Was it a Debit Card with Barclays bank, or was it a Barclaycard Credit Card? The experience I had with ApplePay was that both banks I use allowed me to add my debit cards (These banks were Nationwide and Halifax, and both were Visa Debit cards), but none of my UK Credit Card companies had this feature enabled (one of which was Barclaycard, and the other was Capital One). So it might explain why Barclays is working for some people and not for others. My guess is that it depends on the type of card it is. This was a while ago now when I last tried it (I'm talking sometime last year), so hopefully more things have rolled out. But I no longer live in the UK, so as we don't have ApplePay out here in Greece yet, I can't really be sure what has happened since. (I really wish they'd release it here, but so far I think only really USA and UK have had any kind of ApplePay rollout.
Out of curiosity, How well has it caught on in the UK since I left? Has it become a standard acepted form of payment in most shops yet, or is it still that only really big companies have adopted it it as a payement method?
I guess we'll just have to keep pestering Apple and our Banks to get their act together so that they can see that there is interest. Worth writing them each an email. If enough of us do that, and investors see that their customers want this, it might get things moving. If we leave them to just plod on as they always do, I'm willing to bet nothing will change. So worth a shot!