Sepia Saturday 284: Panel Prints and Coupon Prints

My contribution for Sepia Saturday this week features a photographic format that was popular for only a brief period, and which often receives only cursory attention in photohistory texts, even though they are fairly commonly seen. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, more or less at the same time as amateur photography was taking off, a profusion of new formats were introduced, presumably in an effort to entice customers away from buying their own cameras and back into the studio.


Charles Howell's early studio at Pleasure Beach, Blackpool, undated
Image © and courtesy of Colin Harding/Photographica World
Among these were the panel print and its smaller sibling the coupon print, which appeared shortly after the turn of the century, had their heyday between 1905 and 1915. Initially the new tall, thin shape was probably a draw, but I have little doubt that their low cost proved the main attraction for both studios and their customers. At half a dozen for sixpence from Charles Howell's beachfront studio in Blackpool, they were half the price of the already wildly popular postcard portraits.

The examples featured below include a few from my own collection, and may not represent the full range that were available, but at least they give a fair idea of the format. I've attempted to keep the colours as accurate as possible, and on my screen they are displayed actual size, although they may appear differently to you, depending on the device being used to view this page. I've also provided a number of references to Geoff Caulton's very useful PhotoDetective 1901-1953 pages, which gives many examples of the rapidly changing fashions in hair, hats, clothing and accessories during that period.


Two unidentified young women, c.1914-1918
Panel prints (56 x 121 mm) by D.A. Maclean of Middlesboro & Blackpool
Images © and collection of Brett Payne
These two young women probably visited Maclean's popular Blackpool studio during the Great War, judging by their practical swept back hair styles, V-necked blouses and white corselet skirts typical of that period. Since I acquired them in the same batch, the appearance of identical backdrop and wicker chair suggests they may have been taken on the same occasion.


Two unidentified teenage girls in costume, c.1912-1915
Panel prints (54 x 113 mm) by unknown photographer
Images © and collection of Brett Payne
The younger girl on the left has her hair swept back in a transitional hairstyle, tied with what must be one of the largest butterfly hair bows that I've seen, popular from 1912 to 1918. The older girl has her down in what was sometimes referred to as her crowning glory, although the metal wrist cuffs suggest a costume of some kind. These two panel prints also have similar poses and an identical backdrop, and I wonder if they were sisters appearing in the same stage performance. Perhaps readers more au fait with theatre of the time might be able to suggest a classical play and/or character. Troilus and Cressida is the only one that comes immediately to mind as being from that era.
Post Script Thanks to Rob from Amersfoort, we now have a probable ID for the role being acted, i.e. that of "Mercia" from Wilson Barrett's 1904 four act historical tragedy, The Sign of the Cross, as shown here and here. Thanks Rob.

The wristwatch on the younger girl's left arm is an interesting accessory. It's actually a leather-cased ladies' fob watch popular during the Edwardian era.


Unidentified young women, 28 April 1913 (left) and c. 1910-1915 (right)
Coupon prints (39 x 86 mm) by unknown photographer
Images © and collection of Brett Payne
The most striking feature of these two women is their enormous cartwheel hats, no doubt kept perched in place with long hatpins and a low pompadour hairstyle. The large-buttoned and belted jackets, probably worn over hobble skirts, confirm that these were taken some time during the decade before the Great War. Also noted in the right-hand portrait is the very visible reference number (7141, reversed), probably written in ink on the negative.


Unidentified young woman and girl, c.1910-1915
Coupon prints (36 x 88 mm) by unknown photographer
Images © and collection of Brett Payne
The young lady on the left again has her hair in the transitional style characteristic of the pre-war period. The portrait of the girl is more difficult to date, because her clothing and loose hairstyle could be from any time during the period 1905 to 1920. The belted dress with slightly dropped waistline is similar to some seen in the early 1920s, but the lace collar is more akin to the pre-war period.

These coupon prints were designed so that four could be made from a single postcard cut into strips. The glass plate was probably exposed four separate times, using a card inside the camera, in front of the plate, to mask off all but the desired strip. The shadowing effects across the lower part of the portraits - light in the left-hand portrait, dark in the right-hand portrait - were produced by placing a vignetting card close to the camera, between the lens and the subject.


Unidentified woman, c.1908-1916
Coupon print (35 x 69 mm) by unknown photographer
Image © and collection of Brett Payne
The dark, simply ornamented and middle-waisted dress worn with a high frilled collar and long sleeves is also suggestive of the pre-war period. Her hair style, however, is suggestive of a couple of years later. Detailed painted backdrops became far less common after the war, photographers, and presumably their clients, tending to prefer plain or simply ornamented patterns.


Unidentified man and child, c. 1918-1920s
Coupon print (38 x 70 mm) by H.O. Seaman of Great Yarmouth
Image © and courtesy of Paul Godfrey
This coupon print by Herbert Oscar Seaman, scion of the well known Chesterfield (Derbyshire) firm of Alfred Seaman and Sons, is unusual in that it has a tiny number printed at the base, apparently with the aid of some kind of counter (better visible with an enlarged version of the image).


Extract from patent GB190305361(A), 16 Apr 1903, by D.B. Seaman
"Improvements relating to Photographic Cameras ..."
Image courtesy of the European Patent Office
In 1903 Herbert's older brother Dennis Benjamin Seaman applied for a patent for a camera specifically designed to produce a series of such 1½" x 2½" images on a single photographic plate (Specification), while "a smaller lens projects an image of a ticket with a number or the like." It seems likely that the coupon print produced by Herbert Seaman, and likewise several others in the collection of Paul Godfrey, were made with an apparatus very similar to that designed by his brother.


Unidentified man in front of H.O. Seaman's Parade Studio, Yarmouth
Postcard print, Image © and courtesy of Peter Jones
The postcard photo shown above depicts the storefront of Herbert Seaman's Parade Studio in Yarmouth not long after the end of the Great War, and possibly with Herbert himself standing at the front door. In the window is a sign advertising "12 LARGE MIDGETS FOR 1/-." Given that he was selling a dozen postcard prints for two shillings, it seems likely that the "midgets" were commonly referred to as coupon prints.


Two unidentified woman, taken c. late 1920s
Coupon print (43 x 88mm) by While You Wait Photographs,
The Beach Studio, 12 Lower Promenade, Whitley Bay
Image © and courtesy of Robert Pols

Bessie Fisher, 2 August 1929
Panel portrait (unknown dimensions) by Charles Howell, Blackpool
Image © Peter Fisher and courtesy of SmugMug
The popularity of the format declined considerably through the 1920s, and by the end of the decade they were largely relegated to seaside arcades (above) and photobooths (below) as a novelty format.


Novelty format displaying weight of unidentified woman
Panel print (47 x 103mm) from photobooth, dated 10 September 1935
Image © and collection of Brett Payne
I'm very grateful to Paul Godfrey who has shared his collection of images, extensive knowledge and the results of his research. I'd also like to extend my appreciation to Colin Harding, Peter Jones, Robert Pols and Peter Fisher for graciously permitting me to use images from their collections in this article.

For those who find the plethora of photo formats a little confusing, I've prepared a photo format size guide as a PDF file which you can print out and use to gauge photographs from your own collection.

Sepia Saturday 283: Laying New Rails at Derby

Sepia Saturday's theme image this week was taken in the early 1890s shows a number of railway workers standing at the entrance to a large tunnel in County Mayo, Ireland. Some years ago I published a scanned and digitally retouched image of a roughly trimmed cabinet card from my collection which I entitled, "A group of railway navvies from Sheffield, Yorkshire."

Thanks to information later received from fellow photohistorian Simon Robinson, I discovered that the workers were more likely to be excavating water reservoirs rather than railway cuttings, but that hasn't prevented it becoming the most popular page on Photo-Sleuth, and "navvies" being the most common search term for visitors arriving via Google. If you type "railway navvies" into Google's image search, it should be in the top few images. According to Google Analytics tools, in the seven years since it was published it has received 1839 hits, a steady stream of visitors averaging 5 per week. I have no idea why, except that it is a great picture. It's also one of my most pilfered images, having been reposted without attribution on a multitude of other sites including, I was surprised to learn, the web site of the Smithsonian Magazine (who should know better).


Railway workers
Print (97 x 141 mm) mounted on thick card
Image © and collection of Brett Payne
Today I have a similar image of railway workers, likewise scanned from a roughly trimmed albumen print mounted on thick card. Sadly it's a little worse for wear, the photographic emulsion being considerably faded, the surface of the print showing a good deal of ly spotting, and having a large tear almost completely across the upper right hand quarter. the photograph shows a group of five railway workers standing across several sets of railway tracks, with several buildings visible in the background, including a possible railway station and platform at the far right. Judging from the clothing and headgear of the men, I suspect that it was taken in the late 1880s or 1890s, at roughly the same time as the theme image, and perhaps a decade or so earlier than my other navvies photo.


Inscription: Laying New Rails at Derby(?)
Image © and collection of Brett Payne
The intriguing thing about this photo is the caption written in black (or perhaps very dark blue) ink on the reverse. It's rather difficult to decipher but it may read, "Laying new rails at Derby" (or possibly Darley), and that is how it was advertised when I purchased it off eBay not long ago. If any readers can shed light on where the photograph might have been taken, I'd be very grateful to hear from you, either by comment below or via email.

Sepia Saturday 281: Home Duties

I recently purchased a box containing nineteen exposed 4" x 5" glass plate negatives. They depict various women and children, some of whom appear to be members of the same family. Sadly there are no notes or provenance to provide clues as to their origin but, as I will show, the batch appears to have survived as an intact collection. In other words, they probably belong together. They have little in common with this week's Sepia Saturday theme, except that two of the images show children engaged in what might with some latitude be called "home duties."


As with my recent studies of small photographic collections, A Grand Tour of Europe and Summer Holidays in Derbyshire, this group appears to have been taken in the early years of the twentieth century. Unlike the other two groups, these 19 photographs appear to have been taken over and extended period of time, covering several years in the lives of a family living somewhere in New Zealand. None of the photographs are annotated, nor is the box that they arrived in, so all provenance has unfortunately been lost.

One of the purposes for my showing these images is to demonstrate the process that I go through when researching such collections, in an an attempt to decide whether they are linked to each other in any way and, if so, then to try and establish a theoretical framework around the subjects. In many cases this may never lead to an positive identification but occasionally I have breakthroughs.


Image #09 - Three teenage children ("Agnes," "Charlie" and "Bertha")
5" x 4" (127 x 102mm) glass plate negative, unknown photographer
Image © Copyright & collection of Brett Payne
I'll start with this nicely focussed snapshot of three teenage children, two girls and a boy, seated on a grassy bank in the shade of tree. Just for convenience I'l call them "Agnes" (left), "Bertha" (right) and "Charlie." The girls have taken their hats off, while the boy, who looks as though he never bothered with one, is eating what looks to me like a dark-skinned plum. The clear images of these three individuals allows us to follow them through several years.


Image #14 - Three young children ("Agnes," "Bertha" and "Charlie")
4" x 5" (102 x 127mm) glass plate negative, unknown photographer
Image © Copyright & collection of Brett Payne
This image is partly out of focus, possibly blurred from movement and slightly over-exposed, but I think that the same three children are pictured hanging up the washing, although this must have a few years earlier. "Agnes" is handing a peg to "Bertha" and barefooted "Charlie" appears to have carelessly dropped the tin of pegs on the ground.


Image #05 - Three young children ("Bertha," "Agnes" and "Charlie")
5" x 4" (127 x 102mm) glass plate negative, unknown photographer
Image © Copyright & collection of Brett Payne
The trio are probably at the beach on this occasion, younger still, with one of the girls wearing a rather impractical cap which must have been difficult to control when the wind got up. "Charlie," seated with legs apart at right, is "unbreeched."


Image #16 - Young boy ("Charlie"), possibly with his mother ("Doris")
4" x 5" (102 x 127mm) glass plate negative, unknown photographer
Image © Copyright & collection of Brett Payne
Young "Charlie," here dressed in a Fauntleroy suit popular in the 1890s and early 1900s, appears with a young woman aged in her late twenties or early thirties, seated on a wicker chair, who I think might be his mother and who we will call "Doris."


Image #08 - Young child with doll on wicker chair (possibly "Charlie")
4" x 5" (102 x 127mm) glass plate negative, unknown photographer
Image © Copyright & collection of Brett Payne
An even younger child sits confidently in a different wicker chair placed on the lawn, holding a doll. Despite the presence of the doll, the child's facial features suggest to me that this, too, is our "Charlie."


Image #10 - Young boy in school uniform ("Charlie")
4" x 5" (102 x 127mm) glass plate negative, unknown photographer
Image © Copyright & collection of Brett Payne
Here is "Charlie" dressed in somewhat smarter attire, perhaps ready for his first day at school. The background to this photograph includes the wall of a house, possibly on a verandah or adjacent to an extrance, an upholstered straight-backed chair and a floral carpet.


Image #04 - Older woman ("Eliza") & teenage girl ("Frances") on verandah
4" x 5" (102 x 127mm) glass plate negative, unknown photographer
Image © Copyright & collection of Brett Payne
An almost identical background, only the chair having been changed, appears in two further photographs depicting three more women. In the first portrait an older woman (I'll call her "Eliza"), perhaps in her sixties, is sitting on the chair, while a different teenage girl (say "Frances") is seated on the carpet at her feet.


Image #17 - Middle-aged woman seated on verandah ("Doris")
4" x 5" (102 x 127mm) glass plate negative, unknown photographer
Image © Copyright & collection of Brett Payne
The third verandah portrait shows the middle-aged woman - I'm guessing she is in her late thirties to early forties - we've previous identified as the boy's mother ("Doris") sitting in the same chair. Unlike the others photographed on what may be the same occasion, who face directly into the camera lens, her gaze is off to the right of the photographer.


Image #02 - Middle-aged woman seated outdoors ("Doris")
4" x 5" (102 x 127mm) glass plate negative, unknown photographer
Image © Copyright & collection of Brett Payne
Within the same general time frame, but probably on a different occasion, "Doris" sat for another portrait outside her home. The same mouldings that appear in other images of their home are featured prominently in this shot, taken when the shadows were long, but still with enough light to make a decent picture. She has a low pompadour hairstyle and is wearing a leather-cased ladies' fob watch, both of which were popular in the decade immediately preceding the Great War, i.e. between c. 1905 and 1915. The jigsaw embroidery on the front of her blouse and hobble skirt with large buttons are typical of the same period.


Image #01 - Two young women reading ("Agnes" and "Bertha")
5" x 4" (127 x 102mm) glass plate negative, unknown photographer
Image © Copyright & collection of Brett Payne
Relatively few shots in this series show the surroundings of the house, but one that does is this view of the two girls ("Agnes" and "Bertha") seated in the garden, reading. "Bertha" has bagged the comfortable canvas folding deck chair, while "Agnes" has to make do with a dining room chair set partially in the shade. The presence of tree ferns indicates a strong likelihood that these photos originate here in New Zealand, where they were purchased. They both wear sensible wide-brimmed hats, Bertha's being of the distinctive cartwheel type. The house itself has a wide verandah along at least two sides, and a wooden railing in a stylish geometric pattern.


Image #12 - Teenage girl and apple tree ("Agnes")
4" x 5" (102 x 127mm) glass plate negative, unknown photographer
Image © Copyright & collection of Brett Payne
There are two further portraits of "Agnes" on her own. In the first of these she is standing next to what I believe to be an apple tree, dressed in the same clothing as Image #09, but with her hat on. More prominent in this photo is the narrow velvet choker around her neck, a fashion that arose with the appearance of lower necklines around 1905 to 1910.


Image #19 - Teenage girl, possibly in school uniform ("Agnes")
4" x 5" (102 x 127mm) glass plate negative, unknown photographer
Image © Copyright & collection of Brett Payne
In the next photo "Agnes" is seated in a chair, possibly on the verandah of the house, but in a different location from portraits #04, #08 & #10 displayed above. She is wearing what I think might be a school uniform, with a smart jacket or blazer, dark leather gloves, a tie with a shield and emblem embroidered on it, a straw boater with a broad striped hat band, and her hair tied up with a large bow at the back of her neck.


Image #11 - Three women in the garden ("Agnes", "Eliza" and "Gertrude")
5" x 4" (127 x 102mm) glass plate negative, unknown photographer
Image © Copyright & collection of Brett Payne
In a group portrait "Agnes" is seated with two older women, both on chairs placed on the path in front of the house, one of whom is "Eliza" from Image #04. She has a high-necked collar and is holding a pair of spectacles in her lap. The third woman, wearing a white blouse and tie, I will call "Gertrude."


Image #03 - Two women on the garden pth ("Gertrude" and "Eliza")
5" x 4" (127 x 102mm) glass plate negative, unknown photographer
Image © Copyright & collection of Brett Payne
A view of the garden path immediately to the right of the previous image shows "Eliza" and "Gertrude" dressed warmly in furs and large feathered hats walking towards the house.


Image #18 - Teenage girl on windowsill ("Frances")
4" x 5" (102 x 127mm) glass plate negative, unknown photographer
Image © Copyright & collection of Brett Payne
The third girl ("Frances") is depicted in another portrait, also taken on the verandah, although she is seated precariously on the wide windowsill. Her clothing and hair style are identical with that worn in Image #04, and the two photographs are likely to have been taken on the same occasion.



The Picasa album slideshow above shows the full set of images in the approximate order that I believe they were taken, probably over a period about a decade some time between the years of c.1900 and 1915.

My analysis of the family is as follows:
- Agnes, Bertha and Charlie are siblings, probably born in the late 1890s to early 1900s
- Doris is the children's mother, probably born in the mid- to late 1870s
- Eliza is the children's grandmother, probably born in the 1850s
- Frances is possibly a cousin of Agnes, Bertha and Charlie, and a similar age to them
- Gertrude may be a friend or a relative, possibly a maiden aunt
I must reiterate that these aren't their real names; I've merely invented them for the sake of convenience.

It's possible that a positive identification of this family may be made eventually but, in the mean time, if you spot any further clues or even disagree with any of my rather tenuous deductions, please don't hesitate to get in touch or leave a comment below.

Sepia Saturday 185: Ready with the Bulls-Eye, come rain or shine

A couple of weeks ago I used scans of a couple of amateur lantern slides to illustrate an article on Dovedale. This week's Sepia Saturday prompt of a rainy street scene gives me an opportunity to use a couple more from the same set, as well as featuring another recent purchase, a popular box camera which preceded the ubiquitous Brownie by almost a decade.


Unidentified couple seated on bench, c.1900-1905
Lantern slide (83 x 83mm) by unknown photographer
Image © and collection of Brett Payne
The delightful image depicts a couple enjoying what might have been a quiet glass of beer, seated on a bench outside a pub, if it hadn't started to rain. At least I think the white, nearly vertical streaks must be rain drops; after some deliberation I've decided that if they were merely scratches made during processing, they wouldn't all be roughly the same length (about 10cm). Since rain drops fall between 7 and 18 miles per hour (Source: Yahoo Answers), I estimate that this corresponds with a shutter speed of between 1/30 and 1/60 second. What has made this photograph possible is the bright, albeit slightly dappled, sunlight which accompanies the light shower of rain. The lack of self-consciousness in this candid snapshot is unusual, considering it was probably taken around 1900-1905.


Unidentified group seated on lawn, c.1900-1905
Lantern slide (83 x 83mm) by unknown photographer
Image © and collection of Brett Payne
From what I've been able to tell, the very wide-brimmed and low-crowned straw hats in this second lantern slide were popular shortly after the turn of the century, which correlates well time-wise with the high-collared, wide-sleeved white blouses and long dark skirts. Here a group of three women and a young girl, the last facing away from the camera, are seated on and around a picnic blanket, placed in the middle of a well-clipped lawn surrounded by shrubs and trees. They are boiling a small kettle on a primus stove and a teapot waits patiently on the corner of the blanket. Presumably they're in a private garden, as two chickens can be seen making an appearance from the left hand edge of the picture.


No 2 Bulls-Eye Kodak
Image © and collection of Brett Payne
The image would probably have been produced by contact printing from the original negative onto a thin glass plate, thus producing a positive transparency. Unless a portion of it was masked off - an unlikely scenario, given the composition of the shots - the original negative would therefore have been roughly the same size as the slide. The 83 x 83mm measurements of the square slides equate to the 3½" x 3½" format of 101 roll film and the short-lived 106 cartridge roll holder. The No 2 Bulls-Eye Kodak, originally manufactured by the Boston Camera Manufacturing Company in 1892, but later taken over by Kodak from 1895, was the first camera to use numbered paper-backed roll film. Both this and the No 2 Bullet Kodak, introduced in March 1895 in competition with the Bulls-Eye, used 101 format film, as did a number of other box cameras:

Camera	Film Format	Dates of Manufacture
Boston Bull's-Eye	3½" x 3½"	1892-1895
No 2 Bullet Kodak	101	Mar 1895-1902
No 2 Bulls-Eye Kodak	101	Aug 1895-1913
No 2 Eureka	106	Jun 1897-1899
No 2 Falcon Kodak	101	Sep 1897-Dec 1899
No 2 Bullet Special Kodak	101	May 1898-Apr 1904
No 2 Bulls-Eye Special Kodak	101	1898-Apr 1904
No 2 Flexo Kodak	101	Dec 1899-Apr 1913
No 2 Plico Kodak	101	Mar 1901-1913

Rotary shutter, No 2 Bulls-Eye Kodak
Image © and collection of Brett Payne
Of all these models, the No 2 Bulls-Eye was the most successful, Coe (1988) estimating a total of roughly 257,000 to have been manufactured, and rivalled in sales during the 1890s only by its diminutive cousin the Pocket Kodak, which used the smaller 102 format film. Although I haven't found anything definitive about the rotary shutter used in the Bulls-Eye, other Kodak box cameras were manufactured with shutter speeds of 1/35 to 1/50 seconds, which corresponds well with my calculations of the exposure time using rain drop tracks.


Bulls-Eye held by Grand Duchesses Olga (left) and Anastasia (right)
Taken by unknown photographer, Imperial Yacht Standart, c. 1911
Images courtesy of Royal Russia & Jos Erdkamp
Jos Erdkamp has a wonderful example of a No. 2 Bull's-Eye Kodak, complete with its original carrying case, a film cartridge, an instruction booklet, and a portrait lens attachment. He has also written an account - unfortunately in Dutch, of his detective work (Erdkamp, 1995) unearthing an intriguing fact, that the Romanov family were amongst the many enthusiastic users of the Bulls-Eye camera.

References

No. 2 Bull's-Eye Kodak (1896), on Antique Kodak Cameras from the Collection of Kodaksefke.

f/Stops and Shutter Speeds, on The Brownie Camera Page.

RUSSIAN IMPERIAL YACHTS: On Board the Imperial Yacht Standart, on Royal Russia.

Coe, Brian (1978) Cameras: From Daguerreotypes to Instant Pictures, United States: Crown Publishers.

Coe, Brian (1988) Kodak Cameras: the First Hundred Years, East Sussex, United Kingdom: Hove Foto Books, 298p.

Erdkamp, Jos (1995) De Romanov Kodaks, in Photohistorisch Tijdschrift, Issue 3 of 1995.

Sepia Saturday 184: Burmese Days

The Sepia Saturday prompt this week is, rather unusually, an image of a bas relief sculpture. I'm stretching the third dimension somewhat, but I think my offering fits the bill quite well.


Unidentified man in colonial uniform, Burma, c.1920s-1930s
Loose silver gelatin print (91 x 115mm) by unknown photographer
Image © and collection of Brett Payne
It was the 110th anniversary of George Orwell's birth last week, so what better opportunity to use this loose paper print from my collection. Sadly it has lost all provenance, and I have no idea who the colonial wallah in his solar topee and tropical khaki uniform was, but the inscription on the back clearly identifies it has having been taken in Burma. I estimate it to have been taken in the 1920s and, since Orwell (aka Eric Arthur Blair) served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from October 1922 until July 1927, they were quite possibly colleagues and may well have known each other.

I've looked at several hundred images of seated Buddhas in arched niches trying to find this particular one to no avail, so I'm hoping that a reader will one day be able to identify where this snapshot was taken.


No 3 Autographic Kodak Model G
Image © and courtesy of the Tauranga Heritage Collection
The 3¼" x 4¼" format implies it was printed from 118, 119 or 124 format film, which in turn suggests that the photographer used a roll film camera such as the No 3 Autographic Kodak Model G (above) or the Blair No 3 Folding Hawkeye Model 3 (below).


Blair No 3 Folding Hawk-Eye Model 3
Image © and courtesy of the Tauranga Heritage Collection

I hope you will like this Photo better than the last one it was taken by my mate
the figure by which I am standing is one of the Budhas which the Burmese worship

Eric Blair (back row, 3rd from left), 1923
Police Training School, Mandalay, Burma
In an essay written some years later, Orwell makes it clear that he spent five formative years working in a job he despised, and in a position which left him feeling incredibly uncomfortable.

I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better ... All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty

... when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant

The British Club in Katha, Myanmar (Burma)
Image © Aung Shine Oo and courtesy of The New York Times
In 1927, during sick leave in England, Orwell finally made the decision to resign from the service to become an author and never returned to Burma. His experiences there formed the basis of his first major work, Burmese Days and, some would argue, were instrumental in developing the political beliefs which pervaded all of his subsequent work.

... it is a corrupting thing to live one's real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.

George Orwell, Burmese Days

Most have heard of, if not read, Orwell's seminal works, Animal Farm and 1984. If you haven't already done so, I think his lesser known works, such as Burmese Days, Down and Out in Paris and London, Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia are well worth adding to your reading list.

References

Quotes from Burmese Days by George Orwell, on Goodreads.

Orwell, George (1936) Shooting an Elephant, New Writing, 2, Autumn 1936.

Perlez, Jane (2013) In Myanmar Outpost, a Fading Orwellian Link, The New York Times, 23 May 2013.

George Orwell [The Characteristics of Burmese Days], on Ba Kaung, 17 Oct 2007.