An Appreciation:I MET Ivan (Sandy) Pratt unexpectedly, as part of my research for a book on the secret history of Ibiza, where he spent much of his life as the owner of Sandy's Bar. Otherwise known as El Caballo Negro, it was located in a former hen-house on an unpaved street in the fishing village of Santa Eulalia.
Sandy’s Bar came to be a lifeline for a collection of “painters, wharf rats, beatniks, slackers, raconteurs, jongleurs and elegant Spaniards”, in the words of Maria Aitken, an Ibiza regular herself, not to mention a number of distinguished names from the world of British film and theatre, including Diana Rigg and John Hurt.
I felt a certain kinship with Sandy’s particular sensibility, his delicious and sometimes barbed wit, his love of literature, fine art, grand houses and remarkable gardens. His own homes were comfortable and tasteful, not luxurious but impeccably arranged. Especially impressive was his library, which I hope and trust someone has taken good care of since his death.
He was a very good host, with a great appetite for people. He lived for news of his friends and their doings, their new lovers and creative projects and when they were coming next to the island. He was pre-email, but loved the telephone – one of the first things he did on acquiring his cottage ornéeoutside Santa Eulalia was to wangle a phone line in the days when such a thing was as rare as hen's teeth.
Sandy was born in Co Meath in 1930. He first visited Ibiza in 1954 and settled permanently there in 1958. After a truncated law course at Trinity College, Dublin, he relocated to Florence to study art and Italian (or, in another version of the story, hotel management). Leaving Italy, he pitched up in Barcelona, and was working as a receptionist at the Hotel Manila when a friend persuaded him to try Ibiza again.
“Ibiza was every northerner’s idea of what the Mediterranean should look like. It was a coup de foudre,” he told me. “There were two paved roads and very little electric light. It was an Alice in Wonderland world . . .” His relationship with the island, after the initial thunderbolt, eventually turned into something like love-hate. He disapproved of mass-tourism, the traffic in Santa Eulalia, the vulgarity of the island’s summer clientele. “The people, my dear, the people”, he would say through pursed lips. He even wondered aloud about relocating – Provence, Tuscany, even back to Ireland – until health complications made it more sensible to stay put.
He continued to luxuriate in what remained of Ibiza's glamour. When Travelermagazine published a cover story on the island's wild nightlife and the easy availability of most forms of sex and of drugs, Sandy was quoted in a headline, telling the journalist gleefully: "You can have it all now". There was something about him that seemed so perennial – a hardy perennial, like one of his flowers – that a part of you assumed he would be around for ever.
He talked to me once about writing his memoirs, but I don't believe he got round to it. They would have been a scream. A story of mine lamenting the decadence of Ibiza had just come out in the London Independent. Predictably, the article had met with mixed opinions on the island. "Quite a stir caused," was Sandy's laconic comment.
In everything but his bad love luck, he was a role model: a great entertainer, loyal, generous, discreet when discretion was called for, indiscreet when it wasn't. Sensitive, dignified, generous, with an admixture of wickedness as perfectly judged as a dash of bitters, he was one of the best examples I know of a species that is fast approaching extinction: the gentleman. – PR