kismet?

>I think you're right - it was Churchill. After I mentioned Wellington I think I just rolled on to Nelson - though it could be I got the buggery thing entangled with Nelson's last words <bg>
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>>I thought that was Churchill. Or maybe more than one of them said it. The way I heard it, when Churchill was Secretary of the Navy in his young years he made some change to regulations. "But that's a tradition of the Royal Navy," he was told. "The only traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, sodomy, and the lash," he said.
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>>>Yeah, to make conscription work you kind of have to adopt a training and discipline model that has gone out of fashion. Wellington used to refer to his troops as "the scum of the earth" - even after they defeated Napoleon. And Nelson, of course, said the British Navy was sustained by "rum, buggery, and the lash". (though come to think of it, if you dropped any ban on gays in the navy you might be able to put that on a recruiting poster on Fire Island <bg>)