Humphrey Smith: eccentric brewery owner who favoured tradition over the modern world

On a Sunday night in October 2019, a man in the Fox and Goose in Droitwitch Spa, Worcestershire, told his wife a dirty joke. Unfortunately for the landlords, the owner had popped in that evening and heard a rude word. He closed the business the next day. Humphrey Smith did not tolerate swearing in his pubs.

The Fox and Goose stayed closed for three years. When it reopened, customers were reminded of the brewery’s strict rules: no swearing; no mobile phones; no music; no television; no children inside unless they were being accompanied to the toilet; no dogs; no payments by card. Cribbage was allowed but there were few concessions to the modern world. It closed again a year later and so it remains.

Smith, ruler of the Samuel Smith’s brewery empire, had high standards and would shut pubs that didn’t meet them. In 2020, he called time on the Cow and Calf in Grenoside, near Sheffield, after the landlords were unable to serve him a chocolate fondant. It reopened in 2024 but some of Smith’s 200 pubs have gathered dust for years. When the Guardian profiled the eccentric owner in 2024, it found that 37 of the 59 pubs owned by his company in its native North Yorkshire didn’t answer the phone.

Samuel Smith’s brewery, like its cousin John Smith’s, was founded in Tadcaster in the mid-19th century, taking over a firm that dated from a century earlier, and its most recent chairman gave every impression of wishing that times had not changed. He was often seen walking around the town in tweeds and had lobbied the council to reinstate cobblestone streets and gas lighting. Chris Tregellis, chairman of the York branch of the real ale campaign group Camra, described Smith as “a man of strong views that sometimes seemed to belong in the last century, or even the one before, but were consistently applied with a noteworthy strength of character”.

While some found his rules fusty and inflexible, many appreciated Smith’s traditional ways. He seemed to follow the recipe laid down by George Orwell 80 years ago for the perfect pub: one that “drunks and rowdies” never visit, that promotes quiet conversation over entertainment and where the fittings are “uncompromisingly Victorian”. Dark wood, quiet nooks and stained-glass windows are his pub’s hallmarks.

They serve only company products, too, right down to the crisps, made from Yorkshire potatoes. Old Brewery Bitter, its cask ale, is made with water drawn from the well that was sunk in 1758 and is still delivered around Tadcaster by grey shire horses. The Alpine Lager is both weaker and cheaper than that enjoyed by those who go to pubs to watch football matches. Its wines were once sold simply as “red or white”.

Humphrey Richard Woollcombe Smith was born in Tadcaster and grew up at Oxton Hall, a Queen Anne estate bought by his paternal grandfather in 1919. His mother’s father was Bishop of Selby. He attended Eton, after which he began training in the family business. His father, Geoffrey, died when Humphrey was 20 and after several years of the company being managed by executors, he took full control with his younger brother, Oliver.

In 1982, Samuel Smith’s became an unlimited company, making the owners personally liable for all debts but no longer required to publish its accounts. Two years later, it changed employment terms for its pub managers, making them salaried employees rather than tied tenants free to make their own business decisions. In 2018, the company and its chairman were fined almost £30,000 by the pensions regulator after Smith refused to provide information about employee pension schemes.

He married Julia in 1985 and they lived a reclusive life at Oxton Hall. Their son, Samuel, manages the company’s pubs in London and the south, while their daughter, Maude, runs a homeware label selling tea towels and tiles she has designed.

From the late 1970s, he greatly expanded his property empire, including buying several historic pubs in London, such as Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street. Sometimes he bought buildings and did nothing with them. Nun Appleton Hall, a Georgian stately home in North Yorkshire, and the old King Edward’s School in Bath were purchased in the 1980s and remain unoccupied.

He ran a tight ship, fining landlords of a pub in Oldham more than £10,000 after discovering that they would top up their regulars’ pints beyond the mark, but was also frugal himself. He was known to walk home from York station rather than pay for a taxi.

Some recalled his intransigence in 2016 when floods destroyed the town’s bridge. The council proposed a temporary bridge over the River Wharfe to save local people a 10-mile detour but Smith blocked the plan, as the detour would have crossed his land. One councillor told the press: “If Humphrey Smith were bumped off tomorrow, you’d have 6,000 suspects.”

Others, however, praised his philanthropy. A community swimming pool opened in 1994 on brewery land and he also restored the 14th-century Old Vicarage.

Richard Sweeting, the mayor of Tadcaster, said Smith did a lot of unheralded work. “He wasn’t one for publicity,” he said. “We wouldn’t have a lot of the facilities in the town if it wasn’t for him. He was a proper gentleman.”

Those who admired him will raise a (quiet) pint. Assuming his company policy continues, his critics will need to find a different pub in which to curse him.

Humphrey Smith, brewery owner, born 17 December 1944, died 29 June 2026, aged 81

Photograph by York Press