War: Mutiny?

Stories of restiveness verging on mutiny aboard British ships sent into the Mediterranean to intimidate Il Duce have several times been carried by Italian papers, generally ignored as “Mussolini whistling to keep his people’s courage up.”

Last week London’s “Augur.” a respected news-pundit so close to His Majesty’s Government that irate Italians have called him “the British Agent Augur” wrote off his own bat essentially what Il Duce has been whistling, served up the incipient mutiny of British tars in the Mediterranean to the British public as one reason for Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s consenting to dismemberment of Ethiopia.”Augur” pictured the disgruntled salts “cooped up in the narrow quarters of ships of all descriptions beginning to resent the tension of inactivity they are under without visible cause. They have been deprived not only of leave to go home but also of shore leave in the ports where they are now stationed. This has been particularly necessary at Alexandria, Egypt, where the population is far from friendly to the British at present.”