John,

Congratulations on a magnificent treasure, and one that was originally retailed in the town where I was born and grew up. The old P Orr and Sons Building still stands off Mount Road and next door to two other iconic buildings - the offices of the long-dead Mail (a newspaper that I fondly recall) and The Hindu, one of India's oldest English language newspapers. My father's first clinic used to be a very short distance across, inside the old Travancore Palace (that is gone too, and you have a brutalistic building in is place belonging to the Life Insurance Corporation of India.)

I remember the time when P Orr and Sons still sold guns and you could walk through a store with nicely polished teakwood cabinets and look at row after row of guns. The smell of 3 in 1 oil always hung in the air, and it was as addictive to a youngster like me as the smell of weed is, I guess, to some young fellows these days.

The old building now has a store selling cheap watches in front, and the rear and upper floors house a sweatshop making clothing and pillow cases and sofa covers for retailers around the world. A sad end to a glorious firm, no doubt, but all of the staff at P Orr and Sons went on to start their own little gun shops - Sammandan, Scott and Sons, Hindustan Armoury, and so on. I know that the P Orr and Sons business also had an establishment in Rangoon, but have no idea what happened to it. Would be interesting to find out, and, the death of the company (unlike the Calcutta gun shops like Rodda, Manton, Daw, Ashootoosh and Co etc that still exist) makes your gun a treasure that will never be replicated. The Karumuttu Chettiyar family who own the Indian P Orr and Sons business also traded in Burma, Singapore and Malaysia historically, but were kicked out like huge numbers of Indians were by the Burmese military junta.

Congratulations, my friend, and great hunting!