Ronald Arthur Hopwood

Rear Admiral Ronald Arthur Hopwood CB (1868–1949) 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 John Turner Hopwood and he was educated at Cheam School.

Military career

Hopwood entered the Royal Navy onboard HMS Prince of Wales as a naval cadet in 1882, and became a lieutenant in 1890. After serving in the gunboat Sparrow on the Cape and West Africa Station, he joined HMS Excellent 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 first of the cruiser Blake in the English Channel, and then of the battleship Goliath in China. Hopwood returned to the Gunnery School, joining the senior staff.

Promoted to commander on 26 June 1902, he was second-in-command of HMS Glory, flagship in China, and later of the cruiser Duke of Edinburgh. He advanced to captain in 1907. After commanding Grafton and Revenge, he reattached to HMS Excellent in charge of gunnery training ships. Hopwood was flag captain from 1910 to 1912 to Vice-Admiral Jellicoe in Prince of Wales and Hercules. From 1913 until after the start of the First World War in 1914, Hopwood commanded the cruiser Gibraltar. He was appointed in December 1914, to membership in the Ordnance Committee, becoming its vice-president in 1917. He served as such until January 1919, when he retired on promotion to rear admiral.

Later work

He was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB) on 1 January 1919. From 1919 to 1922 he was general secretary of the Navy League, the charity that supported the Royal Navy and the oldest such organization worldwide. His subsequent advancements to vice-admiral in 1924 and admiral in 1928 were on the retired list.

Late in his military career, Admiral Hopwood wrote Our Fathers, The Old Way, as well as The Secret of the Ships, and The New Navy, "all of which were steeped in the tradition of the Service." Thirty nine of Hopwood's poems, including Secret Orders, are collected in The Laws of the Navy and Other Poems, an expanded edition published in 1951. In his foreword, Alfred Noyes, acclaimed The Laws... as a book

Of less renown, Hopwood was an authority on Horatio Nelson's ships. On 21 October 1925, 120 years after the Battle of Trafalgar, Hopwood appeared before the Royal United Services Institution to lecture on the "The Ancestry of Nelson's Ships." In 1921, he wrote an article entitled The Saving Grace that appeared in The Quarterly Review 467. Hopwood wrote strongly of this opinion:

The Laws of the Navy

The 23 July 1896 issue of the British Army and Navy Gazette presented a poem that was destined to become one of the Naval World's literary classics. Hopwood's work, entitled The Laws of the Navy, set forth what might safely be termed the "wisdom of the ages" for all who seek to make their way in large, hierarchical organizations, with special emphasis on the seagoing versions. During the Great War era, Lieutenant Rowland Langmaid, R.N., made a series of drawings to accompany the poem, which was published in the version illustrated here. The writer Eeyore Smith in The Naval Review remarked "that The Laws of the Navy has had a considerable influence upon the careers of many naval officers who have served during the last half century. The commonsense, the mild cynicism ("there be those who have risen thereby"), the jingling metre, accentuated by the illustrations of [Langmaid], have left their marks upon the memories of those who have come across the twin frames which hang upon the bulkheads and walls of ships and naval establishments."

By the mid-1920s, the virtues of The Laws of the Navy crossed from the Royal Navy and penetrated the consciousness of the United States Navy. The poem began to appear in the U.S. Naval Academy's Reef Points, a handbook presented to freshmen (called "Plebes") for their edification and guidance. It has been featured in the annual editions of this publication to the present day, and many a former Plebe can recite its words by heart, having been made to memorize them as an essential part of the educational process.

Starting in the early 1970s, Reef Points provided a brief introduction to The Laws of the Navy, which is quoted here (as printed in the 1998–1999 edition):

As a word of advice, we include 'The Laws of the Navy' by Admiral R.A. Hopwood, R.N.(ret.). These twenty-seven laws contain words of wisdom that few of you will appreciate fully now, words which you may wish you had heeded twenty years from now. Read these laws, then apply them. See how those above you apply these rules--and how they sometimes disregard them--and the consequences. Be alert to learn from others; only through experience will your understanding of others broaden. You will become a richer and fuller person, a better naval officer.

First and last stanzas

Mis-attributed stanzas

Two stanzas are often quoted that are not part of Langmaid's art or Hopwood's poetry. They appear at the end, set-off with Hopwood's last stanza as the moral to the poem.

While their appendage is an unsourced tribute to Hopwood's appeal, their meter is not quite Hopwood's.

Secret Orders

The title of the 1941 Time article ("World War: Debutantes Celebrated") is unusual for a discussion of the Second World War. Its inspiration comes from the metaphor in the fifth stanza of "Secret Orders":

The fifty are the fifty retired ("mothballed") destroyers transferred from the U.S. Navy to Great Britain in exchange for land rights on British possessions (i.e. the destroyers-for-bases agreement). The destroyers became the Town-class, and were renamed for cities common to both the United States and Great Britain, or for rivers bordering the United States and Canada.

While the U.S. Navy considered the destroyers obsolescent, British naval officers were publicly "agreeably surprised" at their good condition as they debuted in the Royal Navy. Though the fifty in truth were not much liked by their new crews, Hopwood was moved to poetry by the image of old ships returning to duty:

Personal life

On 26 June 1915, Hopwood married Gladys Wolryche-Whitmore of Thedden Grange, Alton, Hampshire, England. They had two daughters.

Hopwood has two portraits in the National Portrait Gallery, London, by Walter Stoneman.

Published works

• The Old Way and Other Poems. London: John Murray. 1916. Retrieved 17 May 2012.  at Internet Archive
• The Muse in Arms The Muse in Arms - a collection of war poems, for the most part written in the field of action (1917) (Internet Archive)
• The Laws of the Navy and Other Poems. London: John Murray. 1919. Retrieved 17 May 2012. 
• The New Navy and Other Poems. London: John Murray. 1919. Retrieved 9 September 2013. 
• The Secret of the Ships. London: John Murray. 1918. Retrieved 17 May 2012.