High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! 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 continues 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 World War II bond between the navies.