Pratt, Samuel & Henry

London; upholder, invalid furniture and camp equipage manufacturers (fl. 1826–47)

Samuel Pratt is best known as the patentee of the coil upholstery spring (pat. Nos 5418 & 5668). Traded from 19 Cockspur St and 47 New Bond St, 1833–35 but may have later concentrated the business solely on the New Bond St address. Their billhead states that they were military equipage makers, upholsterers and writing and dressing case manufacturers to their Majesties. They also featured ‘Elastic Beds, Easy Chairs &c. Stuffed with Iron Wire’, ‘Patent folding Brass Camp Bedsteads’, ‘Patent Stuffed Recumbent Chairs’ and leather trunks and carrying cases of a wide range of different types. Samuel Pratt was probably the u recorded in New Bond St, 1813–30. In December 1833 they supplied a chaise longue to Lord Leigh of Stoneleigh Abbey, Warks. at £13 13s and in March 1834 a patent sofa seat at £7. John Arkwright of Hampton Court, Leominster, Herefs. in May and June 1834 purchased goods to the value of £10 which included a set of mahogany French polished drawers costing £6 15s. Furniture supplied for Stafford House, London in 1838 amounted to £228. By 1839 the type of trade carried on by the business may have changed considerably for in a directory of that year they are referred to as ‘Antique & Foreign Furniture Dealers’. In 1842 the firm was recommended by the architect William Burns to his patron O. Tyndall Bruce as a source of old oak carvings. Samuel Pratt is, however, recorded in the Lord Chamberlain's papers as a trunk maker 1832–45.

Source: DEFM; Kirkham, ‘London Furniture Trade’ Furniture History (1988), p. 121; Gow, ‘Mary Queen of Scots Meets Charles Rennie Mackintosh: Some Problems in the Historiography of the Scotch Baronial Revival’, Furniture History (1996).