Born into the guilded world of the kind of New York society encountered in the novels of Edith Wharton, Dallas Pratt was perhaps the archetypal quiet American. Yet his modest bearing belied his considerable achievements, not the least of which was the founding, with John Judkyn, of the American Museum in Britain. His home in Manhattan, two brownstone houses converted into one early this century, preserved into the 1990s the scale and opulence of an earlier more leisured age. His maternal great-grandfather, Henry Huttlestone Rogers (1840-1909), had helped J.D. Rockefeller to found Standard 0i1. Accordingly Dallas's mother was endowed with the resources and temperament to be independent. Stylish in her dress, she was no less stylish in the decoration of her homes, being one of the first patrons of Elsie de Wolfe, the founder of interior decoration as it has come to be understood in this century. Noel Coward, it is said, loved the parties at her residence on Cap d'Antibes. However, as well as coming into a share of his great-grandfather's Oil and rail fortune, Dallas also inherited the family tradition of public Benefaction on the grand scale. His family would have asked no more of him than to make an annual round of his palatial houses in America and Europe, but he had too much of the energy and determination of his industrialist grandfather to settle for that. Perhaps more important, he had an almost puritanical sense of purpose learned from his English governess Maud Duke, who had the main responsibility for his upbringing while his mother was occupied with her headlong social and marital activities. A glimpse of the style of Dallas's life as a child, as well as an indication of the early formation of his bibliographic interests is given in his account of his visits with his sister to the house of his grandfather, William Everest Benjamin, at Ardsley-on-Hudson.There, on the balcony of the Renaissance-style library with its impressive folios on lecterns and antique Florentine tables', they found a set of Dickens. He relates: We would visit this balcony, then flee to the veranda, my sister with the Old Curiosity Shop, I with Dombey and Son, sharing between us bottles of Cantrell and Cochran ginger ale, a box of Lorna Doones, and much ice to counteract the languor's of a Hudson Valley summer afternoon. On this veranda, overlooking a lawn gently sloping toward the river, we would read until the shadows of the big trees lengthened on the grass, and the voice of our governess called us back to the mundane ritual of tea with grandma: 'Children! Come in; you` re reading your eyes out. Grandma's in the drawing room." A British-American connection was established in Dallas's life when his mother divorced her second husband and married Charles Cartwright ('Carty') in I922. His grandmother's letter describes the marriage as most satisfactory to us, but naturally we would have preferred an American.' She was apprehensive about the uncertainties in the life of a commander in the Royal Navy, but 'Carty' was persuaded to retire in a year or so. Eton was suggested as a suitable school for Dallas, but he-at the age of nine-was adamant that he continue his schooling in America. So he was sent to Aiken Preparatory School. He has left us an entertaining account of his days there. It was, he writes, run very much on the model of a British preparatory school, which meant strict discipline, particularly as enforced by one master who 'kept order in his class by gingering up inattentive pupils by banging them on the back of the head with a geography book or by a frontal attack with a well-aimed piece of chalk.' This, added to obligatory cold showers every morning, and, above all, to a separation for the first time from his beloved governess, Maud, was too much for ten-year-old Dallas, and for the first term he was desperately home-sick: 'Maud ... received heart-rending letters ... asking to be rescued. Gradually the home-sickness subsided, and among the letters which Mamma kept, the one written at the beginning of my second year at Aiken begins: "I am having a simply lovely time and love this school. It is very nice. I like it a-lot." Everyone must have been relieved.' His acceptance his situation owed much to 'the fun and fine times' he and his bosom friends (especially Augie Heckscher and Hugh Chisholm) were having.
'I am in a secret club with them,' he writes, and goes on to describe their ill-fated attempt to film a movie, Hairpins, scripted by and starred in by Dallas Pratt, no less: we arranged to film, in costume, ... using the camera Daddy's mistress (and eventually, wife) had given me for Christmas, 1923. We took the first scene-and the camera broke. End of camera, Hairpins, and Pratt-Heckscher Film Productions.' Dallas's budding creativity was again apparent at his next school, St Paul's, New Hampshire, which he attended from I927 to I932. There he was an assistant editor of Horae Scholasticae, the school's literary magazine, with August Heckscher as head editor, and in 1931 published a small book of poems In the Darkened Glass. The literary interest surfaces again, when in 1936, after graduating from Yale and Columbia University's Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, he embarked on a year-long journey round the world, vividly recording it ln his journals that he continued all his life. The Journey was the inspiration for his second book of poems, Songs from Xanadu, published in 1938 and 'dedicated to Mamma "Madame Va et Vient", in reference to her constant travels. This was to allay the hurt which I imagined she might have felt on finding that In a Darkened Glass had been dedicated to "Dear"-our beloved governess, Maud Duke.' The poems were “ written at odd times, most of them while ... snowbound in Persia.' The following quatrains, with gentle irony, comment on the passage of time seen from historical perspective: PERSEPOLIS Within these shattered palaces, they say- Where once Dallas, king of kings, held sway- Men of a later age have writ their names, Mocking his ruin;-yes, but where are they? ROME 'Le Temps Revient'Caesar sleeps sound, and swift the centuries roll. Cato and Carthage both .Ire dust and dreams; Yet still a Wolf snarls on the Capitol, Still over Africa an Eagle screams. On Dallas's return from his voyage he trained as a psychiatrist and served in this capacity in the U.S. Army during World War 11. He was proud of a piece of research he initiated at Valley Forge Military HospiHe compared the number of combat medals of the psychiatric patients and the physically sick and injured. The psychiatric patients had won more. After the war he practised professionally at Columbia University and St Luke's Hospital, New York, for many years. His links with the university remained close. They included the chairmanship both of the Development Plan Committee of the Friends of the Columbia Libraries and of the Publications Committee of the Friends of Columbia University, together with editorship of Columbia Library Columns. As a result of Dallas's annual visits to Britain, and possibly also because of the Cartwright connection, he developed a deep-seated love of Britain and a desire to foster understanding between that country and America. Both he and his friend John Judkyn were aware in the I950s that the media had helped to produce a distorted conception of the transatlantic experience and that the treatment of American history in British textbooks had tended to be scant and unbalanced. They had long regretted that no museum in Europe presented an authentic picture of American culture. They decided to remedy this. They began their project by acquiring Claverton Manor in January 1959. As the manor was being used as a residential hostel for local domestic science students, the first task was to empty it of its aspiring teachers and a quantity of beds, wardrobes, ironing boards and household appliances, together with pin-ups of worthies like Tyrone Power. One of Dallas's friends was reproachful: 'You're turning all those poor girls out into the snow!' But
Dallas did not act out of character: the 'poor girls' found a more comfortable and convenient home in the city and, by way of commemorating their mid-winter exodus, qualified for free admission to the museum 'in perpetual'. The next, and more complicated, task was to transform the manor into that museum. Together, since 1942, Dallas Pratt and John Judkyn had been acquiring Americana over the years, but the bulk of the collection was formed with extraordinary speed in two and a half years in the late 1950`s the last moment before scarcity and the rise in prices made it impossible to put together a collection of such a size and quality. The key to finding the pieces was the careful research which defined and located suitable objects, and the planning, or plotting, whereby those objects eventually came into the founders' hands. Dallas's journals describe this process of ”whirlwind collecting', including the purchase of 'a behemoth of a bed' and other Prudent Mallard pieces- 'friendly dinosaurs', as he called them-and their installation in the New Orleans Bedroom at the museum. (In due course the great bed elicited the question from a young visitor: 'Was Jesus born in that bed?') The installation of a series of American interiors within the shell of the much larger rooms at Claverton required judgement, ingenuity and skill and the founders were fortunate in having the assistance of Nick Bell-Knight, and the direction of the architect Ian McCallum, whom they persuaded from his editorship of the Architectural Review to become the first director of the museum. On 3 May 1961 Dallas registered 'one of the greatest moments of [his] life' when he entered the manor and found the museum virtually finished-furnished rooms, galleries and special exhibits. Indeed he discovered that he could close his eyes and the experience of being in America not only persisted but increased, because the old panelling, beams and floor boards had brought the scent of America with them. The death of John Judkyn in a car crash in France in 1963 was a tragic bereavement to Dallas. In his memory Dallas set about establishing the John Judkyn Memorial at Freshford Manor, Bath, which had been John Judkyn's home. The house is not open to the public but it is from this base that the Judkyn Memorial circulates exhibitions about America to museums and galleries. Two other major losses-the early deaths of his close friend David Quarrel in I970 and of his half-brother Aubrey. Cartwright in 1972-effected a major transformation in his interests and personality. He found a new and younger circle of close friends, and a life-long affection for animals developed into a passionate concern for their welfare. He devoted himself wholeheartedly to the foundation he had set up in i969, originally Argus Archives, after Ulysses' faithful dog, later renamed the Two Mauds, after his governess and his first Scottie. Its purpose was to do research and to disseminate information on the plight of animals, whether s pets in cramped New York apartments, as potential meat in American slaughter houses, or as objects of experiments in laboratories. His medical qualifications helped him gain access to research establishments and he wrote two books on animal experiments. The first, Painful Experiments on Animals (1976), was a survey of the treatment of laboratory animals in the United States and elsewhere. The second,Alternatives to Pain in Experiments on Animals (198o), was a scholarly and scientific attempt to suggest alternative ways to achieve the same experimental results without inflicting pain. His commitment to animal welfare won him the Albert Schweltzer Award, presented to him in Washington in 1981, and the Award of the Humane Society of New York. The establishment of the American Museum and the Two Mauds was not the only public benefactions of Dallas Pratt. Starting in his school days, he made a Keats collection, most of which he presented to the Keats Shelley House in Rome in 1971. A life-mask of Keats was one of the items he retained. It will in future be displayed at the Wordsworth Museum, the Centre for British Romanticism, in Grasmere. Also, as Friends of the American Museum win know, the New Gallery now houses the Dallas Pratt Collection of Historical Maps, the result of a walk along the Seine at the age of eighteen when his life-long passion for early printed maps was kindled. His final art collection was of twentieth-century American prints and drawings showing a sympathetic portrayal of birds and animals. He called it the Compassionate Eye. Some insight on Dallas's early forays into the world of collectors may be gleaned from his own-often amusing and invariably self-deprecating-accounts in his own 'journals and published works. Here is the story of his 'acquisition' of the Keats life mask from his somewhat testy grandfather, William Evarts Benjamin, who had bought it at the estate sale of Robert Louis Stevenson: When I started my own Keats collection in the 1930s, grandfather kept saying that one day he would give me the mask. For several years he tantalised me with this remark, but the gift never materialised. Finally when I was telling him about a Kits manuscript I had recently acquired from A.S.W Rosenbach- 31 lines from the first draft of 'I stood tip-toe upon a little hill-he said, 'I really must give you that mask.' He went off on another tack but before he had finished the sentence I marched into the dressing room, lifted the mask from the wall, and with much feeling thanked him for the wonderful gift. He didn't explode, but he was surely taken aback by this act of bravado on the part of his habitually meek grandson. Still, as all collectors know, great acquisitions can often only be won by heroic measures (usually financial!). A few years later Dallas was not so successful when, with his friend Alexander Vietor, he made a voyage to the South Seas: We spent a month on Tahiti, renting a house on the beach, an outrigger canoe, and hiring the local chief s wife to cook for us. The chief introduced us to Emile Gauguin, the fisherman son of the artist by his Tahitian vahine, and Oscar -Nordman, who was living in Gauguin's house. The latter ruefully admitted that, when the news of Gauguin's death in the Marquesas had reached him, he had superstitiously burnt the many carvings and painted panels, except for the statues he had used as targets, or thrown into the sea, which the artist had left there. The few paintings that had been saved he had sold for practically nothing, so the two hopeful young collectors came away from Tahiti with no Gauguins, and no Tahitian artefacts either, since the natives, with all their needs supplied by Papeete's Chinese shops, produced hardly any 'arts and crafts.' ... in the Marquesas I bought a foot-high idol made of volcanic rock. Alec, who already considered himself an authority on South Sea material, declared that my treasure has a 'Chinese look,' proving that it was a tourist item and not a genuine Marquesan antique (but I still love it!)' Immensely hospitable, whether entertaining a group of friends on a yacht in the Aegean or at his many houses, Dallas was at the same time self-effacing, always quietly dressed and soft-spoken. He was simple in style and manner. His rather noble appearance so struck his New York neighbour Katharine Hepburn that she exclaimed, 'You have a wonderful head. Where have all the patrician faces gone?' In reply, he could only manage, 'That ... from you!' He would spend one or two days each week with only his dogs for company, walking in the forest at Garrison or working on one of his scholarly, cultural or humanitarian interests, a way of life of which we are the beneficiaries. Many who read this will have their own memories of Dallas Pratt. The above can only give an impression of the splendid life of this many faceted man. Perhaps what most of all will be retained in the memory of those who knew him will be his gentle humour, his kindness and his modesty. For, along with his social, professional, cultural and philanthropic activities he was a man who, as expressed in the last line of his poem Spring Song, lived 'Seeking the joys of life in simple things.' The above is compiled from the writings of Dallas Pratt and from obituaries written by James Ayres, Richard Chapman and John Huitson.