Humphrey Smith, eccentric and old-fashioned head of the Samuel Smith brewery and pub empire

Humphrey Smith, who has died aged 81, was a fourth-generation brewer and property magnate at Tadcaster in North Yorkshire, who ran his empire entirely according to his own eccentric and capricious lights.

Samuel Smith’s Old Brewery Bitter, the flagship product of a range of traditional ales and lagers, is brewed from hard water drawn from a well sunk when the plant was built in the heart of the small market town in 1758. Fermented in stone “Yorkshire squares”, it is stored in oak barrels made by the company’s coopers and delivered locally by dray cart. 

But if the business ruled by Humphrey Smith for almost half a century was admired for its adherence to traditional brewing methods, less positive reactions were provoked by his rejection of almost every tenet of modern life and management in a national portfolio of more than 300 pubs.

At any given time, a significant portion of Smith’s pub estate was shuttered, frequently on the chairman’s on-the-spot orders; a recent survey based on Facebook postings and job vacancies found almost half of its houses closed. Managers, often couples with little or no previous experience in the trade, came and went at his whim. ​His pubs offered no television, music or products of other brewery companies. Customers were warned not to use mobile phones or laptops and not to swear or make too merry; children were expected to sit politely at beer-garden tables.

The Fox and Goose at Droitwich Spa was closed in 2020, only seven weeks after Smith had reopened it, because he overheard a customer telling a joke that included the F-word. The Cow and Calf at Grenoside in Sheffield went the same way after it failed to​ offer Smith his favourite chocolate fondant dessert – because it had not been equipped with a freezer. The John Snow in Soho’s Broadwick Street ejected two male drinkers for kissing, provoking a mass same-sex kiss-in on the pavement outside.

Similar anecdotes were legion and Humphrey Smith took the same high-handed approach to the many other commercial and residential properties owned by the company in Tadcaster and further afield: some were left empty and decaying, others conserved with fierce attention to period detail. And he never explained any of his actions, flatly refusing to speak to journalists – though his son Sam is often quoted as saying, with some understatement: “We love being unique and quirky… We’re also not interested in what other people say about us.”

In that spirit, accounts were kept secret, a fine paid for refusal to provide pension fund data to the regulator, and legal action threatened against anyone who tried to publish an estimate of the company’s undoubtedly substantial value. Those who had close dealings with Humphrey Smith were in awe (and sometimes fear) of his obsessive devotion to what he saw as the company’s and the family’s long-term interests. But as one neighbouring business owner put it, “a good word would be hard to find.”

Humphrey Richard Woollcombe Smith was born on December 17 1944 to Geoffrey Smith and his wife Rosamond, daughter of the Rt Rev Henry Woollcombe, Bishop of Whitby. Humphrey was brought up at Oxton Hall, a Queen Anne mansion south of Tadcaster acquired in 1919 by his grandfather Samuel; “stately but threadbare,” in one recent description, it was his home all his life. A devout Christian, he lived frugally but allowed himself the enjoyment of traditional country pursuits.

In 1886 Samuel had inherited the “Old Brewery” (originally Backhouse & Hartley) from his father William – whose brother John Smith had bought it some years earlier but commissioned a larger new brewery in the town, which through successive takeovers eventually became part of the Heineken empire.

Educated at Eton, Humphrey went straight into the business – but after Geoffrey’s sudden death in 1965, it was run by trustees until Humphrey took command, initially with his brother Oliver, in the early 1980s.

They launched an expansion which included the acquisition of historic London pubs such as Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street, the waterfront Captain Kidd in Wapping and Hennekey’s Long Bar (renamed The Cittie of Yorke) on High Holborn, with its Victorian-style cubicles and triangular Georgian central stove.

Many other properties were acquired or developed in provincial cities, while the business itself was converted into an unlimited liability company to ensure total privacy. And contrary to the Thatcher government’s anti-monopolist move to force breweries to divest themselves of “tied houses”, Smith’s pub managers were obliged to become direct employees rather than semi-independent landlords.

Meanwhile, Humphrey Smith developed a parallel reputation as an inveterate, deep-pocketed and highly litigious objector against any planning application which offended his sensibilities or encroached on his territories.

Most offensive of all, but a battle the family lost, was the routing across their estate of a stretch of the A64 from York to Leeds which formed the Tadcaster bypass, completed in 1978. Smith’s daily one-mile walk from Oxton Hall to his brewery thereafter took him over a concrete bridge across a thunderous dual carriageway – and his enmity towards planning bureaucrats would never subside.

Humphrey Smith married Julia Gladstone in 1965. She survives him with their daughter Maude and son Sam – who now runs the brewery, though Humphrey never relaxed his grip; his resignation from the board was recorded less than a fortnight before his death.

Humphrey Smith, born December 17 1944, died June 29 2026​

[Source: Daily Telegraph]