First Lord of the Admiralty

Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Sir Martin Lessem, KSK, GCR, GCE, SC, DSO, CGM, GS, QBM, RMN First Grand Duke, Lynx
E-mail: firstlord@trmn.org

The First Lord of the Admiralty is the President of The Royal Manticoran Navy: The Official Honor Harrington Fan Association, Inc. and serves as Chairman of the Board. For the work they do, this person is awarded the rank of Admiral of the Fleet. The duties of the First Lord of the Admiralty are as follows (These duties may be expanded as necessary by Admiralty Orders.)

  • The day-to-day running of the organization
  • The issuing of regulations in the form of Admiralty Orders
  • Chair of the Peerage Board
  • Chair of the Promotion Board
  • The issuer of the Monarch’s Warrant
  • Appointment of Officers to the Senior Leadership Position
  • The Official Media Contact of the Royal Manticoran Navy: The Official Honor Harrington Fan Association, Inc.
  • Responsible for calling and chairing the Tri-Annual Leadership Board Meeting
  • Responsible for chairing the Annual Membership Meeting
  • The Official Legal Contact of the Royal Manticoran Navy: The Official Honor Harrington Fan Association, Inc.

A letter from the First Lord of the Admiralty:

Welcome to The Royal Manticoran Navy: The Official Honor Harrington Fan Association, Inc and all of her sub-groups. We are the Official Fan Association dedicated to the Honorverse by David Weber. As such, we may be a bit different than other groups you have belonged to in the past. One of the excellent advantages of the Honorverse is that so much is laid out for us and all we have to do is plug-and-play. There are of course some areas where we have freer reign to expand the group, such as The Royal Manticoran Army, but for the most part, we stick to what David Weber and the good folks at Ad Astra Games have given us.

One of the ways that we are different is that we train our leaders to lead. Our Academy courses are set up to teach people from the ground on up how to actually lead. I have been in fandom for almost 16 years now, and one of my biggest regrets is that no organization has ever managed to teach it’s leaders how to lead a group. Oh, they have promoted people, and occasionally they have promoted a good person, but in many cases, these leaders had had little or no prior experience before they were thrown to the wolves. Nowhere is this more evident than the groups which exist solely in a medium known as Second Life, although this Association is no longer part of that medium.

As we place such an emphasis on leadership, you will find that we also offer resources to help you grow as a leader, including a first-class mentoring program which starts at the very top of the organization. In a sense, think of it like the patronage Earl of White Haven showed toward Honor Harrington in the later novels. We hope that this program will help grow our leadership corps and also help to increase enjoyment in the group.

We are a group wrapped in the cloak of the Honorverse, yet at the end of the day, this group is what you make it! We will have policies in place to explain this cloak, especially in regards to things like Peerage, Rank, Chain Of Command and other administrative responsibilities, but at the end of the day, we are a Fan Association, and that means the fan aspects and the fun are most important. As you get more involved and join us either through Chapter activities or Convention activities, you will discover that the fun is never far away.

In Service to the Fleet & In Honor of the Queen!

Admiral Lord Martin Lessem, KSK, GCR, GCE, SC, DSO, CGM, GS, QBM, RMN First Lord of the Admiralty.
Admiral of the Fleet.
Duke of New Scania

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