Very loosely related to naval history

[PMarione]

Frederick Edwin Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead (1872 – 1930), best known to history as F. E. Smith, was a British Conservative statesman and lawyer.
He was a skilled orator, noted for his staunch opposition to Irish nationalism, his wit, pugnacious views, and hard living and drinking, and Winston Churchill's greatest personal and political friend.

A 1924 entry in Evelyn Waugh’s diary states that an English High Court judge presiding in a sodomy case sought advice on sentencing from Lord Birkenhead. "Could you tell me," he asked, "what do you think one ought to give a man who allows himself to be buggered?" Birkenhead replied without hesitation, "Oh, thirty shillings or two pounds; whatever you happen to have on you."