Enclosure 2..
22
Hon. Colonial Secretary,
We, the Cadet Officers appointed under the Fost- reconstruction scheme, have the honour to address you on
the subject of our petition to His Excellency the Governor
for an increase of salary, which was forwarded to you on
8th October, 1926.
Although we have received no definite reply,
we understand that certain points were raised by you and
by Mr. Mc. Elderry, then Assistant Colonial Secretary.
These points we endeavour to meet below, and we request
you to be so good as to grant us an interview to enable
us further to present our case.
2.
It appears that, in the criticisms which have
been made on our application, it has been assumed that the
salary of a junior Cadet is necessarily a bachelor salary.
While admitting this in the case of unpassed Cadets we
consider that the salary of a passed Cadet should be
sufficient to enable an officer to marry, as several
of us have done, without the inevitable consequence
of fi"ancial embarrassment. The present salaries we
regard as insufficient even for a bachelor, whose
total salary, we submit, cannot be compared with the sum
to which a senior officer, with wife and children at
home, may restrict himself after meeting all his
commitments.
We invite attention to the facts that, on the
institution of the present salary scheme in 1920 the then
most junior Cadets, Messrs. Carrie and Ainsworth went on to
£500 per annum, that the war cadets have received salary
concessions, and that we alone have experienced the
working of the scheme in respect of one's early years as
a passed cadet.
In this connection we would refer to Sir R. E.
Stubb's statement, made in 1920 that the expenses of
junior passed cadets are much heavier than those of