a residence and expected to entertain society. The admiral's house in the Strada Mezzodi was one of the smaller auberges, originally palaces for the Knights of St. John. The small size was a disadvantage for the lavish parties which Tryon and his wife were expected to host, but the parties held in the winters of 1891–92 and 1892–93 were very popular. The admiral was the second most important person on the island, after the Governor. The admiral's other duties, aside from running the fleet, included corresponding with the director of Naval Intelligence, Captain Cyprian Bridge, passing on and receiving intelligence reports. This required replying personally to information received from his officers: he was described as a fast writer but with difficult handwriting. The correspondence covered everything from problems the Italian were having with their carrier pigeons to details of international law. TA, manoeuvres without signals Admiral Tryon was concerned that the normal system of signalling between ships would become unworkable in real war conditions. To send a signal required hoisting a flag sequence, waiting for all ships to raise flags to confirm they had seen and understood, and then lowering the initial flags to signal everyone to carry it out. The signals book had grown to hundreds of pages describing the many possible flag combinations and virtually no one knew them all. In a real battle this process might take too much time, or might be entirely impossible if enemy fire had destroyed the masts from which the flags must fly, or smoke made them impossible to read. Instead, Tryon proposed a simple signal, using the letter-flags T and A, which simply instructed captains to follow their leader. Other flag signals might be used additionally as circumstances allowed, but once the initial order was given, the ships simply had to follow the movements of their leaders. A few, basic, single flag signals were designated for particular movements, which would simply be flown without needing acknowledgement. This was a radical departure from contemporary practice, in which all movements were precisely signalled from the flagship and acknowledged by their recipients. Opinion was fiercely divided about it, for instance The Times newspaper considered it "unsound in theory and perilous in practice", whilst Rear-Admiral William Kennedy on the East Indies station declared following experiments with it that "the officers commanding thoroughly appreciated the idea which would be invaluable in time of war". Grounding of