"Don't Forget Your Old Shipmate" (Roud V23285) is a traditional naval song that has been sung by British Royal Navy sailors since the 19th century.
The song was written by Richard Creagh Saunders (1809–1886), who enlisted in the navy as a Schoolmaster on the 11th of July, 1839.
[1] It was recorded in Charles Harding Firth's Naval Songs and Ballads (1908) in a slightly different form from the one popularized in cinema, where its opening verse has been omitted, and with quatrain stanzas instead of couplets.
[2] The first version opens with the following quatrain: The rest of the song as presented by Firth does not differ substantially from the popular version presented below, but a few lines are inverted or have slight alterations to word order.
The version sung in the film was arranged in 1978 by Jim Mageean[3] from his album 'Of Ships... and Men.