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Some old motoring names have disappeared almost completely.
Pratt’s is different.
Go to enough automobilia auctions, rummage through enough old garages or spend enough time looking at vintage enamel signs and sooner or later you are likely to encounter that name.
PRATT’S.
Usually in enormous lettering.
Often against a bright yellow background.
And despite the brand disappearing from British petrol forecourts many decades ago, those old signs remain instantly recognisable.
We recently picked up two of them.
One is a double-sided Pratt’s Perfection Spirit enamel sign, with the coloured area measuring approximately 52cm by 46cm.
The other is another double-sided Pratt’s sign, approximately 56cm by 46cm, carrying little more than that enormous brand name.
Neither is remotely pristine.
They have corrosion, enamel loss, scars and plenty of evidence of a long life.
But perhaps that is part of why we like them.
And once we started looking into the history of Pratt’s, it became obvious why so many of these old signs once existed in the first place.
Pratt’s was one of the most important names in the early British petrol trade.
The brand belonged to the Anglo-American Oil Company, which established itself in Britain in 1888 as the first overseas affiliate of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil organisation.
The Pratt’s name came from Charles Pratt, the American oil pioneer whose business had become part of Standard Oil.
By 1896, Anglo-American was advertising Pratt’s Petroleum in Britain.
As the motor car developed, the company began selling the product motorists really needed.
Motor spirit.
Or, as we would simply call it today:
Petrol.
The wording sounds wonderfully elaborate now.
Pratt’s Perfection Motor Spirit.
But it was petrol.
More specifically, it was one of Anglo-American’s branded grades of motor fuel, promoted to the rapidly growing number of people using internal-combustion vehicles.
Period records show Pratt’s Perfection being distributed around Britain in the years before petrol stations as we recognise them became commonplace.
Early motorists often bought fuel in two-gallon cans.
Those cans could be collected from motor agents and other retailers, carried to the vehicle and emptied into the fuel tank.
Period recollections from people who worked around the trade describe Pratt’s Perfection Spirit being supplied in green two-gallon cans.
There were other Pratt’s fuels too.
Over the years the range included products aimed at different uses and markets, including Standard Spirit, Commercial Spirit, High Test, Ethyl petrol and various oils and lubricants.
Pratt’s was not simply one product.
It became a whole family of fuels and motoring products associated with the rapidly expanding motor trade.
If you fancy seeing what has survived, you can browse old Pratt’s signs, petrol cans and automobilia currently on eBay here:
https://go.ukbarnfinds.com/pratts
This is probably the best explanation for why Pratt’s memorabilia still appears so regularly.
The company behind it was enormous.
By 1900, Anglo-American had already developed a national distribution network in Britain.
Its operation was still sufficiently old-fashioned that around 1,000 horses were working for the company.
Then, in 1905, King Edward VII granted Anglo-American a Royal Warrant for the supply of Pratt’s Perfection Motor Spirit.
By that point there were around 3,500 agents around the country selling the company’s products.
Think about that number for a moment.
Three and a half thousand outlets.
That is an enormous physical presence for a motoring product at a time when the car itself was still a relative novelty.
And every one of those sellers needed motorists to know what was available.
Which brings us back to the signs.
We sometimes think of branding as a modern obsession.
It certainly wasn’t.
Those early oil companies understood it extremely well.
A motorist travelling through an unfamiliar town needed to recognise where fuel was available and, importantly, which fuel was being sold.
There was no smartphone showing the cheapest petrol within five miles.
There were no illuminated supermarket price boards.
Instead there were names, colours, signs, cans, globes and advertisements.
Pratt’s needed motorists to recognise Pratt’s.
Shell needed them to recognise Shell.
BP needed them to recognise BP.
The result was some wonderfully bold advertising.
Our Pratt’s Perfection Spirit sign is a perfect example.
Bright yellow background.
Huge black letters.
Red shadowing.
Almost nothing subtle about it whatsoever.
It was designed to be noticed.
And it still works more than a century later.
Because the brand was everywhere and because it sold far more than one product.
The Science Museum collection includes period enamel advertising for Pratt’s Motor Spirit, Pratt’s Motor Oil and Pratt’s Perfection Motor Spirit.
Other surviving material advertises Pratt’s High Test, Pratt’s Ethyl and various oils and lubricants.
There are rectangular wall signs.
Double-sided hanging signs.
Flanged signs intended to project from buildings.
Pump signage.
Petrol cans.
Oil cans.
Maps.
Ashtrays.
Dealer material.
Advertising novelties.
Even different typefaces and colour schemes can turn up.
Our second sign is wonderfully simple.
It just says:
PRATTS
Huge dark-blue lettering on yellow.
That is all it needed to say.
By the time somebody saw it, the brand itself was doing most of the work.
Our larger Pratt’s sign measures approximately 56cm by 46cm and is double-sided.
Along the bottom of one face is a surviving maker’s mark:
FRANCO SIGNS – LONDON
That little detail is exactly the sort of thing worth looking for on old enamel signs.
Manufacturers’ names, addresses, printing marks and small codes can all help identify different versions and sometimes assist with dating.
The Franco name also appears on other surviving period enamel advertising.
But just as importantly, it reminds us that these were manufactured advertising objects.
Somebody commissioned them.
Somebody designed the lettering.
Somebody produced them in quantity.
And somebody hung them outside garages and fuel agents all over Britain.
The world these signs belonged to looked very different from the modern petrol station.
Before roadside pumps became widespread, motorists commonly bought petrol in sealed cans.
Fuel could be obtained from all sorts of businesses, including motor agents and shops that today we would never associate with filling a car.
Anglo-American understood early that distribution was everything.
After the First World War, the company installed what it describes as Britain’s first kerbside petrol pump at Hale in Cheshire.
The familiar roadside filling station then developed rapidly during the 1920s.
Pratt’s branding followed the motorist through that transition.
From two-gallon cans to pumps.
From agents and cycle shops to garages and dedicated filling stations.
And throughout it all, those signs told you what was being sold.
There was another clever way of putting the brand directly into motorists’ hands.
Maps.
Anglo-American produced Pratt’s road maps and atlases from the early years of motoring.
The idea was brilliant.
Give the motorist something genuinely useful for travelling around Britain, while making sure Pratt’s Perfection Motor Spirit was staring back at them every time they opened it.
Early examples appeared in the first decade of the 20th century.
By the late 1920s, Pratt’s motoring atlases were depicting the increasingly familiar world of roadside filling stations.
It is another reminder that petrol companies were not simply competing on the liquid inside the can.
They were competing to become part of the motorist’s life.
That feels particularly interesting today.
Of course fuel companies still spend enormous amounts building brands.
But ask plenty of modern drivers how they decide where to fill up and one answer will dominate:
Price.
Which petrol station is cheapest?
Which supermarket has knocked another penny off a litre?
Which app says there is cheaper diesel two miles further down the road?
Early petrol advertising feels different.
Companies sold trust.
Performance.
Consistency.
Modernity.
Quality.
Pratt’s even chose the word Perfection.
That is not shy branding.
The company wanted motorists to associate its name with a product they could depend on.
Whether every driver was quite as loyal as the advertising departments hoped is another matter.
Price mattered then too.
But the extraordinary amount of surviving branded material shows how seriously the oil companies took the battle for recognition.
If Pratt’s was so widespread, where did it go?
The answer is hiding in a name everybody still recognises.
Esso.
The Anglo-American Oil Company was associated with Standard Oil of New Jersey.
The Esso name was introduced in the United States during the 1920s and arrived in Britain in 1934.
Within roughly a year, Anglo-American had changed its British fuel brand names over to Esso.
Pratt’s disappeared from petrol branding.
The name did survive for longer on lubricant products, continuing into the 1950s.
So those old Pratt’s signs represent more than a forgotten petrol company.
They are part of the direct ancestry of one of the most recognisable fuel brands still operating today.
Quite simply, because there must once have been a lot of them.
Thousands of agents sold the company’s products.
Garages displayed them.
Petrol retailers displayed them.
Signs hung from buildings.
Others were fixed to walls.
Advertising appeared on pumps, cans and delivery vehicles.
Most disappeared.
They rusted away.
Premises were demolished.
Garages were modernised.
Old signs were pulled down and thrown into skips.
But enough survived that Pratt’s remains one of those names we encounter surprisingly regularly at automobilia sales.
That does not make every Pratt’s sign common.
Some designs are considerably scarcer than others.
But it does mean there is a wonderfully broad collecting field.
This is where old signs become fascinating.
Two nominally identical signs can produce wildly different reactions from collectors.
Condition matters enormously.
Strong original gloss matters.
Bright colours matter.
Clean lettering matters.
Intact edges matter.
The amount of enamel loss matters.
Previous restoration matters.
Whether a double-sided sign is equally good on both faces matters.
And originality matters enormously.
A crisp sign retaining most of its original enamel can be a very different proposition from one which has lost large areas to corrosion.
Our signs are firmly at the well-used end of the scale.
They have suffered.
The Pratt’s Perfection Spirit sign has substantial enamel loss around its edges and elsewhere.
The larger PRATTS sign is also scarred, chipped and corroded, with one face noticeably rougher than the other.
They have clearly not spent the last century wrapped in cotton wool.
This is perhaps the most important point for anyone clearing an old garage.
Please don’t look at a rusty old enamel sign and automatically assume it is scrap.
Condition may drastically affect its value.
But poor condition does not necessarily remove all value.
Brand matters.
Rarity matters.
Design matters.
Age matters.
Size matters.
Whether it is single or double-sided matters.
The subject matter matters.
And sometimes collectors simply like the appearance of something that has genuinely spent decades outdoors.
A rough original can still be preferable to a shiny modern reproduction.
Recent auction results show just how widely Pratt’s signs can vary in value.
A Pratt’s Motor Spirit enamel sign sold through Mathewsons in October 2024 for £410, against an estimate of £130–£230.
In the same sale, a much larger Pratt’s Perfection Spirit enamel sign measuring 52 inches by 18 inches sold for £350.
Another double-sided Pratt’s Motor Spirit sign, measuring 53cm by 46cm and showing enamel loss, damage and discolouration, sold through Burstow & Hewett in November 2022 for a £150 hammer price.
And a 36-inch-square Pratt’s Ethyl Petrol enamel sign sold through Mathewsons in October 2024 for £560.
Those figures are not valuations for our signs.
They simply illustrate how much the exact design, condition, size, originality and sale circumstances can matter.
The phrase we keep coming back to with automobilia is:
Don’t throw it away before you know what it is.
Signs tend to grab the headlines because they look fantastic hanging on a workshop wall.
But they are only part of the surviving Pratt’s story.
Collectors also look for old petrol cans.
Oil cans.
Pourers.
Pump globes and pump plates.
Maps and road atlases.
Advertising cards.
Ashtrays.
Badges.
Price boards.
Dealer material.
Receipts.
Promotional items.
Even apparently mundane packaging can become interesting once most examples have disappeared.
If you want to disappear down the same rabbit hole we did, have a look at the Pratt’s petroliana and old garage memorabilia currently on eBay here:
https://go.ukbarnfinds.com/pratts
You never quite know what will turn up.
We recently researched an old Dagenite accumulator sign and discovered an entire piece of British battery history hiding behind it.
These Pratt’s signs have done exactly the same thing.
At first glance they are just battered pieces of enamel advertising.
Start digging and suddenly you are looking at the arrival of petrol motoring in Britain.
Two-gallon fuel cans.
Horse-drawn oil deliveries.
Thousands of sales agents.
Royal Warrants.
Early petrol pumps.
Road maps.
Brand wars.
And eventually the arrival of Esso.
That’s what we love about old garage memorabilia.
Often the object is only the doorway into a much bigger story.
Because Pratt’s was once so widespread, there must still be material sitting undiscovered.
Perhaps there is an old enamel sign fixed to the inside of a shed.
A petrol can on a shelf.
A box of maps.
Oil tins.
Garage advertising.
Pump parts.
Old stock from a motor agent.
Or something carrying the Pratt’s name that nobody in the family has really looked at for years.
We would love to see it.
And please don’t clean, repaint or restore old signs before finding out what you have.
Original condition is important to collectors, even where that condition includes chips, fading and corrosion.
This applies well beyond Pratt’s.
We are always interested in old motoring material.
Vintage enamel signs.
Petroliana.
Oil and fuel cans.
Garage equipment.
Old tools.
Dealer signs.
New-old-stock car and motorcycle parts.
Petrol-pump pieces.
Brochures.
Advertising displays.
Workshop clearances.
And the odd things nobody quite knows what to do with.
If you’re clearing an old garage, workshop, dealership, filling station, farm building or collection, you don’t need to identify everything first.
You certainly don’t need to decide what is worth saving and what isn’t.
Send us some photographs.
We would much rather see an obscure battered sign before it reaches a skip than hear about it afterwards.
You can contact UK Barn Finds here:
https://ukbarnfinds.com/contact-us/
Sometimes the names we no longer recognise tell the best stories.
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