The Thirties

The First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Austen Chamberlain, hurried
to Invergordon to conduct a personal investigation there; and
it was announced that, as far as the Navy was concerned,
pay cuts were suspended. Later, they were reintroduced
in a greatly modified form without any objections being
raised.

Abroad, the Invergordon Mutiny was regarded as the begin-
ning of the break-up of the British Empire.12 Britannia, it was
felt, was clearly not in a position to go on ruling the waves, and
therefore London was no longer a safe place to deposit money.
The flight from the pound, which had been slowed down by the
formation of the National Government, gained renewed impetus;
hearts, reassured by the cut in unemployment pay and other
economies, were made anxious again by insubordination in the
Navy. Once more Mr. Montagu Norman had to announce an
empty till, and the refusal of French and American bankers to
replenish it. Less than a month after MacDonald had formed the
National Government,, there was a recurrence of the same
situation which had led him to break with his old associates and
find new ones among former opponents. This time he could
not save the country. He had saved it already. His previous
performance was not capable of repetition. On August 25 he
had delivered a solemn warning that 'if there were any collapse
in the pound we should be defaulting on our obligations to the
rest of the world and our credit would be gone'; on September
21 he announced the abandonment of the Gold Standard,13 the

12 Especially in the U.S.S.R. The course of die Russian Revolution has
now been sanctified there as the pattern of all true revolutions; and as a
mutiny in the Black Sea Fleet heralded Lenin's assumption of power, so it
was assumed that a mutiny in the Atlantic Fleet must herald the outbreak
of a. proletarian revolution in England.

1S Commander Stephen King-Hall, in Our Own Times, pointing to the
Invergordon Mutiny as the direct cause of this, in his view, necessary change
in fiscal policy, mentions that he has often reflected upon 'the strange com-
bination of circumstances which caused the Royal Navy to be used by a
far-seeing Providence as the unconscious means of... releasing the nation
from the onerous terms of the contract of 1925 when the pound was restored

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