very poor photocopy of the Gooding article: “The Day World War II Came to Bridgetown”. I found a clean copy of the BAJAN from August 1978 in some things belonging to my god-mother; Doreen Weatherhead. In the People section it had a photograph of her and an announcement: “Barbadian born Doreen Weatherhead daughter of Mrs. Inez Weatherhead and the late Major Cyril Weatherhead, was recently elected as the Conservative member for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea“. I suspect her proud mother Inez had sent Doreen a copy of the BAJAN.
As an aside: Doreen’s mother Mrs. Inez Weatherhead used to make the most magnificent Guava Cheese and Shaddock Rind which was sold in Bridgetown in the Women’s Self Help Store in little grease proof paper packages tied with fine string. A pack of Mrs. Weatherhead’s Guava Cheese was sent annually to Queen Elizabeth ll.
In 1977, during Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee visit to Barbados, Mrs. Weatherhead’s Guava Cheese was served at a dinner party held by Governor General, Sir Winston Scott. The Queen so enjoyed the Mrs. Weather’s Guava Cheese that the Governor General’s wife, Rosita May Hynam, gave the Queen two packets to take home – which was the start of that tradition.
Below is the image we had been looking to re-produce of Dick Davies and Reginal Gooding:
What keeps amazing us and keeps us motivated is the breadth and range of the stories that BajanThings have covered. Out of an idea that emerged on a family island tour in December 2014, BajanThings now has a back-catalogue of 230+ posts. Some have become go-to reference pieces – something we would never have dreamed of when we launched BajanThings in December 2014.
We are indebted to our contributing authors who have shared with us their research and allowed us to increase the breath of content covered on BajanThings.
| Bill Hern (5) | Brent Stoffle (1) |
| C. Don Lorde (1) | Clement Griffiths (1) |
| David Miles-Hanschell (1) | David O'Carroll OBE (7) |
| Greg Hoyos (2) | Ian Clarke & Christopher Clarke (2) |
| Jan Weel (1) | Jenny Gonsalves (1) |
| Jim Webster (14) | Jo Ann Warren (1) |
| John Fraser (2) | John Fraser & Douglas Newsam (2) |
| John Knox (6) | Kandace Chimbiri (1) |
| Katharine Campbell (1) | Keith Mackie (1) |
| Kim Johnson (3) | Lauren Kramer (1) |
| Lyall Seale (1) | Lynda Lewis & Jim Webster (1) |
| Mike Spence (1) | Nicholas Mayers (1) |
| Peter Murphy (1) | Richard Rose (1) |
| Roger Gibbs (2) | Shana Jones (1) |
| Simon Kreindler (1) | Tyrone Roach (2) |
We welcome anyone who has a story on bygone Barbados to write it and send it to us. We will work with you to format it for publication.
If you have additional information on an existing article please add it as a comment. This will add to the article, often giving a different perspective.
To contact us please click on the Contact Burts link in the navigation bar.
BajanThings is my cousin William Burton and my little passion project to document Barbados’ recent history. To help cover some of the costs of running this website we have three income sources:
- Donations from our readers (22% of operating costs)
- Income from Google Ads (21% of operating costs) and
- Short-fall funding from William and I (57% of operating costs).
Last year between August 2024 and September 2025 we trialled taking out the ads within posts to see if we could re-coup the ad income from donations and make the posts ad-free. This failed. So at the beginning of September 2025 we reinstated Google AdSense ads within the posts.
To those that have made a donation, and continue to make donations – Thank you for your support – we really appreciate it.
Click here to make a donation to BajanThings or jump straight to the donation gateways provided by Stripe (which will take you to the secure Stripe webpage: buy.stripe.com) or PayPay (which will take you to the secure PayPal webpage: paypal.com/donate/).
The BajanThings website and the technology that drives it continues to evolve and as it evolves we try and keep ahead of the technology curve. At the start of 2024 we commenced a major upgrade – moving from what is now called the WordPress classic environment to the new WordPress block theme environment (also known as Full Site Editing – FSE).
During 2025 we have continued to update the technology with each major update to WordPress. Over 2025 we have made a few evolutionary design tweaks to the look and feel of BajanThings. The one major addition is we have added a dark mode switch in the header and footer. This was in response to one of our readers who reached out with a request: was there a way to force BajanThings into Dark mode? Our reader explaining that her eyes had deteriorated and had become extremely sensitive to light and that she now relies on dark mode when browsing websites.
The other big behind the scenes change in November was we changed our website hosting provider from SiteGround to ChemiCloud. We had been using SiteGround for many years, and over that time they had grown very big. We felt SiteGround’s use of AI bots for first-line support, meant their overall service had deteriorated. ChemiCloud comes highly recommended. The big behind the scenes changes were SiteGround used Apache server software while ChemiCloud uses the more modern LiteSpeed server software – so there has been some fine tuning of the BajanThings caching setup. LiteSpeed typically serves static content faster than Apache and handles dynamic content more efficiently too, so the BajanThings website should now load faster!
William and I have managed to catch up three times in 2025:
- In February, my wife Susan and I visited Barbados to see my sister to finish sorting through stored belongings following the passing of both parents. We even got to join William for one of his regular St. Philip walks.
- We saw William again in England in May — both at the start and the finish of his TGO 2025 walk across Scotland.
- And we’ll see him once more on 30th December, when the fambam will be in Barbados, reconnecting with family. Our children, one who has finished university and one who is still at university, haven’t been back in eleven years! They were part of the William island tour back in 2014 when the seeds of BajanThings were planted. On that tour one of the first ports of call was the Lion at Gun Hill.
For more details on how to play Warri click here.
William will at the end of January 2026 be heading to the Falkland Islands, where Bajan born Col. Richard Moody was Governor of the Falkland Islands from 1842 to 1849, his brother Revd. James Leith Moody was the first Colonial Chaplin to the Falkland Islands serving there from 1845 to 1854 and Bajan Dr. Frederick Gustave Ameile Delisle Saphile Wooding Deane RAMC FRCS was posted to the Falkland Island from 1920 to 1927.
Some key BajanThings stats:
- BajanThings has a subscriber base of just over 2,500 who receive an email when we post a new post.
- Typically about 200 people per day visit BajanThings.
- Following a new posting we typically get a spike for about 5 days peaking on the second day. This is as we drip feed out, over two days, the email notifications for new posts. Off the back of these posts we sometimes get additional spikes if the post is shared on social media. And sometimes we get random spikes when an old post has been shared on social media.
- BajanThings visitors come from: Barbados, USA, Canada, UK, Trinidad & Tobago, Australia, India, Germany, Singapore, Antigua, Brazil, New Zealand, France …
- In terms of demographics: the majority of our visitors are aged 55 to 65+, and 52% of our audience is male.
One of the highlights of 2025 was a quick post we did on Bygone Barbados photos – featuring photographs from the Colonial Office photographic collection held by The National Archives, Kew in the UK. This post went viral and this year relegated our December 2014 test posts: Bajan Seasoning into second position!
As Bajan Seasoning was a test post we do not show it in the top 25 listing – even though via Google Search it tends to be, one of the most popular posts! Thanks Mr. Google! Maybe we should do more posts on Granny’s favourite recipes – BTW (By The Way) if we did do a series of posts on posts on Granny’s favourite recipes, what would your favourite recipes be?
Click here to message us your favourite Granny’s Recipe.
Top 25 BajanThings Posts for 2025 ranked by visitors
Below are the top 25 posts based on visitor numbers for 2025:
- Bygone Barbados photographs held in the UK National Archives
- Warri: a game from West Africa brought to Barbados
- Hurricane Janet hits Barbados on 22nd September 1955
- HARP (High Altitude Research Project ) Barbados
- Belleville Village
- Old Historical & Antique Maps of Barbados 1500s-1980s
- Errol Barrow and his commanding officer Sholto Douglas
- Torpedoing of CNS Cornwallis Barbados 1942
- The Garrison Drains
- Plantation Life in Barbados in the 1950s
- Ronnie Hughes: Barbados Plantations 1630 – 1846
- Errol Walton Barrow, RAF Navigator & PM of Barbados
- Barbados Plantations & Sugar-Works 1912 – 1924
- Millie gone to Brazil – The 1920s Bailey Murder
- Barbados “land of the flying fish” luggage stickers of the 1960s
- The story of Rediffusion Radio in Barbados
- Bajan: John (Bad John) Archer a habitual criminal
- Thor Heyerdahl Ra expeditions to Barbados
- Adam Straughn (Straw) Waterman (1803 – 1887)
- Richard Rose reminisces: The Barbados Rally Scene in the 1960s and 1970s
- A Fisherman’s Tale
- Memories of Growing up in Barbados in the 1950s
- Barbados History – Professor Richard Drayton
- Mike Spence reminisces: The Origins of the GIN Club, Strathclyde
- Lord Nelson’s statue – Bridgetown, Barbados
Click here to see an index of ALL the BajanThings posts.
As 2025 draws to a close, we look ahead with a renewed commitment to sharing stories and information that educate and enlighten not only Bajans, but also our many friends around the world.
To those who have supported us — especially through donations — thank you. Your contributions help keep BajanThings alive and growing.
To our contributing Authors – thank you.
To our readers – thank you. Look out for our Boxing Day post on: The Barbados Railway 1881-1937.
The world in 2025 has been anything but stable. From the deepening effects of climate change and ongoing conflicts, to corruption, rising crime, and humanitarian crises such as the famine in Palestine and the war in Ukraine – the global landscape remains challenging. Yet despite this uncertainty, we hold on to hope.
From all of us at BajanThings, we wish you a peaceful end to 2025.
May 2026 bring renewed hope, greater unity, and a future that is safer, fairer, and more compassionate for all.
We wish you a Healthy and Happy 2026.
Peter Burton & William Burton
BajanThings – All things Barbadian. Bajan history. Bajan folklore. Interesting Bajan people. Hiking in Barbados and overseas
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