Ronald Arthur Hopwood

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. and John Turner Hopwood; he was educated at Cheam School. Hopwood returned to the Gunnery School, joining the senior staff. he was posted to the cruiser HMS Hawke as she conveyed troops to the Mediterranean from January to March 1903. He was second-in-command of , flagship in China, and later of the cruiser . He advanced to captain in 1907. After commanding and , he reattached to in charge of gunnery training ships. Hopwood was flag captain from 1910 to 1912 to Vice-Admiral Jellicoe in and . From 1913 until after the start of the First World War in 1914, Hopwood commanded the cruiser . 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. |group=upper-alpha

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. In his foreword, Alfred Noyes, acclaimed The Laws... as a book of permanent value to our literature; and there is no other book of sea poetry quite like it. Ships and the ocean-sea are the main burden throughout. The manner is of the author's own generation, and the matter is timeless. Steeped in the history of the British Navy through the centuries, they speak of something which may be called, quite simply, the soul of England, something that has saved her from a thousand perils in the past and is her only safeguard for the future.—Alfred Noyes C.B.E., D.Litt.

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 Ancestry of Nelson's Ships." Though the fifty in truth were not much liked by their new crews, the Royal Humane Society, the Royal Sailors' Daughters' School and Home #Tag:Ref|Originally the Sailor's Orphan Girls' School and Home, it was later renamed as the Royal Sailors' Daughters' School and Home. In Hampstead since 1862, now defunct.

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

Published works 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)