Lord Michael Pratt

Lord Michael John Henry Pratt (15 August 1946 – 3 September 2007) was a scion of the British aristocracy. An eccentric, he is best known as the author of several historical books. Birth and ancestors Michael Pratt was born at Bayham, near Lamberhurst in Kent, the younger son of John Charles Henry Pratt, 5th Marquess Camden, and his second wife, Averil Streatfield. The Pratt family were lawyers and politicians, and became wealthy through large property holdings, particularly in Camden Town, although the last properties in London were sold circa 1946. His father later sold the 100-room neo-Jacobean mansion at Bayham Abbey, near the ruins of the medieval Bayham Abbey, and built a new house nearby. Education Pratt was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read modern history and was secretary of the Gridiron, a lunch and dining club founded in 1884. He sustained severe injuries as a passenger in a road accident while an undergraduate, and sat his exams with a broken back, graduating with a second class degree. He worked for a brief time as a merchant banker for Lazard Brothers in the City of London, but left to become a writer. Books He published his first book, Britain's Greek Empire, in 1978, reviewing the history of Corfu and the Ionian islands from the 15th century, when the influence of Byzantium ended, through rule by Venice from 1401 and then as a British protectorate from the Napoleonic Wars until 1863, when the islands became part of the newly independent Greece. His second book, Great Country Houses of Central Europe, was published in 1990, with a revised edition in 2005. Finally, he published Nelson's Duchy in 2005, on Castello Nelson and the estate at Bronte in Sicily, granted to Lord Nelson by Ferdinand III of Sicily and IV of Naples.