Photo 50/1

Green half-leather bound album (spine broken and front cover detached) measuring 535 x 395 mm, with prints loosely pasted down onto page at corners (resulting in some stress tears to prints). 'Imperial View Album No. 5 23/10/58', written in pencil on front free endpaper.

The contents of the albums can be broadly broken down as follows:

Durbar at Ambala, photographed by C.C. Taylor (March 1869): prints 43, 47, 49, 50, 51, 58, 79.

Amir Ali Sher returning from Ambala, photographed by Burke and Baker (April 1869): 38–40, 44, 48, 70, 75, 78.

Lord Mayo's visit to Peshawar, photographed by Burke and Baker (c.1871): 55–56, 60–61, 62, 68–69.

Views at Kandahar, photographed by Benjamin Simpson during the closing stages of the Second Afghan War (c.1881): 41–42, 45–46, 53–54, 72–73, 76–77, 81–82, 83–84, 86–87, 91. (75 of Simpson'sphotographs of the Kandahar district were later marketed commercially by the Bourne and Shepherd studio).

Henry Walter Bellew (1834–1892) received a medical training at St George's Hospital, London and served in the Crimean War before entering the Indian Medical Service in 1856. In India he served with Sir H. Lumsden's mission to Kandahar in 1857–58 and was interpreter at the Ambala Durbar with Amir Sher Ali in 1869. He accompanied Sir Richard Pollock's mission to Seistan in 1871 and Sir Thomas Forsyth's mission to Yarkand in 1873–74. He was Chief Political Officer at Kabul during the Second Afghan War and retired as Surgeon-General in 1886.