Enclosure 3,
Continued. 2
3. The chief ground on which we base our
appeal to you is that our present salaries are
insufficient to live on. Two of us are married, as
is also Mr. Kennedy Skipton, and one intends to get
married in the course of the year, when he has
passed his final examination in Chinese. Those of
us who are married venture to assure you that even
by the exercise of the strictest economy we are out
of pocket to the extent of approximately £100 a year.
That a Cadet officer of over four years service
should have to depend on the charity of relations
in order to make both ends meet is not, we venture
to suggest, a satisfactory state of affairs. The
bachelor Cadets are of course less hardly pressed,
but, as we pointed out in our letter of 31st December
to the Honourable the Colonial Secretary, the salary
of a passed Cadet should, we submit, be sufficient to permit of an officer marrying without the inevitable consequence of financial embarrassment.
4.
Since 1920 when the present salary scale
was brought into force the cost of living has gone up. Recently this has been accentuated by the fall of the
dollar. We had confidently hoped that our financial
embarrassment was to be alleviated by a scheme to compensate for the fall of the dollar. But the scheme turned out to be the Remittance Privilege Scheme, which ipso facto does not benefit us in the slightest degree. A young married officer invariably has his wife living with him in the Colony, and bachelors are of course excluded from the operation of the scheme. On the other hand a senior officer with a salary of £800-£1500 per annum will, if he is married and has his wife and/or children at home, be paid one third or one quarter of his salary, as the case may be, at the priviliged rate of exchange reconverted into
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