Eric Blair was born on June 25, 1903 in Motihari, Bihar, in India, when it was part of the British Empire under the British Raj. There, Blair's father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked for the opium department of the Civil Service. His mother, Ida Mabel Blair (nee Limouzin), brought him to the United Kingdom at the age of one. He did not see his father again until 1907, when Richard visited England for three months before leaving again. Eric had an elder sister named Marjorie, and a younger sister named Avril. He would later describe his family's background, as "lower-upper-middle class." He is noted as a political and cultural commentator, as well as an accomplished novelist, Orwell is among the most widely admired English-language essayists of the 20th century. He is best known for two novels written towards the end of his short life: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. At the age of six, Blair was sent to a small Anglican parish school in Henley-on-Thames. He was recommended to the headmaster of one of the most successful preparatory schools in England at the time: St. Cyprian's School, in Eastbourne, Sussex. Blair attended St. Cyprian's on a scholarship that allowed his parents to pay only half of the usual fees. After a year at Wellington, Blair moved to Eton, where he was a King's Scholar from 1917 to 1921. Blair made lifetime friendships with a number of future British intellectuals such as Cyril Connolly, the future editor of the Horizon magazine, in which many of Orwell's most famous essays were originally released. After Blair finished his studies at Eton, his family could not pay for university and he had no prospect of winning a scholarship, so in 1922 he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He came to hate imperialism, and when he returned to England on leave in 1927 he decided to resign and become a writer. He later used his Burmese experiences for the novel Burmese Days (1934) and in such essays as A Hanging (1931), and 'Shooting an Elephant' (1936).