Obituary: Peter Ralph Pratt, legendary old-school farmer

Stories of Peter Pratt and his fun-loving antics, whether covered in cow dung, oil, straw, or dressed in his country tweeds, stretch from the UK to Europe and span his eight well-lived, mad-cap decades on this earth.

Born in Romsey hospital on April 13, 1944, Peter grew up the son of a female farmer, maiden name Clara “Millie” Cox, who was the matriarch of the family until her passing aged 98. Peter’s father, Ralph Pratt, who volunteered for the RAF, was tragically killed during WWII when his plane crashed into the sea off Scotland in 1943. Young Peter was raised on Brook Farm as an only child by his mother, her sisters, and  her brother.  

Peter went to school at Stroud, and Embley Park before attending boarding school at King’s College, Taunton. Peter excelled at sports and was a talented athlete and competitor throughout his life. He won cups for javelin, long jump, sprinting and long-distance running and was a member of the Kings and Royal Agricultural College Cirencester’s cross-country running teams, even making National Championships. His 1950s long jump record is still up in the great hall at Embley.  At King’s the aspiring athlete soon started cycling part way home from Taunton to Timsbury on school holidays. Competitive cycling featured prominently in his twenties and thirties.

Peter was not just an athlete but an avid sports supporter too. He’d think nothing of driving 800 miles, each way, to watch the Tour De France mountain stages roadside dragging unwitting family or friends along with him. And he was also a “Pompey till I Die" fan, a devotion instilled in him by his elegant mother and church-organ-playing  aunt Daisy who regularly took young Peter to matches at Portsmouth from the time he was in short pants. Naturally, he was at Wembley in 2008 when his beloved Pompey won the FA Cup.

In October of 1963 he took a one-year farming course at Cirencester.  What he learned there he would authoritatively impart in bossy letters home to his family demanding that the downs had to be  “top-dressed …with manure before the cows were turned out onto it” and “when the downs were eaten off it should be top-dressed again”. Peter loved giving imperious orders about everything, but as the years passed his own farming style became completely idiosyncratic.
Peter spotted his first love Bridgette in 1963, a stunning Irish blonde with a bee-hive, wearing Chanel suits and stilettoes. walking down Southampton’s Charlton Road. He was smitten and when Peter set his heart on anything he generally got it. So, he pulled his car up, got out, and asked the young Bridgette, “can you tell me the time?”  And so began a relationship that lasted over six decades.

By January 1966, Peter and Bridgette moved to Holland so Peter could try his hand at a semi-professional international cycling career. But Peter quickly learned that if you didn’t take performance-enhancing drugs in Europe back then you didn’t have a chance of a cycling career so he returned to England to race with local clubs like the Southampton Wheelers, winning stages at six-day events and competing in the Tour of Ireland.

On February 4, 1967, he married Bridgette in the Timsbury church where he’d been christened. Initially, the couple lived at the family’s North Waltham Farm and Peter drove back and forth for 5am milking duty at Brook Farm.  But by 1972, Peter had relocated his family, that now included his children Sarah and James, to Brook Farm. For the first half of Peter’s life he was just an unpaid farm labourer for his family. It wasn’t until the 80s when Peter finally inherited part of Brook Farm that he adopted his fabled mantra, “I’m in Charge.”  When friends chided Peter that he’d never done a day’s work in his life, he would respond. “I work every day from 8 till 9,” pause, then finish, “in the morning.” 

Peter’s agricultural peculiarities were such that when his first child, Sarah, was born during the 1967 harvest, Peter sent a telegram to Bridgette in Southampton General saying, “Sorry I can’t be with you, gone combining”.

Growing up with such an eccentric father Peter’s children had an offbeat childhood. Sarah recalls being particularly embarrassed that her father would pick them up from school, late, in an Austin 1800 or truck, filled with sheep and sheep dung. Or he’d take them out wearing his much-laughed-at odd wellies, one green, one black, both cut off at the ankle. When people asked Peter why he didn’t buy a new matching pair, he’d respond with a glint “Why waste money on a new pair when I have two perfectly good wellies already”.

Over the decades, friends and family never quite knew which Peter Pratt they’d run into - the tweed-wearing country gentleman farmer or the expletive ranting man who looked like a tramp covered in mud and straw. One woman just called him “Hayseeds.” In the late 70s, Peter decided to try his hand at sheep farming and determined that required a sheepdog. Enter his much-loved border collie, Pepper who instead of penning the sheep preferred to scatter them everywhere instead. By the late 80s/early 90s Brook Farm’s wall-eyed collie collection had grown into a fang-baring wolf-pack, who stood guard on the farmhouse lawn and terrorized any walkers or visitors who dared venture near. Despite endless complaints, Peter would insist this was the countryside. if walkers didn’t like his menacing dogs on his farm, they should stroll elsewhere.

But for all the farming hilarity, his vintage clapped-out machinery, string fences that allowed his cows to roam Romsey’s roads and gardens, his “organic” gates made of silage bales ( (metal gates would be stolen! he insisted.) and the trail of mud and straw he left wherever he and his old cars went, it was his ever-growing crop of rustic classic cars that turned Peter into a global sensation. Footage of his so-called “Car Graveyard” went viral. No sooner did Peter get one car home, than he’d be off in pursuit of another. His car addiction infuriated his mother and aunts who would open the farmhouse front door and slam it in the face of any of Peter’s  “car friends” while reprimanding, “No we don’t want any more cars today Mr”. Fill in the blanks. There was family outrage whenever another wreck arrived in the farm yard. But outrage never stopped Peter. He’d drive around the country looking over hedgerows to see if there were any vehicles that interested him. In 1980 his roving car eye united him with the classic that turned them both into historic rally icons. Hidden under a hedge Peter found one of the earliest long-door TR 2s registered in May 1954, with the registration plate SHY 3, that did not reflect the gregarious nature of the car’s new owner.

Shy 3, with Peter behind the wheel, took to the rally circuit in the early 90s. Rallying quickly became Peter’s passion, and car and driver were much-loved spectacles on the European rally circuit including Liege to Istanbul, the Monte Carlo Challenge and his beloved Tulpen Rallye, which he attended for 25 years in a row until 2023. His tatty green Shy 3  (dubbed the “flying cow pat”) stood apart from all the other pristinely restored cars, but Peter didn’t care. Some rally regulars could never figure out why more selective events even allowed shabby Shy 3 to compete.

A fellow competitor recalls that when one pre-event official scrutineer approached Shy 3, Peter joked "Be careful of the paint." "Why’s that?" asked the scrutineer. "It’s not dry yet. I was up until 3am, hand-painting it.”  His long-time navigator Julie Eaglen says “it was his agricultural charm” that got him into events - i.e. his decades-long schtick of “I’m just a Poor farmer who can’t afford luxuries”.  Peter rallied on a poor farmers shoestring.  Peter Baker, a former committee member of Historic Car Rally Register, recalled “I first met Peter on the eve of a rally starting in LLandrindod Wells. Naturally, we all were staying at the posh Metropole hotel. Peter however had pitched his tent in the hotel grounds. ‘I can’t afford that’ he said in his farmer's drawl.

Peter farmed, rallied, and loved making people laugh until the end. He was one of the last remaining old-school eccentric farmers, and one of historic rallying’s most colourful, amusing characters who brought hilarity wherever he went. He was much loved and will be dearly missed by Bridgette, his children, grandchildren and friends. But tales of his irreplaceable humour and spirit will live forever.