'Your money is permanent' - Invergordon Mutiny Poem

Would you ask your sleek Committee

By whom the probe was begun

To manage on twenty-eight bob a week

or try it on twenty-one?

For six long years they dallied

And jiggled the wedge so thin

For six long years we wondered

How far they would drive it in

But you spoke and we believed you

‘Your money is permanent’

And now you’re chipping the plain AB

by twenty-five per cent.

Excerpts from unpublished poem about the 1931 mutiny over Navy pay cuts, by AB John Bush.
AB = Able Seaman.

Verses printed in Anthony Carew, The Lower Deck of the RN, 1900-1939: the Invergordon Mutiny in Perspective, Manchester, 1981, pages 142 and 171.