During the early 1870s, William Barleycorn was a Sunday school teacher, a member of the Native Missionary Class, and a preacher at the local Bubi village of Basupu. In 1871 he abandoned running a small trading store and moved to San Carlos (North-West Bay) to work as an assistant for a European missionary. In 1873 he became the head of the Primitive Methodist Day School in San Carlos. Barleycorn made several trips to England, and received by the conference in Hull to serve as probationer in 1881.
Studying in Barcelona
In 1884 he became listed as one of the regular ministers, and studied in Barcelona for two years to obtain his Spanish teaching certificate. He became the visible leader of Santa Isabel's Fernandino community by the 1890s, and served as a patriarchal remnant of the Anglophone and Protestant influence on the island.
In his honour, a 40-foot-high (12 m), $300 monument was erected in a Protestant cemetery near the Krio settlement Clarence Cove.[2]
Two copies of the Bubi na English primer compiled by William B. Luddington and William N. Barleycorn (1875) are available for consultation in SOAS Library.
^Sundiata, I. K. (1996). From Slaving to Neoslavery: The Bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the era of abolition 1827-1930. University of Wisconsin Press. p. 149. ISBN0-299-14510-7.
^ ab[Glimpses of Africa, West and Southwest coast. By Charles Spencer Smith; A.M.E. Sunday School Union, 1895; p. 165
