Ronald Arthur Hopwood

Rear Admiral Ronald Arthur Hopwood (7 December 1868 – 28 December 1949) was a British naval officer and poet. He began his career in 1882 with the Royal Navy as a gunnery officer, completed it in 1919 as a rear admiral, and was acclaimed in 1941 as poet laureate of the Royal Navy by Time. As an author, Admiral Hopwood's first work was his poem The Laws of the Navy, published in 1896 when he was a lieutenant. With its good-natured military advice making it popular within both the Royal and U.S. navies, Time gives it "precedence among Navy men even over Kipling's If and goes on to quote Hopwood's new poem Secret Orders in its entirety. The last lines of Secret Orders, written in appreciation of the Destroyers for Bases Agreement (a predecessor to Lend Lease), harken to the Second World War bond between the two navies. Early life Hopwood was born on 7 December 1868 as the third son of Mary Augusta Henrietta née Coventry (1841–1894), the granddaughter of George Coventry, 8th Earl of Coventry, and John Turner Hopwood; he was educated at Cheam School. His older brother was Aubrey Hopwood (1863-1917), the lyricist and novelist. Military career Hopwood entered the Royal Navy on board as a naval cadet in 1882, and became a lieutenant in 1890. After serving in the gunboat on the Cape and West Africa Station, he joined in 1891 to specialize in gunnery, and on qualifying in 1893 was appointed to the junior staff in the HM Gunnery School, HMNB Devonport. He was gunnery officer of the cruiser in the English Channel, and then from 27 March 1900 he was 1st and gunnery lieutenant of the battleship on her first commission, to the China station. Hopwood returned to the Gunnery School, joining the senior staff.